Evening star., 1946-02-03

On Wednesday of this week the world
will have lived through the first six
months of the atomic age.
The age began last August 6 when a
single bomb brought doomsday to Hiro-
shima and awesomely proclaimed, in a
language of preternatural heat, light,
fire, smoke and thunder, that mankind
now had at its disposal an instrument
capable-at least theoretically-of de-
stroying. with appalling speed, every
trace of vegetable and animal life on
this planet.
Up to now, for reasons of security,
there has been no detailed description
of the thing that devastated Hiroshima,
but this much is known about it:
Cd That its explosive contents were
so light that a schoolboy could have
carried them with one hand.
Cd That it was equivalent in de-
structive force to 10000 tons of TINT,
or 1000 lotion bombs of the orthodox
type.
90 That it was tremendously radio
active and gave off, at the moment of
explosion, an almost unbelievably in
tense heat, measurable in terms of many
millions of degrees Fahrenheit, or in
terms of theoretical maximum the
same as the heat of the suns core.
Already Obsolete.
"a That despite its terrible destruc-
tiveneSs, it was made obsolete by the
bomb that fell later on Nagasaki; that
the Nagasaki bomb has been made obso-
lete by the bombs we have since manu-
| factured and stored away, and that
these, in turn-unless effective world
control stops the process-will in the
future be succeeded by bombs possibly
1000 times more powerful with other
countries besides Canada, Britain and
the United States knowing how to make
them.
And finally 60 that this product of
the science of nuclear fiSsion opened
up on last August such mind-reeling
and revolutionary vistas Of good and
evil-moral, social, economic, political
and military-that civilization, if 1t Is
to survive, most certainly can no longer
adhere to its old habits of thought or
to the past patterns of its history.
To say these things is to repeat what
has been said over and over again ever
since the smashing of Hiroshima. The
words and phrases-words like awe
some and appalling" phrases like
'vistas of good and evil'-have become
slightly hackneyed, and Frank Sullivans
| celebrated Mr.. Arbuthnot, the nimble-
witted cliche expert has already made
sport of them in The New Yorker.
| This fact-the fact that the "awesome
and appalling" Implications of atomic
energy can be spoken of only in Ian
| guage that is beginning to bore people
constitutes problem in itself. It is a
problem because If words about the
atom wear thin to the point of being
unimpressive, the task of promoting
universal awareness of the unique and
dangerous character of the new age
is bound to be doubly difficult.
AS chairman of the Special Senate
Committee on Atomic Energy. Senator
/ Brien Mcmahon is fully aware of the
Importance of publicity in this sense.
1t battles him, for instance, when he
sees columns of newspaper type devoted
to the Pearl Harbor inquiry and rela-
lively little to the proceedings of his
| To set ov1lc >f
course, that the story of December T.,
1941, is of great historical significance,
that valuable lessons may be learned
from it, and that the press may not be
overreporting it as far as reader in
terest goes. But still the fact is, in his
opinion, that it belongs essentially to
the dead past and is not nearly so far
reaching and meaningful, in respect to
tomorrow, as the story of the atom.
This viewpoint will be echoed sympa-
thetically by anybody who has followed
the story with care and read the record
of the open hearings so far held by the
Mcmahon committee. The record
which contains many bright promises
but which occasionally seems narrowing
enough to make one speculate morbidly
over what the Senators have been told
in secret-undoubtedl takes rank among
the most fascinating documents ever
published by the Government Printing
Office. Yet any discussion of the subject
Immediately gives rise to host of un-
avoidable cliches tending to blur the
peculiarly urgent meanings of atomic
energy
Nevertheless, irrespective of their
triteness, if the x-month-old atomic
age is not to end one day in universal
catastrophe, the well-worn warnings
about another war must be taken literal
| ly by peoples everywhere. And to help
themselves understand this. to deepen
| their comprehension of the new real
tiles, the masses of individuals could do
worse than keep constantly in mind two
basic facts set forth by Henry D. Smyth,
the nuclear physicist, in his official War
Department report on how the United
States-with the help OF Britain and
| Canada-converted the atoms of ura-
MUM into a fashionable material giving
mankind not merely an explosive of
! unparalleled power but . new source Of