ATOMIC ENERGY CONTROL

The Proposals for an International Authority Are Examined in the "Great Issues" Course By One of the Leaders in This Thorny Field

PRESIDENT DICKEY AND GENTLEMEN. I suppose you appreciate that this is an immense subject. When I had finished my most active connection with it, I estimated that I had material for about thirty hours of lectures.

Now what I want to do tonight is to do something more than give you a complete miniature of this complicated subject. I want also to say things about its setting and about the business of getting a plan adopted. I would like to give you a sense of proportion about some of the things involved that may make it easier for you to interpret the events of the future, because this subject, I suspect, will be with us for a long while.

I think we had better start by getting together on what it is we are talking about, and so I am going to present to you very briefly the essential items in the United States Government plan lor the international control of atomic energy. That plan contemplates that a multilateral treaty would be executed by the nations of the world, establishing an international atomic energy authority, presumably subject to the general supervision of the Security Council or of the Assembly of the United Nations. The first essential duty of that body would be to explore the world to find out where are the deposits of uranium and thorium, the two elements that are important from the standpoint of our subject tonight. It is necessary to know where they are in order to know whether they are being surreptitiously extracted from the earth. The second essential is that the authority should have control of all uranium and thorium from the time that it is mined, either by property ownership or by any other method that gives it absolute and complete control. The third element of the plan is that the production of fissionable materials which might be used for explosives or poisons or for peacetime purposes shall be exclusively conducted by the international authority which shall own the plants and own the stockpiles and have complete control of them at all times.

A fourth function of this body would be to license the use of some atomic ma- terials for peacetime uses and to license the operation of piles in college, university and institute laboratories which would produce only sufficient fissionable materials to be used for experimental purposes, and to supervise such experimental work. The next to the last function of this body would be to conduct research in atomic warfare weapons, and the reason for that is to permit it better to perform its last function, which is the supervision and inspection of all nations of the world to assure that the treaties outlawing atomic bombs and giving control of all atomic energy matters to the international body shall not be surreptitiously and clandestinely violated. In order for it to fulfill that function, it has to be ahead of all other groups in the world in its knowledge of the science related to this subject, and particularly to the science related to the production of weapons.

To the essentials which I have now stated, which were developed by the Lilienthal Board and Acheson Committee of the State Department, the United States representative added one other provision of an essential character, which was that no nation should exercise a veto power with respect to matters concerning the control of atomic energy. That topic I will discuss last in tonight's lecture.

That is the general outline of the plan for the international control of atomic energy. I think the first thing we want to consider in connection with it is: How important is it to have international control of atomic energy? It is very easy to get completely out of balance on that. This horrible means of destruction of life and property, this horrible poison- speaking now of its radio-active characteristics—absolutely continues to be as important as we thought it when we first knew of it through its dramatic use. Relatively, however, even at that time and since, its importance has decreased.

Shortly after the Lilienthal report was published, Dr. Frank Jewett, an old friend of mine who was then President of the National Academy of Science, wrote to me that he was very much disturbed about this report, because he thought it would mislead the American people. He said: "There are other means of mass destruction which I think are more horrible, more terrible than the atomic bomb and much more difficult to get under control, and I fear the publication of the report on this subject will lead people to assume that the means of mass destructive warfare have already been taken care of; and that, I think, is not likely to be the case." The easy and obvious answer to that objection was that the other means of mass destruction were not put up to -the particular committee that developed this report. They are on the agenda of the United Nations Assembly in connection with general disarmament particularly related to mass destruction means. But there is another reason for justifying the treatment of this subject which I will touch upon later.

The reason that the atomic energy question is relatively less important and, I think, will continue to grow relatively less important, is that other means of mass destruction are being developed apace. Guided missiles and rocket bombs, chemical and biological means of warfare presumably are being prosecuted every day—not by a few nations, but by many nations—and developments in those fields seem to be more likely than further developments in the atomic bomb or the other war uses of atomic energy. Then, despite its dramatic character, I think we need to keep a little perspective about this destruction in general. After all, the squadrons of B-29 bombers which dropped petroleum bombs in Tokyo secured more casualties in one night, about 180,000, than there were casualties from the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That is, if you are talking about destruction, there are other means besides atomic bombs for doing it on a large scale, and probably the chief difference between them from a military standpoint is the matter of economy. At a million dollars apiece, an atomic bomb is a cheaper method of destruction than to take hundreds or thousands of bombers to accomplish the same job. But so far as the people affected are concerned, I see very little difference in the horror of destruction from atomic bombs—either from the blast or from the burns or from the radiation—and the horror from destruction by any of the other means. Perhaps the most important aspect of the atomic bomb from the standpoint of future warfare is its efficiency or efficacy as a means of surprise attack. In that respect, I suspect that if there are means of carrying it—that is, either rocket bombs or guided missiles or fast bombers—it is more potent than any of the other weapons thus far developed.

