Letters to .the Editor
The Hydrogen Bomb Defence and Deterrents Racial Prejudice The Two Roses Language and Colour The Grapevine The Investigation Piscatorial Potency The Dog It Was The Attack on Baha'i RichardR. Wood Charles B. Collins R. D. Merriman, Hugh Morris David Bond T. J. Haarhoff Ronald G. H. Roberts C. B. Larabee A. S. Thomas Jeni Crowley Zeine N. Zeine THE HYDROGEN BOMB
SIR,—Mr. lain Hamilton seems to think it politically 'innocent' to question the value of the hydrogen bomb.
This may turn out, in the light of history, to have been itself an innocent opinion.
If an essential element of national power is the ability of the nation to get its own way, one may' question whether the possession of the hydrogen bomb actually increases the power of the possessing nation. The argument against using the bomb—uncontrollable vastness of destruction—is so persuasive that the bomb is likely to become an expensive and, in the long run, ineffective bluff.
And a dangerous bluff. With both sides possessing the bomb, the situation becomes a stalemate threatened by petulance.
' The really innocent — the inexcusably innocent—are not those who question the wisdom or rightness of producing hydrogen bombs. The dangerous innocent are those who continue in the teeth of the evidence to talk and act as if the possession of weapons of terrifying destructiveness were an adequate deterrent of war, who fail to allow adequately for the dangerous probability that the delicate stalemate between abilities to terrify may be catastrophically upset by tiny and unintended incidents, and who disparage as innocent those who are trying to direct attention to the search for peaceful means of keeping peace. —Yours faithfully,
RICHARD R. WOOD
The Friend, 304 Arch Street, Philadelphia 6, Pennsylvania
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