Towards Atomic Control
The reasons, whatever they are, which prevent the daily Press from giving adequate space to the most important question in the world have prevented an extremely important report of the Scientific and Technical committee of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, published in America last Saturday, from get- ting as much as one hundredth of the space given to the Heath murder trial. The report says that effective control of atomic energy is " technologically feasible " and it bears the signature of Dr. Alex- androv, a Russian representative. The first point was established some months ago by the Lilienthal Report. The second represents the first sign that Russian policy may be moving away from the un- compromisingly suicidal line taken by Mr. Gromyko in the Atomic Energy Commission in June. There was really little sign of such a change in Mr. Stalin's recent statement. That simply asserted that the American monopoly will not last, which comes to saying that the danger of the use of atomic weapons is increasing ; and that the use of such weapons will be prohibited, which begs the whole question whether prohibition can be made effective. The latest report proposes to steer clear of the political aspects of the question. What then can it add? It adds Russian assent to an argument which leads logically to effective control of atomic energy. For if control is possible at all, it can only come through the fusion of political with scientific power. That is to say it can only be exercised as part of the process of scientific discovery by the positive co-operation of the discoverers themselves. All talk about external inspection and the separation of political from technical control through the
veto of the Security Council is ultimately nonsense. Control and development are the same thing. Therefore all the scientists con- cerned with development should be united in a single international team, not subject to external interference. Dr. Alexandrov has set the little toe of one Russian foot on a very important but very long ladder.
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