A SPECTATOR
'S NOTEBOOK
S0 man's highest scientific achievement is the discovery of means for effecting man's annihilation. That, of course, is an obvious comment, and perhaps hardly worth making. But for the moment little more than the obvious can gain currency. It will take some time for anyone to settle down to fixed convictions about the atomic bomb. This is the period of questions—endless questions. Were Allied scientists right in trying to invent an atomic bomb? The answer to that is plainly yes ; it was a race between the Allies and the Germans, and if the Germans had won—before the war was over—we should have been obliterated as Japan is about to be. Could the process, when discovered by the Allied scientists, have been kept secret, and if so should it have'been? The answer to the first question depends on whether even now German scientists, or any neutrals, might struggle to the goal they have so long been seeking ; if the answer is that there was a reasonable hope of preserving secrecy, then, and only then, the second question arises. The answer to that is singularly hard to decide on. The universal horror with which news of the discovery has been hailed is altogether wholesome ; the more widespread it is and remains, the better. It would seem to justify the view that in spite of the part the atomic bomb may play in shortening the Japanese war it would have been better for the inventors of the bomb to carry the secret with them to their graves. But since the Allied leaders have decreed otherwise we come to the next, and crucial, question: Will the invention make for peace or war? That no Man can tell. What we have to ask is not whether a rational human being would ever assume the appalling responsi- bility of launching atomic bombs against an enemy country—actually, in fact, they are being launched already—but whether a Hitler or a Himmler would hesitate. There is not much doubt about that. In another war, if there is another war, everything will depend on getting the vital blow in first—of course without any thought of a declaration of war. In that condition—" if there is another war "— lies mankind's one hope of survival.
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