The United States News (August 17, 1945)
Lawrence: What hath man wrought?
By David Lawrence
Man has at last brought forth a weapon that reduces war to an absurdity.
Man has discovered that a means of destroying whole nations is available out of the minerals of the earth and that no people can hope to remain secure against the atomic bombs of another people no matter how distant one country may be from the other.
A single airplane riding high in the stratosphere, unobserved and undetected because of its great speed, propelled by this new energy, can appear suddenly over London or Washington or Detroit or Pittsburgh or any city in a peaceful area and destroy human lives by the hundreds of thousands in just a few seconds.
No longer are armies and navies or even air forces by themselves an adequate defense.
Peoples throughout the world feel an unprecedented urge to find ways and means of avoiding war. We have been brought face to face with stark reality—that wars cannot hereafter be tolerated and that peoples must never again allow one-man governments to exploit them and drive them into war.
Greater than the atomic bomb itself is the challenge to man to rise above this new means of world suicide and to implant throughout the human race an understanding of the futility of combat and the need for removal of the basic causes of international friction.
Is this ‘civilization’?
God did not provide this new weapon of terror. Man made it himself with the God-given brains and skill of the scientist. Previously other weapons like the submarine and the airplane had been introduced. We were permitted to defy the laws of gravity and fly through the air and we were permitted to move men and supplies under water. But man turned those inventions into methods of carrying on warfare more intensive and more terrible than ever.
A few decades ago man did not think it fair or sportsmanlike to attack non-combatants. War was reserved for armies and navies. Civilians behind the lines were immune. At the beginning of World War II we were horrified to see the German air forces murdering civilians in Warsaw and later at Rotterdam.
Then came reprisals. The single action of a German maniac—who by skillful propaganda appealing to those in economic distress had seized possession of the minds and energies of a whole people and had directed them along the paths of revenge and brutality—caused other nations to follow suit and bomb cities.
We – the great, idealistic, humane democracies, on the so-called civilized side—began bombing men, women and children in Germany. Last week we reached the climax—we destroyed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japanese cities with the new atomic bomb.
A dangerous precedent
Perhaps these many thousands of Japanese men, women and children who were blown to bits by the atomic bombs may not have died in vain. Perhaps somewhere on this earth a scientific experiment of the magnitude we have just witnessed had to be tried and the reaction of all mankind had to be invoked to impress everybody with the indescribable horror of man’s latest achievement.
Yet we had already been winning the war against Japan. Our highest officials have known for some time that Russia was planning to enter the war in the Far East as soon after V-E Day as she could deploy her troops and supplies over the long stretches of the Trans-Siberian Railroad.
The surrender of Japan has been for weeks inevitable. It has come now as anticipated. We can rejoice that hostilities are to cease at last. But we shall not soon purge ourselves of the feeling of guilt which prevails among us. Military necessity will be our constant cry in answer to criticism, but it will never erase from our minds the simple truth that we, of all civilized nations, though hesitating to use poison gas, did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children. What a precedent for the future we have furnished to other nations even less concerned than we with scruples or ideals!
Our guilt is also the guilt of all mankind which failed to find a way to prevent war. The dispatches say Germany was working feverishly along the same scientific road and that Hitler would not have hesitated to use such a weapon against Britain. But Hitler has been killed and Germany has been beaten. Could an announcement of the tests of the atomic bomb made in New Mexico recently have been used as a dramatic means of persuading the Japanese militarists to release their people and surrender?
Surely we cannot be proud of what we have done. If we state our inner thoughts honestly, we are ashamed of it. We can justify the bombing as a means of saving precious American lives and shortening the war. Yet we cannot suppress the wish that, since we lately had been warning the people of Japan against air attack on certain cities, we might have warned them against staying in the specific area where we first wished to demonstrate the destruction that could ensue from the continued use of the atomic bomb.
All the world knows that the secrets of the atomic bomb cannot long be withheld from the scientists of nations large and small. The tiniest nation with a laboratory and certain raw materials will have a weapon that can be used to destroy its neighbors.
All nations thus will in time become equal in potential strength. The weak will stand alongside the strong demanding new respect and new consideration. The Charter of the United Nations furnishes now an even more timely means of collaboration by all nations, large and small. New responsibility has been imposed on the larger nations which at the moment can so readily manufacture atomic bombs.
But we shall miss the entire significance of the new discoveries if we do not apply a spiritual interpretation. It is man and not God who must assume responsibility for this devilish weapon. Perhaps He is reminding all of us that man-made weapons can if their use is unrestrained, destroy civilization, and that man still has the chance to choose between the destructive and constructive use of the findings of science.
The challenge to mankind
What will man say to this? Will he foolishly toy with the new weapon, build huge factories and husband supplies of atomic energy against potential enemies? Or will man see that at last there must be the greatest surrender that has been known from the beginning of time – a surrender to reason and the processes of tolerance and forbearance, a surrender to unselfishness and self-restraint, a surrender to conscience and the will of God as the only way to survive in this world?
Will man see at last how he has been exploited by the seekers of so-called glory, the power-mad militarists and domineering egotists who get possession of the reins of government, sometimes by constitutional and sometimes by unconstitutional means, while craven, submissive persons sit by and follow a course of what they deem to be individual safety?
The challenge of the atomic bomb, therefore, is plain. Since individual security can vanish in an instant, peoples everywhere must organize their national life so that no ruler anywhere, by using specious pretexts, by suppressing or intimidating the press or the radio, can seize military control of a government.
Peoples must be alert to maintain peace. Peoples must exercise the power that belongs inherently to them and must reason with each other through free governments and God-controlled statesmen.
A world of law and morals
The adjudication of all disputes and controversies must hereafter be submitted to tribunals and courts of justice. Man must see that only in the philosophy of Moses and Jesus, Mohammed and Confucius, who have sought in their time to teach billions of persons a universal goodness, can there be an elevation of man from the nadir of his brutality to the lofty heights that so long have been the goal of a righteous civilization.
The world of tomorrow must be a world of law and morals. Centuries of exhortation have in vain sought the same result. The world has intermittently listened. Now the world must listen incessantly or be destroyed.
There must be peace on earth and good will between factions inside nations as well as between nations themselves. Conflicts between religious sects and races must end so that our spiritual energies can be concentrated on a common purpose – the achievement of a real brotherhood of man.
For at last it has been demonstrated to all of us that only by following His guidance in our daily conduct as individuals and as nations can we hope to fulfill our true mission as the children of God on earth. It is the only road left now – the road of mutual forbearance. It is the way to survival and human happiness.