Learning to Live With the H-Bomb
MADARIAGA, SALVADOR DE
Learning to Live With the H-Bomb By Salvador de Madariaga SINCE THE advent of industrial civilization, man has learned to adapt himself to the dangers brought about by technical progress....
...Only then will this danger cease to invade our lives and remain where it belongs—at the margin, like cars, planes and all the other technical threats to our existence...
...If the West is to be saved, its citizens must shake off their fears and learn to live on the edge of the biggest danger that has ever confronted them...
...Reunification cannot be discussed by the great powers but must be negotiated between the two German states, i.e...
...There seems to be no reason why the magnitude of the danger should twist life out of its inherent shape and reason...
...and the Soviet Union to join hands and save the world by preventing anyone else from destroying it...
...Thus, the existing danger becomes even more dangerous...
...Thousands of people are killed on the highways every year, yet auto traffic and speed are steadily increasing...
...The fact that the United States and the Soviet Union have reached a nuclear stalemate seems to have reduced these dangers to the level of the marginal risk any pedestrian takes when crossing a busy street...
...Curiously enough, the initiator of this new trend may well be the same great Englishman whose stout heart and keen intellect saved the world from Hitler...
...is asked to come to terms with the Soviet Union...
...All this is known to the West...
...In order to soothe the fears of some Westerners, the U.S...
...Even war has become an ever-present but somehow distant threat with which people have learned to live...
...The Soviet Union, he said, does not contemplate allowing free elections in East Germany...
...This ability of man to carry on "business as usual" on the margin of death also governs the attitude of most people toward the new and more formidable dangers of the nuclear age...
...Nevertheless, we in Europe are invited to persuade the U.S...
...The West is now anguished by the prospect of nuclear annihilation, though any child in the West should know that it is impossible to achieve a global peace settlement with the Kremlin...
...between the West German Republic and the Soviet puppet regime in Pankow...
...Yet such a deal would plunge into final, hopeless anguish the hundreds of millions of Eastern Europeans who, by their passive but determined resistance, have left the Westerners free to wallow in their worries...
...It was, if I remember correctly, a report on the H-bomb in the Manchester Guardian which prompted Sir Winston Churchill to change his course and call for a summit conference with Moscow...
...The very existence of the H-bomb is creating so much havoc in certain Western quarters that it saps the basis of Western defenses...
...If any doubts remained, Anastas Miko-yan dispelled them with brutal frankness recently...
...He, like all Leninists, knows that the triumph of "socialism" over "capitalist imperialism" can only come through a war which may take this or that form, including, if need be, coexistence and summit talks...
...But the invention of the H-bomb has reversed this attitude for many people...
...Nikita Khrushchev is not anguished...
...Planes crash, but this does not deter people from flying...
Vol. 41 • September 1958 • No. 31
