The Evening Star (April 3, 1946)
ON THE RECORD —
Atomic energy can’t be controlled until nations learn to stop wars
By Dorothy Thompson
The State Department’s committee on the control of atomic energy, anticipating skepticism, suggests that the program offered may be attacked as “too radical,” and says we all should ask “what are the alternatives?” The committee says it cannot find a tolerable answer.
This column suggests that no one will ever find a tolerable answer to how to control atomic energy until an answer has been found to the question precedent to all others: How to stop war. The answer to that question resolves all others.
There was. before the war, an international “conversion” forbidding the bombing of other than military targets, but it was violated by every belligerent once war began. Anyone who has seen Plymouth or Coventry, Dresden, Wuerzburg or Berlin, or observed how war breeds hate and unreason, turning peace into destruction, and liberation into terror, cannot be greatly concerned about another terrible weapon. If. after this war, civilization cannot abolish war, it deserves to perish, and will.
War can be stopped, and the way to stop it is to stop it. The only thing in the way is that the governments of the world do not want to stop it. They want to do too many other things first. They want to abolish or maintain capitalism, or be sure no other country has more power: they put a thousand conditions on the abolition of war. Otherwise, we, or the Soviet Union, would have offered a program for abolishing war. Neither has.
If the Security Council wanted to abolish war, it would call a meeting of the General Assembly and put to vote the implementation of the treaty signed long ago which furnishes the base for the case against German war criminals, the Kellogg-Briand pact. That would necessitate a definition of war as the basis for a law of nations. Maxim Litvinov once gave an excellent definition before the League, which, for reasons of space, I cannot here repeat. War being defined would then be codified in one single prohibitory international law.
The law of nations against war would be submitted for ratification to all states, to be embodied in their own constitutions. If all states adopted it armies, navies, air forces and all categories of weapons which can be used exclusively for war, would be abolished and one single world police force created, which would include inspectors with access to the factories of all countries, and an air force – the only legal one on earth. Every manager and worker of a factory would be responsible under domestic law and world law for violation of the prohibition to rearm.
A world supreme court would be necessary, to which any person could address a complaint about breaches of the law, if he could not find a hearing at home. The world would have an antiwar espionage system never yet conceived – the espionage of the common man who doesn’t want to be killed. A majority decision of the Security Council to investigate charges of rearmament anywhere would involve inspection. limited to one single function – reporting on rearmament. If the charge were sustained by evidence before the court the persons involved would be enjoined to desist; if they did not desist there would be immediate enforcement against the particular violators involved.
None of this demands the creation of a superstate. Any sort of social order could exist, as is necessary in a world which is not “one,” but manifold, and in which no society has found the solution for all injustice and never will. The greatest injustice is war, and the barrier to greater justice everywhere is war.
Interference in any state would be limited to the protection of one single law of nations – the law forbidding armament or organization for war.
Given the abolition of war there would still be ideological struggles and rivalries between persons and nations, but these would be pacified by the absence of force and the fear of, or will to, war. which usually amount to the same thing. Atomic energy could be released for constructive use everywhere. Satellite governments for security purposes would have no justification; and reason instead of force would increasingly rule even in the domestic affairs of nations, all of which are influenced in internal policies, political and economic, by the possibility of war.
The fact that the atomic bomb is for the moment the sole possession of the American people, gives us the greatest opportunity and duty to take the lead in lifting the curse of Cain. It is as though God himself were testing the nations – this great land first. We, ourselves, have set the pattern in Japan. There the new constitution forbids the maintenance of an army, navy or air force. If total disarmament is good for Japan and Germany, it is good for everybody; otherwise the disarmament of Axis countries will not contribute to preventing aggression but to extending it by the creation of helpless possible victims.
It will be argued that some countries will not agree. How do we know? We have never proposed it. Would Americans agree? Ask them!