FAITH, FEAR, AND FUSION

...But the statement we make to the world is a mushmouthed two paragraphs about "a thermonuclear experiment," followed by the news that the President has resumed his fishing in Colorado...

...But what leadership can we give now...

...Russians get cold chills at the idea of an international control force sending strangers with good watches into the heart of the Urals, whereby good Stakhanovites might learn what time it is in the 20th Century outside...

...It is another fact of secrecy, ai not at all curious, that to be believed you must believe...

...This fact may be the most important event to civilization since Hannibal crossed the Alps...

...For two to three years after the war we maintained a vague but absolutely pious approach to the bomb...

...What of the new man who also seems a little vague...

...Then we had Korea...

...dollars to build an electronic moat to provide a partial defense of our production...

...Harold C. Urey, pleading for a complete system of world law to control atomic energy, wrote: "Freedom from fear...

...but if neither he nor you nor anyone else afterwards speaks of it, you sometimes find that for years on end you will forget the most startling revelations...

...A good case can be made for saying this is the most important tide in the affairs of men since the Copernican Revolution destroyed the faith which held mediaeval Europe together...

...we might cease to keep our fears secret, and in admitting our fears reduce them in size...

...But the world outside the two great powers may note only that the whole truth is not being told by either...

...Our President breakfasts with hv, atomic chief, Admiral Strauss, and his psychological warfare chief, C. D. Jackson, and they wrestle with the mountainous fact that Russia has the hydrogen bomb...

...But on which bomb which President...

...we have or can have automatons which go like mechanical homing pigeons towards metal or even towards heat...

...There never will be a Maginot Line against the limitless powers of the universe as developed by the limitless imagination of Man...

...Thus in darkness we stumble on, along the edge of an abyss so deep no man can say he has seen bottom...

...This vanity strikes at something deeper than modes of government, or government itself...

...Their social mechanisms against their fears are even more elaborate than ours, and alone may be sufficient for mankind's suicide...

...It is often a curious effect of secrecy that a fact known in secret is not believed, accepted, and put into force in one's decisions as solidly as a fact which everyone knows...

...The armed service publicists conspired with the advertising agents of the aircraft companies to paint a picture of a push-button war, a conflict of strange and beautiful new shapes, done in four colors on glossy paper...

...At bedrock, there is no defense against a bullet—bullets are killing men today as they killed thousands in the last war...

...There was a Truman in the White House who gingerly said the Russians had achieved an atomic "explosion...

...We have or can have robots with television in their noses to tell ground observers what they see...

...II The businessmen who manage Washington today are all too familiar through their advertising men with the wishful thinking of Americans...

...If the electronic brains miscalculate, which of course is not possible, an atom bomb at a mile and a hydrogen bomb at ten or twenty or thirty miles will still destroy the enemy plane...

...We still have some who say that it need not break into a catastrophic Civil War of our race...

...The naked violence of the hydrogen bomb is no more sinister than the hysteria which has made us behave like smarty children crying, "I know a secret...

...here we use the headline and the klieg light to preserve the uranium curtain...

...Today it is simply not true that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself...

...But when the North Korean bullet came through the page, the splash was not ink, but blood...

...For a generation not only the ignorant but the wisest of American leaders were perplexed, confused, and finally desperate as they watched the great on-curling wave of the American Civil War...

...Then we had the Louis Johnson era, when constantly we spoke of our awesome strength, and how our vengeance would flash, "within one hour," should the enemy ever strike...

...We have new radar and new fighters, new rockets and new missiles...

...It strikes at men's basic faith that if men know, men can think and act...

...Can one believe the President of the United States on the subject of Russian bombs...

...What leadership have we given the world, while we assured it that if worst came to the worst, the Gordian knots of human affairs could always be untangled with one flashing stroke of our exclusive magic sword...

...We do not know whether humanity can live, as the citizens of Pompeii lived, on the slope of a volcano...

...There are many other reasons for beginning to tell some real truths about defense—that is, about man's hope of survival...

...This is not to say the two national attitudes may really be symmetrically equated...

...is not meant to be a question which answers itself—nor is it meant to slight the Russians' fears, which amount to paranoia...

...The American people need to know the facts of the secret controversies over our air defense before so much money is spent...

...I know a secretl" We can believe neither in bombs nor in men until we see the bomb and our world, and face them, not as children, nor as ignorant armies in the barren Nevadas of negation, but as men who can know, think, and act, as men who, knowing the terrifying power of their weapons, prefer talk to threats, negotiation to destruction...

...The lines of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach come to mind: "The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore, Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd...

...Could it have been that here again, in our emphasis on absolute security-through-inspection and our elaborately worked out proposals for registering every physicist, we were again only skimming the surface of our fear, and coming up again with a machine—a social machine to manufacture trust...

...An H-bomb is a city-killer...

...On atomic questions, everyone knows we will not tell the whole truth...

...But to avert it we must have facts, and far more debate than is symbolized by a one-sentence communique that we can not be told the truth, father knows best, and will take care of us...

...In trying to understand such tides in human affairs, men feel as Newton did of science itself: one walks along the shore of a vast ocean, and now and then picks up a little pebble of truth...

...Most scientists believe there will be no real defense against the atomic bomb or against hydrogen bombs...

...Thus men will die a thousand deaths, and society as we know it may be destroyed before the hydrogen bomb descends...

...The planned ignorance which men call secrecy is a vain attempt to manipulate with mere cleverness a human crisis which calls on all the reserves of courage and reason of which men are capable...

...The pebble I would examine with you is this: some of our fear today is fear engendered by willful secrecy, and is therefore fear of the unknown...

...We have no civil defense, and will not have any until we tell people the truth, and tell it in a dignified way, suited to their lack of scientific knowledge, but respectful of their common sense and courage...

