THE ATOMIC JAG
Mayer, Milton
The Atomic Jag. By MILTON MAYER THE brave new world is upon us—if only we can control the atomic bomb. The Kingdom of Heaven is here—if only we can control the atomic bomb. The shoeless are shod,...
...And even if we can't control it—we can still run away from it...
...we have slept and slept, dreaming dream after dream, of a car in every garage, of a new deal with free chips, of Hitler as our destruction and the atom as our salvation...
...The atomic bomb is the only thing worth ignoring in this desperate condition of our civilization...
...The process, they admit, is simply one of trial and error common to all industrial research...
...When the beautiful dream of painless extermination is over, we shall have to get up and go to work on the reality of economic, political, and social injustice all around us...
...If we are bent on going to war, we will go to war with what we've got, or, like Hitler, with what we haven't got...
...When our economic system broke down, we plowed under cotton and corn though millions were cold and hungry...
...We do not know how to use the power we need...
...And to whom will the secrets, if there are any, be "entrusted...
...If we can not make democracy work in the richest nation on earth, we can not export it to our enemies or our friends...
...Just what have we got to offer Russia or anyone else...
...Now that our moral system has broken down, we might just as well plow under laboratories and physicists...
...Now we have got to work fast...
...Are we to suppose that a sort of atomic-shotgun wedding of nations will now hold them together when they could not bring themselves, in San Francisco, to promise to love, honor, and obey...
...by fighting, not merely for the control of the atomic bomb, but for the international abolition of national armaments, including the block-buster, or week-day bomb...
...The scientists estimate that any nation can solve the few technical problems, which we call "secrets," in perhaps two years...
...There's a little matter of hopelessly inadequate unemployment insurance, not to mention medical care, housing (formerly known as slum clearance), and education...
...WHEN the atomic jag is over, we shall have to face our plight in the sober daylight...
...THE atomic bomb is the last straw of the One Worlders, as it is the last circus of the rest of us...
...by dredging up the Atlantic Charter and supporting the struggle for the liberty of all people everywhere, not only in India, buf also in Puerto Rico...
...Of course, there's still China, ablaze between two non-atomic totalitarianisms...
...And since we do not know how far the other countries have advanced under the cloak of secrecy, it may not be two years at all, but six months, or a month, or tomorrow, or yesterday...
...One says to decentralize our cities—as if the shotgun principle, devised to frustrate the decentralization of quail, would not be applied to the bomb...
...And the steady trend, in and out of Congress, to reaction...
...To an organization which has not been able to meet, has no meeting in sight, has not been able (or willing) to write a peace anywhere, even in Italy, and whose minor representatives were unable to keep one meeting together...
...Or federate it...
...The atomic bomb is simply the latest circus in a ¦long, long line of bread and circuses...
...If we can not control ourselves, we can not control the atom...
...Urey, whose discovery of "heavy water" made the bomb possible, warns us that one of the leading physicists on the bomb project here is a Dane now in Denmark, and another a Frenchman now in France...
...And, while we marvel and wonder and shudder at the newest implement of destruction, the problems that are really destroying us fester faster and faster...
...Just what are the secrets on which we are trading...
...Justice—which, as Plato pointed out long ago, holds even a band of thieves together—is dispensable...
...The slaves are freed, the lowly are risen, the dawn is here, and our troubles are over— —If only we can control the atomic bomb...
...If only we can control the atomic bomb...
...and the paradox of participation by the Land of the Free in the maintenance and extension of slavery all over the world...
...The shoeless are shod, the hungry are fed, the homeless are housed—if only we can control the atomic bomb...
...But, as Major de Sev-ersky pointed out after looking at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a sortie of 200 flying fortresses with week-day bombs would have made as big a hole...
...If all we can-do with the wonders of our age is throw them at each other, we might be better off with nothing to throw more dreadful than rocks...
...There's the poll tax, the restrictive covenant, the social segregation, the exclusion of 10 or 12 million workers from social insurance, child labor, and the monster of municipal corruption...
...War-makers will suppress war with bombs, just the way criminals suppress crime with guns...
...While we fiddle with the bomb, the world is burning...
...In four years of blood, sweat, toil, and tears, we have succeeded only in adding to our unsolved problems the paradox of a Jim Crow army fighting against Nazism...
...If we will all go around with our pockets full of atomic bombs, we shall all be happy...
...Of course the third atomic bomb has got to be kept from being dropped...
...And the Baltic and Balkan and half the Korean and German people transferred from a variety of slaveries to the non-atomic slavery of Stalinism or western power politics...
...One of the half dozen greatest atomic physicists is in Russia...
