PEACE AND WAR
In most newspapers on Wednesday morning the two uses of nuclear power were strikingly contrasted in adjacent columns. On the one hand there was the White Paper setting out the plans for building in Britain twelve nuclear power stations during the next ten years at a cost of £300 million and pointing to that farther distant day when the atom will be a cheaper and more plentiful source of power than coal. This was good news. On the other hand, there was the report from Mr. Lewis Strauss, chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Com- mission, on the lethal 'fall-out' that succeeds a nuclear explo- sion. What it said in effect was that half the people in a broad belt stretching for 160 miles down-wind from the explosion of a hydrogen bomb might die, and that the total area of con- tamination might extend, as it did after the Bikini test, to 7,000 square miles. This was bad news. But the juxtaposition came us a forcible reminder that the tremendous power now coming to man's finger-tips is in itself neither good nor bad. The peaceful uses of nuclear power do not make man better or happier, but they can make his world more comfortable. Its warlike uses can certainly make his world a desert.
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