...We need to tell some truth to the brass and braid of the North Atlantic Treaty organizations, so the European generals who have a decent respect for bombs can give up their paper game in which they move non-existent armies over maps of the future, maneuvering with the support of our secret unknown weapons against the phantoms of Russia's secret weapons...

...Now fear has also given them some of our secret weapons, and given us some of their secret police...

...Once calculated, the shell takes off and hits the target...

...It would be less than fair not to say that we did make one grand attempt—in the Lilienthal-Acheson plan, upon which Bernard Baruch so blandly put his name...

...But in dealing with more cynical Europeans and more illiterate Asians, our businessmen may find that all the "psychological warfare" in the world will not regain the confidence we have lost by refusing to speak candidly about the most important facts in the world...

...And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night...

...Historic tides in human affairs may sometimes not be successfully met, even with the facts and sober debate...

...There was a later Truman who manfully said the word "bomb," and a still later one in Kansas City who told a reporter he believed the Russians had never made one at all...

...We have electronic calculators which can take a radar fix, calculate all kinds of factors of speed of the incoming plane or missile, allow for variable wind resistance, pull of gravity, curvature of the earth, the age of the pilot, E equals MC2, and the annual cost of brass for all three of the services...

...This MICHAEL AMRINE writes of developments in the Pentagon for the North American Newspaper Alliance and a number of magazines...

...Brien McMahon while the latter was chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy...

...We are at last face to face with the powers which, philosophically speaking, are supreme in our universe...

...But I think we might step forward if we gave up the absurd idea of keeping this volcano secret...

...Formerly editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, he has interpreted the march of military science in many magazines both under his own name and in collaboration with Albert Einstein, Harold C. Urey, and the late Sen...

...On atomic questions, most worldly-wise neutrals know that Russia will lie...

...Truman said our possession of it was "a sacred trust," as he spoke on Navy Day, 1945, and the guns boomed a salute...

...For as one destroyed for many their religious pattern and faith in God, so the other is destroying a faith in reason and faith in man...

...Today America, like its current and recent Presidents, oscillates between a braggadocio that it is the strongest and most secure country on earth and a thousand manifestations of fear about the new fragility of the world...

...So in time we crossed the 38th Parallel, but not the radioactive Rubicon...

...Certainly we should...

...There are many reasons for America now to tell the candid truth about the biggest facts in human history...

...Today the great globe itself is being split, and we are told we may have to live for years in the shadow of an overhanging wave...

...We had no fear of anyone else's strength, though sometimes it seemed our own magnificent might stunned us...

...One is a twenty billion dollar decision which must soon be made...

...Something of the sort happened to Truman, who was secretly escorted to the gates of the Hydrogen Hell by our scientists, but who everyday walked along the shady secure streets of the American morning, among people who knew only it was going to be a busy day...

...And today our fear of their learning of our knowledge bears a bitter fruit in our own fear of our own knowledge...

...But in hindsight, was not Einstein right when he spoke of it as a contrivance of legalisms, when the world needed humility and trust...

...Our civilization has floated on a sea of faith—faith in man's ability to reason, to act and even to negotiate, and in moments of supreme danger to draw on reserves of love and courage...

...Diplomatically we need to tell some truth to the world as to our own policy on atomic bombs...

...Secrets and bluffs take the basic man-pride which is a binding force in society—and distort it into a vanity which is only one more face for fear...

...But some scientists believe it would be worth twenty billions of U.S...

...And how easy will it be to remedy the superficial attitudes which have made The Secrets as sacred as the Constitution...

...But while one's own belief is' necessary, it may not be convincing without the facts which produced it...

...Thus the free world does not know its own strength nor its weakness...

...If you—the people—let things drift, we will perhaps see a world divided into two great spheres of interest, east and west, afraid of each other, afraid of one unguarded word...

...This happens personally when some friend tells you some stark story in greatest confidence, perhaps some dread confession...

...Fear, and Fusion By Michael Amrine EIGHT YEARS ago a man who had once won the Nobel prize for his esoteric and "useless" discovery that heavy hydrogen could be separated from ordinary hydrogen wrote some prophetic lines on the subject of a spiritual chain reaction...

...Russia tortures her citizens with club and drug to preserve the Iron Curtain...

...But now I only hear Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world...

...Ill We have been so unconvincing with our atom, which is incredible to begin with, that neither we nor the rest of the world can fully believe in either its promise or its peril...

...It was just three months after Hiroshima that Dr...

...We will eat fear, sleep fear, live in fear, and die in fear . . . There is little point in seeking scientific defenses against this weapon or against its dreadful development in radioactive poisons...

...Yet the policy of not saying what the bomb is, and not saying what we will and will not do about it, and the resulting fear of the unknown, still makes friends into neutrals and neutrals into enemies, and likely even increases the bitterness of presumed enemies who may stand between terror of their secret police, and terror of our secret weapons...

...And fear of knowledge itself threatens the structure of society as surely as bombs threaten bricks and stones...

...We enjoy half-believing in miracles and in single magic remedies: irium for our toothpaste, osmium for our pen points, uranium for defense, and tritium for a magic, secure tomorrow...

...one bomb, one city...

...That might lead to a second step...

...At home we have a national secrecy-panic lest some one tell the truth about the 21st Century inside our laboratories...

...Can we plan any course of action unless we recognize that this fear, and its inseparable other side, apathy, is of itself a foremost political fact of our times...

...We need to give our own soldiers something better than Yucca Flats —that tragic-comic charade in which they are led like dumb cattle to within a mile of an atomic bomb, told to cower in open graves, and informed they have survived Armageddon and all they need is an aspirin...