International: In a Locked Room

Kenneth McKellar, President of the U.S. Senate, last week temporarily yielded his chair, stepped down to the floor and informed his astonished colleagues that he had solved the problem of the bomb. Outlaw it, said the gentleman from Tennessee.

For a very few minutes a very few Senators beamed. Then skepticism set in. Snapped Colorado’s Edwin C. Johnson: “If it is possible to outlaw the bomb, why not go the whole step and outlaw war?”

Next day, Ohio’s cautious, conservative Robert Alphonso Taft added that maybe the idea might work—if every country allowed United Nations policemen to nose around for signs of atomic activity. But many doubted that Soviet Russia, for one, would ever consent to international snooping.

“Whoever Shoots First.” The troubled, unhappy House got ready to debate the already much-amended May-Johnson bill for control of atomic energy. Many changes were certain on the floor. In the Senate, a nine-man committee headed by chubby Freshman Senator Brien McMahon planned new hearings. The House bill will be further rewritten there.

Elsewhere in the U.S.:

¶ In Boston, a scientist foresaw someone sitting down to play a piano and destroying a city. Dr. Louis N. Ridenour of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology thought an atomic machine might easily be made to resemble a grand piano. And he warned: “Science has devised no means for detecting atomic explosions before they are detonated.”

¶ In New York, a civil engineer constructed a model of the Empire State building to show that the only hope for the city’s skyscrapers was to dig a hole under each and, during an atomic raid, lower them into the earth by elevator.

¶ Four Oak Ridge, Tenn., scientists warned the New York Herald Tribune that the U.S. edge in atomic bomb production is unimportant. Said they: “. . . It is as though two men (who don’t trust each other) sit face to face in a locked room, each pointing a loaded machine gun at the other. It makes no difference that one man’s gun is a later model, or that he has 1,000 cartridges to the other’s 100. Whoever shoots first wins decisively.”

¶ Five hundred Harvard and M.I.T. scientists issued a joint statement: “. . . To keep permanent monopoly of the atomic bomb would require immediate conquest of the world by the U.S. and constant policing by this country of the entire hostile world thereafter.”

¶Even comic-strip characters had entered the debate. Isolationist Orphan Annie complained that “international gangsters” aided by “politicians” had stolen Daddy Warbucks’ atomic secrets, and Saddlesoap Jones in Smilin’ Jack bought a B-29 and two atomic bombs from the government to blast a hurricane (see cuts).

Dr. George Gallup found that 71% of the U.S. people oppose giving control of the bomb to the United Nations Organization. In the same poll, 65% were sure that the secret could not be kept and that other nations would soon have bombs of their own.