THE ISSUE IN THE ATOMIC AGE
Rodell, Fred
The Issue In The Atomic Age By FRED RODELL RUNNING through all the palaver about the atomic bomb and its bouncing baby, new-christened the Atomic Age—through casual popular chitchat and through...
...or, in minor variation : "Why did they ever have to use it...
...First off, I take it that behind all the talk and the deep-down terror caused by the bomb is the notion that another war, fought as seems certain with atomic energy, might literally wipe out most of mankind or even, if the atoms got out of control, blow up the earth...
...HERE, it may be objected that even so vague a hint of a possible answer as this is also unrealistic— that the war spirit is bred as bone-deep in the nature of man as is the spirit of nationalism...
...What the gentlemen forget is that men are men and that some of them are less than perfect and, when pressed or peeved or unhappy, less than peaceful...
...And I know too that the answer, if any—to be worth the paper it is written on— must start by accepting the atomic bomb and accepting man as man—as an ornery cuss who is inordinately inventive in a physical sense and comparatively tribal in a social sense and capable of being mean when aroused or frustrated or annoyed...
...ALL this suggests the most hackneyed crack that the atomic bomb has made commonplace...
...Could be...
...The answer must proceed, I rather suspect, to an effort to build the kind of world, within the confines of nationhood, where very few men will want to raise hell with atomic bombs or with popguns and where those few will be quite hard put to find followers...
...airforce, obsolete or not, along with U. S. control of the Panama Canal and of Pacific bases for a world government which would take all these under its wing and in which the U. S., if it continued to exist as an emasculated nation at all, would have— population-wise—a minor voice...
...DEPLORABLE as it may be, the ultimate reason why world government is not the answer to the atomic bomb is the flat fact that most of mankind that inhabits the master nations is not ready or willing to accept a real world government, bomb or no bomb...
...It has simply posed, more pressing-ly than ever before in history, the old old problem of giving all peoples enough to live on and enough to live for so that war may perhaps come to lose its occasional appeal to the minds of men...
...that, to quote the Saturday Review's headline, "Modern Man is Obsolete...
...A world government would, of course, try to keep to itself the "secret" of the atomic bomb, and presumably use it only to "police" the earth...
...The fierce nationalism of the French is legendary...
...Even a British Labor Party doesn't care to relinquish an acre of Empire...
...And to suppose that the atomic bomb can be made to disappear, as it were, from the earth and from men's minds by a sort of international New Year's Resolution is to ignore truths, unpleasant as they may be, that every school-kid knows...
...I doubt it...
...And a fact that the atomic bomb has hot even dented...
...To make people happy is a large order—and perhaps an impossible order...
...one atom of U-235 is pretty much like another atom...
...and Englishmen would scarcely relish having England become—as it would in any set-up that pretended to be democratic—a sort of Delaware to India's New York...
...Old-fashioned nationalism reaches deep and dies, if ever, hard...
...Isn't there an element of condescension and essential complacence in wishing men were different than they are, blaming their troubles on their not being different, exhorting them to be different, and letting it go at that...
...And so is that of many a weak or tiny people on earth...
...Because it has been taken up rather tumultuously by most of the liberal journals, because it has been wrapped in a cloak of realism such as the Ostrich Theme could never command (notably in an eloquent five-page editorial in the Saturday Review of Literature), because indeed it does seem almost unanswerable at first or at second glance, this One-World-or-No-World theme cannot be laughed off in a paragraph...
...It is the rare American who would exchange the U.S...
...Let us bury our heads in the sands of the past and pray...
...Have the gentlemen never heard of civil wars, even perhaps in this country...
...The race has always bred Napoleons and Hitlers, John Browns and Lenins—and their followers...
...Such a world does not imply or need world government...
...I do not know nor purport to know the answer...
...Sure, our social institutions are way behind our scientific skills...
...But most men go to war today reluctantly and under some sort of compulsion ; all men come back to peace gladly...
...For thus, they say, with no separate nations to wage war, we would have no war...
...But every one of the 2,000,-000,000-odd human beings on earth, because he has a mind, is radically different from every other one...
...Certainly they could not have done so locked up in a laboratory...