And finally, perhaps it is more true of the atomic bomb or other forms of atomic destruction that there is little or no defense in prospect for it. I can't stop to talk about the use of fissionable materials for sabotage, or its surreptitious introduction into the country, but .hat should not be forgotten as one of the aspects of the problem that faces an international authority or any nation if we have no international control. It is entirely feasible to bring explosive uranium products into the ports of this country, in small enough quantities so that there is no danger in them, without their being easily detected, and to assemble them in bombs relatively easily so that there could be a surprise attack by that method as distinct from that of dropping bombs.

It is to meet this particular means of destruction that it is proposed to put the control of atomic energy under an international authority. What are the limitations, fundamental limitations, of the plan proposed? One of the most important and one that we shouldn't forget in connection with this subject is that it does not prohibit the use of atomic bombs once war breaks out. I have heard very few people say that there is any possibility of prohibiting the use of atomic energy for war purposes once war broke out. There are a few who say, "Well, why couldn't this be handled on the analogy of gas in the present war?" And I think the answer that most people would make is that the only reason that gas was not used in the present war was because the various military authorities didn't find it expedient to use it. I credit our own military authorities with a somewhat higher level of morality in connection with this subject than perhaps some others. I don't think there was any morality about Hitler's failure to use gas, but in the next war I should assume that all means of destruction found to be militarily economical and efficient would be used as seemed appropriate to the military authorities. The fact that gas was not used in this last war doesn't, to me, give the faintest suggestion that anything that we could say, that any treaty that we could make, would assure us against the use of atomic bombs and other military uses of atomic energy in any war that breaks out in the future. What is assured within limits by this plan, if adopted in good faith, is that atomic bombs will not be used as a surprise weapon for the initiation of war. Let's not forget that when we talk about the use of this particular method for the initiation o'f war by surprise attack, we are thinking in terms of the destruction of a large number of cities of a country in one night. That is the kind of surprise warfare that we contemplate in connection with the atomic bomb of the future. If provision against surprise attack were assured by the international control of atomic energy, at least a year, and certainly with some countries longer than a year, would be required before it would he possible to secure a sufficient number of bombs to be of any importance in a future war.

A second thing which is perhaps of even greater importance is that if you assume that atomic bombs will be used in any war of the future, there is no great decrease in the problems of vulnerability, related not to defense but to the best position for the next war. I doubt if at the time this plan was developed in our committee that was sufficiently appreciated. There has been some pretty careful study and a good deal of thought given to the question of vulnerability. Now, what do we mean by that word? We mean that for this type of attack, and I think also for squadron attack with petroleum or magnesium or TNT bombs, concentration of population and concentration of industry are the most vulnerable conditions. While we may have no important defense against these weapons, we could at least put ourselves in a better position if instead of having large cities, great concentration of population, and great aggregates of industrial plants, we had a great deal of dispersal of population.

The difference between having no international agreement and having one, if you assume that the next war will involve the use of atomic bombs, is solely a difference in the speed with which we attempt to make ourselves less vulnerable. That is quite an important difference, because if we had a scare in this country, really got scared, got panic-stricken, about the dangers that confronted usand we are not now, because we don't think anybody else has the bomb—rapidity in dispersing our populations would be very much more expensive and very much more offensive to the people than a slower-going method of distributing the population. Governments have found in the past that the hardest single thing for a government to undertake is the deliberate shifting of the population against its wishes.

So this plan doesn't guarantee against the use of atomic energy in a future war, and it doesn't very importantly decrease the perplexing problems of the reduction of the vulnerability of our population to atomic attack and attack by some other kinds of weapons.

