- NEWS OF THE WEEK
impression the advent of the hydrogen bomb has made gro s deeper daily, both in the United States and here. The uneasiness is primarily moral, revolt against the iniquity of invoking such a weapon, not fear for the particular individual life it may threaten. The public mind remains hesitant and confused.
There is hardly a voice raised in America, and very few here, against President Truman's decision that the manufacture of the bomb must go forward ; the prospect of Russia alone being in possession of the new devilry could not be contemplated. But the President has made it abundantly clear (as an important article by our Washington correspondent on a later page indicates) that the decision holds good only till a satisfactory plan for the control of atomic energy is achieved. The crux here, of course, is " satisfactory." Unsatis- factory plans could be manufactured as easily as pancakes ; the task is to persuade a country that lives behind hermetically sealed frontiers to accept the searching and perpetual inspection without which no plan for the control of atomic energy could be even remotely satisfactory. Mr. Dean Acheson on Wednesday showed himself to be under no illusions about that.
So grave is the situation that it seems, paradoxically, to have actually given a stimulus to human optimism. According to our Washington correspondent, Mr. David Lilienthal, than whom no man living speaks with greater authority on this subject, believes, for reasons he has not yet explained, that we are living, " not in a twilight, but on the edge of a daWn." Senator McMahon, chairman of the Joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee, has gone ,far to capture the imagination of America by his proposal to cut American armaments expenditure by two-thirds and devote the 50 milliard dollars thus made available in five years to a super-Marshall Aid scheme by which all countries, Russia included, would benefit, conditionally on an effective plan for the control of Atomic energy being generally accepted and on every country agree- ing to devote two-thirds of its own armament expenditure to con- structive ends. Far more vague, but not wholly negligible, is a report from Moscow that Russia is willing to meet United States representatives on common problems at any time. Never have the rulers of the nations been faced with graver decisions. Never have they needed the prayers of men of goodwill in every country more.
