No Control of Atomic Energy
It may yet turn out to be one of the major disasters of history that within less than three years of the Hiroshima explosion the attempt to secure the international control of atomic energy has failed—and that with hardly a flicker of public interest. Twenty-two months ago, when the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission began its work, the impetus towards the imaginative control of this revolutionary force was strong. It had been given a striking expression in the Lilienthal Report, which recommended that supreme direction should rest with a sovereign international body. Mr. Bernard Baruch, on behalf of the United States Govern- ment, had recommended such a scheme to the United Nations. All observers, including the scientists, who had taken the trouble to acquaint themselves with the elements of the situation, were behind him, and hope was still alive. It received its first blow a few weeks later when Mr. Gromyko insisted that the decisions of the Commission should be subject to the veto in the Security Council. Logically that was the end of it, for unless the international atomic authority was sovereign in its field it was bound to be ineffective. But hope overcame logic and the past twenty-two months have been wasted in an attempt to discover whether the Russians had any workable alternative. At the end of March a British represen- tative called the bluff. by pointing out that the only proposals the Russians had been induced to make provided no basis for control and did not even conform with technical knowlege. Last Friday France, Great Britain and the United States officially reported the failure of the Atomic Energy Commission and asked the General Assembly to suspend its work. Since the subject of international control cannot be allowed to die, some new approach must now be sought, with or without the handicap of Russian procrastination from the inside. But the original impetus is dead and the informed few will have uphill work against the incredible indifference of mass opinion. In the meantime the atomic armaments race is on.
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