If that is so, why bother with a plan for the international control of atomic energy? How much is there in it anyway? It doesn't eliminate atomic bombs from the next war, it merely mitigates the problem of getting ready to reduce the vulnerability of this country—and, of course, Britain is much more vulnerable than we are, much more concerned with this problem. Since there seems to be so much difficulty in getting the plan adopted, why bother with it? One of the reasons for bothering with it is that when the danger is so great, you are justified in taking long shots. I want to emphasize that. When I first went into this matter, and I am sure it was true with some others, it seemed to me almost fantastic to hope either that we could agree on anything or that we could get anyone else to agree with us, including the United States Senate. But the stakes are so high! In my opinion, the stakes are whether we have a totalitarian government here, as well as whether we have peace. I think the reduction of our vulnerability that will follow failure to get international agreement will gradually, more and more, point to the controlling of the lives of individuals. Such control already has progressed to the point of controlling science. In order to maintain the kind of life that we are talking about, and have been willing to fight for, we would almost have to agree to carry such controls into other fields as far as may be necessary. The stakes are enormous, gentlemen! They are literally enormous for our children and even for our present form of life, so it is worthwhile to get control of this thing.

But a second reason is that, of all the means of destruction, if it can be put under control, the atomic bomb and its associated methods of use in warfare are the easiest to control. Now the reason it's the easiest is almost obvious if you will read the Smythe report, which I hope no one will fail to read some day, if you haven't already. The reason is that it takes enormous amounts of material to produce fissionable materials. It takes great quantities of power; it takes vast plants even if you assume the plants to be half the size of those which we originally constructed in this country; the production emits enormous quantities of radio-active energy which can be detected under many conditions fairly easily; and the production of plutonium results in the generation of immense quantities of heat which have to be disposed of in some wa:y. The quantities of material required and its transportation, the quantities of power necessary for isotope separation, the quantities of radiation which have to be guarded against by massive plants, the ease of detecting radio-active dust, and the quantities of heat generated in the production of plutonium—all these things make it relatively easy to determine, by inspection and by accounting for materials and power, what's going on if fissionable materials are being produced in sufficient quantities to be a real menace in war. Biologicals can be made by little Holland in small laboratories; chemicals could be produced in small quantities, even though uneconomically, and assembled where you will. But this thing, unless methods change beyond what I think likely, is relatively easy to detect, difficult though it is to put under control.

But there is still a more important reason, in my judgment, and it was very much in the minds of our board in developing this subject. If you take the easiest thing and the one which is most dramatic, and get an agreement to put it under control, and get an organization established, and get the habit of thinking of international control established, then the more difficult things are more likely to be made susceptible to international control. Thus we have made an important step, nearly all others previously having failed, to getting mass destruction armaments under international control and getting a vested interest established in some degree of international government.

Now I want to say a few words about the obstacles to the introduction of the plan. Almost any plan that isn't meant to be just an idealistic blueprint to talk about, or to stimulate the imagination, has to include the means by which it probably could be made effective. I made no reference in my introductory remarks to the fact that Section 4 of the report which you have read, or will read, deals with the methods of getting from here to there, the methods by which the United States would relinquish step by step its monopoly position in connection with atomic energy, and by which, finally, the whole matter would be under the control of an international authority and all nations would be on a basis o£ equality. I have not time to discuss that section of the report, except one single angle later. That could be discussed and will be discussed at great length if the plan goes forward, because it was possible to consider only an outline at the early stages. And there is a very difficult obstacle to getting any plan of international control evolved. We don't start as equals. The United States has the atomic bomb; it is speculative when some other nation will have it. Of course, the British have it, too, in principle, and so do the Canadians. I think there are probably some ten or twelve other nations working at it very avidly at the present time. That is a real difficulty in conducting negotiations.

A second obstacle which is of great importance to us Americans is the problem of security and secrecy. Actually, I don't think there is a thing that I would say to you tonight any differently than I am going to say it if all the secrets of the atomic bomb and atomic energy were public property. They are not. There are so many of them that no single mind could comprehend them because most of these marvelous gadgets of a technological character are not scientific; they are engineering and trick things. If they were all available, I don't think it would really make any difference in what I would say to you, and it wouldn't make any essential difference in the fundamental problem that confronts this and other countries.

The real difference is in the intensity of the support that you get from the people for any plan you have to adopt. Now anything I say to you is bound to be subject to the qualification in your mind, "I don't know whether this fellow is holding something back, or whether he doesn't understand it, because I haven't got the whole story." That is a very important limitation and it is a dilemma. I see no way to avoid it. It would seem to me to be impossible politically, and not proper from a military standpoint, just to give away the secrets that we have. But the possibility of securing popular support for unpopular things—and international control in my opinion inevitably involves unpopular things—is somewhat diminished, if not seriously injured, by the fact that there is so much secrecy. . . .

