The Evening Star (May 17, 1946)
ON THE RECORD —
Competition of lunacy
By Dorothy Thompson
In reading the newspapers these days one gets the impression the leadership of the world is engaged in a competition of lunacy. Though every school child knows that in respect of security we live on a frontierless planet, political leaders haggle over who should receive what strip of land or what port. For the sake of “security,” millions of persons are uprooted from their ancestral homes and whole populations and states compressed into alien systems that can only be maintained by naked force.
The peoples are divided from each other by ideological struggles. Some believe that without private enterprise there can be no freedom; some that only Communism is salvation. Meanwhile, in their international policies, leaders of capitalist states violate every principle of capitalism, and leaders of old and new Communist states, every principle of Communism.
Congress cannot agree on a defense policy, although it is obvious that real peace is no nearer now than it was before V-J Day.
But there is significance in this. For there can be no American defense policy. National states, in today’s world, cannot defend themselves by any historic means: America not by oceanic distances, Britain not by her century-old fleet, Russia not by her great army and archaic conception of a satellite protective ring. Previous concepts of war blew up at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and with the V-1 and V-2 rockets over London. The next war will be a push-button war of robots, the fate of mankind decided by the throwing of a switch. Armies of victors will be sanitation corps – white wings – to clear up the rubbish, bury the corpses and establish, perhaps, military governments over wildernesses as dead as the moon.
John L. Lewis wants a health and welfare fund to protect miners against occupational hazards. How do you know, Mr. Lewis, that in 10 years there will be any miners? The greatest occupational hazard is merely to be an occupant of the earth, in the 20th century. And the question for all of us, of every race and age and creed, is: Do you want to live or die?
So far our leaders, all of them, are choosing that we shall die, taking with us most of what is left of the accumulation of centuries of civilization.
We are drifting now toward the crashing falls. But one thing holds our peace. Only we have the atomic bomb. Only we could, at this moment, drop it on any country with whom our relations were strained. The fact indisposes us to use it. We are restrained by relative absence of fear. But where will be restraint when Russia has atomic bombs, as she certainly will, in five years, or ten, if you want to be optimistic? That Russia is as far as we in the development of rockets is probable. She had as easy access to German scientists as we, and the guided missile is an even more fateful development than the atomic bomb. It can carry anything to a target – bombs or bacteria.
Science moves by the discovery of laws, which once established are eternally so. Technical improvements accelerate rapidly. The bomb of the near future may be five to ten thousand times as destructive as the one that fell on Hiroshima. The range of guided missiles can be stepped up to encompass the globe, and will be. There is no defense against it; it cannot be shot out of the air.
So, when all great powers can destroy each other from long distance, the fear will be so great that there will be no restraint, for the only possible fraction of security will lie in hitting first. Scientific facts of modern warfare are true, not the way arguments for capitalism or communism may or may not be true, but the way physical laws are true – the way it is true that an apple falls down and not up. So Truman, Attlee and Stalin, however much they may quarrel about other things, cannot debate whether it will very soon be possible for one of their countries to destroy the other, or all of them. This is one thing that is not debatable and also it is not debatable, I suppose, that it is undesirable for each to destroy the other or entire planet.
It would, therefore, seem sane that they should concentrate on the single question of how to prevent this, all else being lunacy. It will really not matter to the inhabitants of Trieste whether they belong to Italy or Yugoslavia when they are dead, nor to British miners whether the state or private corporations own their graves, nor to a Russian whether he perishes in a Kolkhoz or on his own land, nor to an American woman whether she dies in nylons or bobby socks.
Molotov, Bevin and Byrnes, too, will atomize into identical elements, and the Kremlin, Westminster and the Capitol will make the same kind of dust. So if nothing else binds the world together this should – that we are destined for the same fate – if we go on like this.