...The problems we had were still unsolved when,, after the collapse of 1937, and the concomitant end of the New Deal reforms, the war boom began...
...And our own non-atomic conversion of Germany into what the London Economist calls "a vast derelict human slum," with its ex-soldiers enslaved by the French and the Russians, its children and aged facing death from incapacity to resist the cold, 25 per cent of its arable land gone, and, in the American zone, only 15 per cent of what industry remains working at five per cent capacity...
...Roosevelt and Willkiei started accusing each other of leading us down the road to war...
...Or run away from it...
...A six-month advantage in industrial research in exchange for the surrender of the dream of world conquest and the regurgitation of the peoples and resources they have conquered...
...But to keep it from being dropped is only to obtain a reprieve...
...If we can't control it, we can still run away from it, and the brave new world will be here...
...It isn't the atom bomb we're running away from—it's ourselves...
...Or organize it...
...When men like Robert M. Hutchins say that "the atomic bomb is the only thing worth talking about," it is time to realize that the country has gone on an atom jag...
...And the non-atomic British shooting the Dutch East Indians and the French Indo-Chinese—with American guns—until the French and the Dutch can take over the shooting themselves...
...the paradox of peacetime conscription—the cornerstone of the Prus-sianism we thought we defeated 25 years ago...
...And who of us now wants to face the haunting fact that we went to war in 1917 against imperialism, militarism, treaty-breaking, and atrocities against civilian populations...
...Or drop it, in concert with peace-loving Britain and Russia, on the Guatemalans or the Koreans...
...If we can not use the reprieve to regenerate our civilization, there is no point in stewing around to get the reprieve...
...the people of the world everywhere wanting it and willing to pay for it—perhaps we can get it by force and fear and distrust and terror...
...Even if the control of the atomic bomb would, somehow, solve our unsolved problems, we can not control it...
...And we, who dropped the first two bombs, have got to give the world, which now stands in terror of our might, the first evidence of moral regeneration...
...The discussion of what to do with our shattered civilization has sunk so low that eminent social scientists can participate in it...
...To a unilateral organization of the three senior and two junior victorious powers, not one of whom, except China, which has nothing to lose, was or is willing to surrender any part of its sovereignty...
...True, too, atomic energy will clothe and feed and house the world much faster than steam or electrical energy...
...But if we are thinking in terms of clothing and feeding and housing the world, why are we helpless to touch the slums here at home with the energy we have, and why are we using the energy we have to convert Germany into a desert...
...There is skyrocketing unemployment on the horizon, with its accompaniment of racial and religious tension...
...Another says to go underground—as if mankind had struggled up from the cave only to go back to it in the end...
...The bomb has succeeded the Nazi death camps and the trials of the war criminals as national diversions...
...True, the atomic bomb will blow us up faster than the block-buster, or week-day bomb...
...We can do it by fighting, along with Congressman Joe Martin, for the abolition of peacetime conscription everywhere...
...AND then there are—or are there?—a few little non-atomic problems still unsolved here at home...
...Only then will we persuade suffering and cynical humanity everywhere that we mean what we say...
...Since we could not get One World the only way it can ever be got—by...
...If we are bent on being at peace, we wilt tackle the causes of war first...
...If we are bent on exterminating ourselves, we will do it with or without the atomic bomb...
...And even the pretense was patent when the organization proved to be no organization at all in the sense of having its members bound by the rules...
...There's the cost of a two-billion-dollar-a-week war, still on the cuff...
...We are late for work already...
...And when the great big super-colossal bomb now in preparation everywhere hangs over everybody, peace will prevail, the way it prevailed after the invention of gunpowder...
...We are face to face with the fact that we lost the war and that Hitler is winning it, and we want to think about something else...
...They pretended to try to organize the victorious nations, as if the peace of the world would be menaced by the totally conquered and half-destroyed losers...
...THE problems we had before World War .II—the problems that cause the wars we lose—were still unsolved when the Messrs...
...At least the Egyptians built the pyramids...
...We did not know how to use the cotton and corn we needed...
...Prof...
...Or sell it, or give it away...
...It's pleasanter now to Forget Pearl Harbor than it is to Remember the Four Freedoms...
...While we gape and gawp at an impotent invention—¦ impotent to solve our pre-atomic problems—the problems fester on...
...The victorious nations did not even pretend to try to organize the world in San Francisco...
...If we are bent on saving ourselves, we will do it with either primitive or advanced technology...
...and by fighting, above all and before everything else, for the forgotten Four Freedoms here at home...
...It isn't the atom bomb that's caught up with us—it's our misspent faith and hope and blood and money...
...If we will threaten each other with non-existent secrets, we shall all knuckle under...
Vol. 9 • November 1945 • No. 45
