LAST THINGS FIRST .
AST week, the Defence and Foreign Ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation formally accepted the assumption, already firmly established, that planning for defence must make provision for the use of nuclear Weapons. It reserved the final responsibility for giving the order to use them to the Governments, but it could hardly do anything else, since it now seems to be taken for granted that the decision to use nuclear weapons and the decision to go to war Will be one and same thing. ., The justification for this is the view, which cannot be questioned, that at present it would be impossible to defend Western Europe against Russian attack en masse, even if the attackers employed only conventional weapons, without resort to atomic warfare. The staggering fact, for which posterity Will call us to account, is that long after this terrible truth has become generally recognised, politicians in Western Europe , _are still debating the expediency of rearming Western Germany. Whatever military experts may say, the view that conventional Weapons are not enough to defend the North Atlantic Treaty States, even if their enemies refrain from using atomic bombs, Ought not to become a permanent strategic assumption until the North Atlantic Treaty States have at least started in earnest to accumulate all the conventional weapons and all the resources of manpower they can. Instead, years have been Wasted in trying to organise the defence of Western Europe )4..1.1 a semi-federal basis which everybody ought to have known to be doomed as soon as the peoples concerned understood that it meant; German rearmament, as a consequence, has been postponed, and we are left with the not very comfortable reflection that the only thing which stands between us and our extinction is a weapon which if used might extinguish most of 1 Mankind. The full horror of this realisation is still blurred 1131 1 Y the illusion that it may be possible to arrange and enforce 1 °Dole agreement for the abolition of the production of atomic Weapons. No efficient international means for the inspection ,'3f armaments production has ever been invented, and the latest .,_mvelopments in nuclear physics make such inspection harder ;gen it ever was. The only hope, certainly slender but much '°0 easily discounted in earlier discussions, is that nuclear weapons like gas may never be used from fear of reprisals. but if one side, and the more virtuous side at that, decides that they are necessary implements of defence, that hope is also banished. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's decision is for the present unavoidable; it must not be allowed to become irrevocable.
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