ATOMIC AGE: Coke at the Crossroads

Could it be possible that U.N.’s Atomic Energy Commission was really getting somewhere? Russia’s usually churlish Andrei Gromyko explained that “nobody is asking for secrets” and that what his country wants is a discussion of plans for peaceful and constructive utilization of atomic energy. That helped. Mr. Gromyko bought Bernard M. Baruch of the U.S. a 15¢ Coke at the hotel bar, and 75-year-old Mr. Baruch presented Mr. Gromyko with a cake, on his 37th birthday.

More oil was poured on a still choppy sea by Brazil’s Navy Captain Alvaro Alberto da Motta Silva, who took over the Commission’s rotating chairmanship. The Captain—a chemist and a physicist, whose naval duties have left him a lot of time for reading—documented the world’s urge for peace by citing a long list of immortals: Descartes (“I think, therefore I am”), Virgil (to whom the Captain erroneously ascribed Horace’s phrase on war, “matribus detestata”), Thomas Jefferson (“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”), Abraham Lincoln (“We cannot escape history”), Epicurus, Lucretius, Democritus, Kant, Condorcet, Jeremy Bentham, Auguste Comte, Pierre Dubois, l’Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Poincaré, Ruy Barbosa and the Baron de Rio Branco (of Brazil), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Bernard M. Baruch.

Even after cramming all this in a twelve-minute speech, the scholarly Brazilian needed a punch line to show the delegates that they stood at a crossroad. He chose one from Empedocles: “Love or hatred—that is the question.”