THE ATOMIC AGE: Regrets & Realities

When Britain’s House of Commons sat down to the business of the week, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was all set to defend his drastic new atomic-age defense policy (TIME, April 15). But the Laborites seemed scarcely interested. Instead, with the nagging insistence characteristic of the troubled British conscience, the Laborites waged an inconclusive and none too logical debate among themselves on whether or not the government should go through with the scheduled test of Britain’s first hydrogen bomb.

Opposition Leader Hugh Gaitskell offered a motion to “postpone” the British test while Britain tried to get international agreement to halt all H-bomb tests. Leftist Richard Grossman, one of Labor’s most brilliant and least predictable figures, urged renunciation not only of the H-bomb but of all nuclear weapons. George Brown, Labor’s current defense spokesman, had endorsed the test only a fortnight before. “We must be able to show any aggressor that we have the bomb. The only way to do this is to show that you have successfully tried it out, and it has worked,” he said then. Now, he no longer seemed certain where he stood. “We do not know what we do.” Brown told the House in a voice charged with emotion. “We do not know that we may not be using the devil’s means to interfere with the Creator’s purpose.”

Vain Appeal. Labor’s doubts and fears were shared last week by troubled men all the way from Hamburg to Hiroshima. Unlike George Brown, the Japanese, who live relatively close (4,700 miles) to Britain’s Christmas Island testing area were entirely confident that they knew what the British were doing. Declaring that the test would pollute Japan’s Pacific fishing grounds, the Japan Council Against Atom and Hydrogen Bombs noisily formulated plans to send a “peace fleet” into the 750,000 square miles of ocean which Britain has declared off limits to shipping between March i .and Aug. i. Driven by mounting public hysteria, the Japanese government five times formally requested the British to call off the test.

Mere Coincidence. Inevitably, the U.S.S.R. moved to capitalize on this uneasiness among the world’s free nations. In London, Valerian Zorin, Russian delegate to the U.N. Subcommittee on Disarmament renewed the Soviet “offer” to abandon H-bomb tests if the U.S. and Britain would do likewise. As usual, however, the men in the Kremlin were working both sides of the street. Two days before Zorin’s statement, the Russians exploded a nuclear weapon of their own. It was the fifth (and one of biggest) Russian nuclear explosion in two weeks—explosions which, by curious coincidence, came hard on the heels of Soviet threats of hydrogen retaliation against European nations which agreed to the establishment of atomic NATO installations within their borders (TIME. April 8).

The Soviet tests (which one Japanese scientist declares to be more than twice as “dirty” as U.S. H-bomb explosions) temporarily focused Japanese wrath on Russia rather than Britain. The fallout, increased by a week-long drizzle of rain, was the heaviest ever recorded in Japan, and the government broadcast a warning: “Cover all open wells; do not drink rain water.”

Neither Russian saber-rattling nor nervous visions of the onrush of Armageddon impressed the Western leaders who must deal with the stern realities of power. From Oslo Premier Einar Gerhardsen, unmoved by Soviet threats against his nation, fired off a note informing the Russians that Norway’s defense was her own business. In Britain Macmillan assured the Labor Opposition that the Christmas Island test would be held. “Those who carry responsibility and perhaps even those who aspire to responsibility must make decisions,” he said. “We must rely on the power of the nuclear deterrent, or we must throw up the sponge.”