ATOMIC AGE: The Other Bomb

From Berlin to Bari, from Malaga to Manchester, the news of the Russian bomb (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) struck with vastly varying impact. In some places, it cut deep along taut nerves; in others, it slid smoothly off the backs of nations long numbed by constant danger. Nowhere did it provoke the apocalyptic shudders which had attended the world’s first atomic explosions; in the Atomic Year V, men still dreaded the unchained atom, but they had gotten used to the idea that they must live with it. The question was, how? How would the Other Bomb affect the great struggle between Communism and the West? How would it weigh in the balance of war or peace?

A Prayer to Allah. Different answers came from every streetcorner and every newspaper in all the world’s cities. Some people predicted inevitable peace. In Germany’s new capital city of Bonn, Professor Otto Hahn, one of the discoverers of nuclear fission, who won a Nobel prize in chemistry in 1944, argued agreeably: “If both the United States and Russia have it, there will be no war.”

Some men predicted inevitable war. Said an Istanbul taxi driver: “As long as only the Americans had The Bomb, the Russians were afraid to make war. Now they won’t hesitate.”

France’s General Charles de Gaulle declared that the Atlantic pact had lost most of its efficacy. Intoned the sepulchral voice of Paris’ Le Monde: “Whatever the future of the giants . . . Europe is bound to be abandoned to herself . . . She no longer guards the ‘fire’ of the century . . . War or peace will be decided by others.”

In Sweden, Stockholm’s Svenska Dagbladet wondered tearfully “how a little country can hold itself alone in an evil world.” In Istanbul, the daily Cumhuriyet sighed: “All we can do is pray to Allah that he grant some wisdom to humanity.”

From the Communists there was smug mirth. Their press mocked America’s “atomaniacs.” In Italy, pro-Soviet Socialist Leader Pietro Nenni (just back from a 15-day junket to another “peace” congress in Moscow) proudly pinpointed the site of the explosion in “eastern Siberia.” In the town of Santeramo near Bari, Communists got the news in the middle of the night, raced in nightshirts and dressing gowns to a hasty rally where a speaker promised: “We Communists will have our headquarters at the White House! Washington shall be ours!”

An Ominous Specific. From Moscow came the most remarkable reaction of all. For more than 24 hours after President Truman’s announcement, the Russians maintained silence. Then Tass released a deadpan communiqué deploring the “alarm among broad social circles” which the Washington news had caused. Tass suggested that the West had, just possibly, been fooled. “In the Soviet Union . . . building work on a large scale is in progress—hydroelectric stations, mines, canals, roads—which evokes the necessity of large-scale blasting . . . It is possible that this might draw attention beyond the confines of the Soviet Union.” As for atomic energy, added Tass casually, Vyacheslav Molotov had announced back in 1947, when he was still Foreign Minister, that Russia had mastered its secret.

Russia stood to gain from her atom bomb if it scared Europe’s people into clamoring for appeasement of Communism, but the West itself stood to gain more: a new clarity of common purpose. The atom bomb in Russian hands was something so ominously specific that it was almost certain to impel a brand of Western unity which otherwise might be years in the forging. Plain common peril might be translated into plain common courage. Moscow’s atom-smashing made obsolete no major part of a political strategy that embraced the Atlantic pact, U.S. military aid to Europe, and restoration of Europe’s economic health. The U.S. did not have to change what it was doing. It had only to do it better and faster.