◆ SpookStack

a A A a py ‘ a re ) inverted fashion by our identifying our safety and welfare with the one-sided expansion of our weap- ons system. Thus we surrendered the initiative to our instruments, confusing physical power with rational human purpose, forgetting that machincs and weapons have no valucs and no goals, above all, no limits and no restraints except those that human beings superimpose on them. The one thing that might have rectified our government’s premature exploitation of atomic power would have been a public assize of its manifold dangers, even for wider industrial and medical use. As early as the winter of 1945-1946 the Senate Atomic Energy Committce made the first full inquiry into these matters, and the physicists who appeared before this committee gave forecasts whose accuracy was fully confirmed in the tardy hearings that have just taken place before a joint congressional committee. Almost with one voice, these scientists predicted that Soviet Russia would be able to produce a nuclear bomb within five years, possibly within three. On that basis, the nations of the world had three “safe” years to create through the United Nations the necessary political and moral safeguards against the misuse of this new power. There was no salvation, the more alert leaders of science wisely pointed out, on purely national terms. Naturally, Russia’s totalitarian isolation- ism and suspicion made it difficult to arrive at a basis for rational agreement, but our own sense of holding all the trump cards did not lessen this difficulty. All too quickly, after the Russian re- jection of our generous but politically unsound Baruch proposal, our country used Russian hos- tility as an excuse for abandoning all further effort. Even before we had openly committed ourselves to the Cold War itself—-a now obsolete pre- atomic military concept — our leaders preferred to build a threatening ring of air bases around Russia rather than to pursue with patient circum- spection a course directed toward securing even- tual understanding and cooperation. So the diffi- cult became the impossible. As late as 1947 this situation, though grave, was not disastrous. Our very mistakes in turning to mass extermination were capable, if openly and honestly faced, of leading both ourselves and the world back 10 the right path. Up to then, our totalitarian weapons system had not yet con- solidatcd its position or threatened our iree in-