...Nor has it changed the essential character of slow-growing man...
...look at the Swiss...
...Nor could they have done so by simply and smugly deploring at length the stupidity and the backwardness of social man...
...And atomic energy itself, harnessed to peace and turned to the benefit of people everywhere, could conceivably do it...
...But man is curious and man is inventive as well as being imperfect...
...The physicist works with mindless and therefore comparatively predictable stuff...
...At risk of being hopped on, I am going to suggest that the physical scientists, granted they are geniuses, have still had a far easier time of it right down the line than have those who deal with man as a social being...
...But I do know that neither the Ostrich boys nor the One-World boys have come up with a plan that makes the slightest practical sense...
...that the physical scientists have made monkeys out of the social scientists...
...It is that scientific man has outstripped by centuries political man or moral man...
...They would also, as a sort of second thought, "outlaw" war, perhaps forgetting that such a pious gesture has been tried before...
...A single world government, no matter how strong, would be no more of a guarantee against future mass violence, atomic bombs and all, than a piece of paper "outlawing" the bombs or "outlawing" war...
...It nonetheless strikes this constant carper as, in essence, about as unrealistic as the theme of the wailers...
...Typical was the protest sent post-haste to President Truman by some 34 high-minded and high-ranking educators and churchmen...
...catch up to your Einsteins and Oppenheimers...
...These intellectuals of the upper reaches, wringing their hands in holy and helpless horror, seriously suggested as a solution of obvious and tremendous problems the "outlawing" of the bomb...
...But it is an order that nowhere conflicts with the nature of man nor with the stubborn fact of nations...
...Have the gentlemen never heard of revolutions...
...Navy and the U.S...
...Happy people do not start wars, even at the urging of an occasional inevitable megalomaniac...
...hurry up...
...Q.E.D...
...Sometimes for "good" reasons, sometimes for "bad," they have managed to break loose against the authority and power and phoney safety of the status quo—And this has happened within nations as well as between nations...
...Local pride and national pride, the feel for home-rule, small-scale or large-scale—these are just as rampant in peacetime as in wartime...
...no scientific secret has ever been kept for more than a few years—an instant in eternity—by any group or any government anywhere...
...I doubt that Einstein or any of the rest of the brilliant workers with impersonalities could have contributed much toward bringing men politically or ethically "up-to-date...
...Such a world needs rather that human beings, the world around, be fairly well fed, clothed, housed, busy, unafraid, happy...
...The Russian probably doesn't live who would submit the destiny, the policies and politics, of his broad land to the hands of a global government where Russian representatives could be voted down...
...Let me try to tell why...
...No, the atomic bomb has not changed the world overnight...
...But isn't there something rather evasive and therefore unrealistic about dismissing a basic fact with a smart phrase...
...The other and somewhat more sophisticated theme that runs through atomic bomb talk goes something like this: "It's an ill wind—for, goody-goody, now we'll have to have a real world government, and nations, as we know them, will soon be defunct as the dinosaur...
...FOR the bemoaning of unblinkable facts—instead of facing them—is the essence of intellectual immaturity...
...The Issue In The Atomic Age By FRED RODELL RUNNING through all the palaver about the atomic bomb and its bouncing baby, new-christened the Atomic Age—through casual popular chitchat and through solemn publicized screeds—are two recurring themes...
...Deplorable perhaps, but a fact...
...But how helpful is it to say to mankind: "Come on...
...One might be called the Ostrich Theme and it goes: "Oh my, oh dear, oh gracious, why did they ever have to discover this awful thing...
...If the world is to be -saved from being destroyed by the wanton loosing of atomic energy in another war, the saving plan can no more ignore the fact of still hard-held nationalism than it can ignore the fact of the atomic bomb...
...I say—poppycock...
...Therefore, say the One-World-or-No-World boys, we must have one single global government, a sort of United States of the earth...
...Let us," the 34 and their ilk seem to say, "pretend that the atom and Hiroshima were never smashed...
...Their wail was well labelled by the New York Herald-Tribune, in a crackling editorial, as "this foolishly sentimental outburst . . . virtually meaningless as a statement of the facts and worse than useless as a guide to the action demanded of us...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 37
