A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
IHAVE rarely heard anything more brilliant of its kind than the Daniel Stevenson Lecture which Dr. J. B. Conant, the President of Harvard, delivered in London on Monday. The subject was Anglo-American Relations in The Atomic Age, and the problem how, in that age, to combine security with liberty. Dr. Conant spoke with great spirit, against a background of knowledge far beyond what he was free to disclose, and with a humour and charm and depth of feeling which made a pro- found impression on a very distinguished audience. Science, as he pointed out, once knew no frontiers. That was its glory. Beneficial discoveries like penicillin became the property of all the world. But within a wide field nuclear physics has changed all that. There every operation is conducted behind an impene- trable barrier of secrecy—even where countries as closely asso- ciated as Britain, the United States and Canada are concerned. Those countries, Dr. Conant suggested, could and should even now make common cause over atomic energy. There would be moral as well as military advantages in that.
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