So much is almost introductory. What is the general theory of the plan as proposed? I for one felt the dangers of atomic energy were so great that we could afford to adopt at once a plan that stopped all production of fissionable materials and all scientific research in that field. What is the use of attempting any progress in science or in civilization or anything else if because of the existence of atomic bombs and similar things, it is all going to be destroyed, or very nearly so, in a relatively short time anyway? I thought the dangers were so great that any sacrifice whatever of future peacetime uses of atomic energy was justified. But I was very quickly persuaded away from that position by Mr. Lilienthal and Dr. Thomas, perhaps activated by somewhat different motives but with the same result, by the argument that a merely negative authority that prohibits everything doesn't command very much support.

There isn't much emotional foundation for something that is merely negative, a mere police power, that says you can't do anything. And then if you wanted really to continue support of an international atomic energy authority, it ought to have a constructive job to do that would develop vested interests in the maintenance of that kind of organization. Therefore, the job that should be given to this atomic energy commission would be to develop the peacetime uses in scientific research, in pathology, in the production of power, in whatever methods or whatever ways the future might show to be real peacetime uses; to give this authority a constructive job and not merely a negative or defensive job. That is point No. 2 in the fundamental theory of this plan.

Point No. 3 is that competition for uranium and thorium, international competition, would be eliminated, and must be eliminated, by any other plan or it would be an aggravation to future wars rather than the reverse. I suppose the next most active source of competition is petroleum, which is useful for peacetime purposes and also very important for wartime purposes. But the relative scarcity of uranium and thorium and its quite unequal distribution over the surface of the globe, so far as anyone knows, have created already a deadly international competition for this vital material, particularly from the standpoint of potential use in war.

And there perhaps I ought to throw in a word which will be of significance a little later about peacetime uses. I think a very small uranium pile such as could be authorized without danger, or a few of them, could produce radio-active isotopes for research and medical uses in sufficient quantity without involving any danger of international warfare or the use of atomic energy in war. And cyclotrons and betatrons are also being developed that in many instances cover the same field. The principal emphasis here should be on whether or not you permit uranium to be used for power purposes. Fuel, except in certain sections of the earth, is no longer an important factor in producing power. It is important to the producer, of course, but not important in proportion to overall costs—say half a cent a kilowatt hour for fuel in an average cost of three or four or five cents. A considerable reduction in fuel cost doesn't mean any considerable change in the power-cost factor in industry generally. If you take the arctic regions or some desert regions where transportation of either coal or petroleum would be extremely expensive, you have a special condition in which, if you had the means available now, the use of atomic energy for that power purpose might be important. But for some time to come that is likely to be relatively unimportant.

Now let's get to a little of the detail concerning the essential parts of the plan. I've already stated that the important thing about the control of uranium and thorium is, first, that you would need to eliminate the international competition for those materials; second, that that is the most obvious first point for an international authority. To obtain control to an extent that is going to be effective, its first step is to get hold of all of the raw materials that could be used in producing

fissionable materials. That is easy to say, but it would be a matter of enormous difficulty. Every step in the creation and functioning of this international authority would involve problems that are almost as great as those involved in the conduct of the war itself and would involve some that are quite novel. Yet we dismissed the subject very easily as if it were something accomplished by the stroke of a pen. The mere question of how you would compensate various countries for their supply of these raw materials could be a source of thorough and long and sometimes heated discussion.

Now we come to the second item, the ownership and operation of the productive plants and the stockpiles of fissionable materials. And here I think you will find now the beginning of a divergence of view among those who are familiar with this subject, some going back to my original position that this thing was so dangerous that we had better forget all peacetime uses and forget further research in it. Their argument is this: you had better not let any of these plants be built, because the use of uranium for power pur- poses is at least a generation or two off. People are working on the development of, shall we call them, boilers that will take heat from uranium piles off at a high level and convert it into usable energy, but it hasn't been done yet and, as I indicated a moment ago, the economy of doing it is narrow or doubtful, except under special conditions. That being the case, why run the risk of having any authority produce these materials? Why not control this stuff at the mine or in the ground and let it go at that?

Now I have to bring in the one thing I said I would discuss later in connection with how you get from here to there. If an international atomic energy authority were to develop fissionable materials from uranium and thorium, where would it locate its plant? Suppose we say that it will locate it in the Azore Islands. Then Americans and Russians say that is pretty handy to the British and they could seize the plant and then they would have atomic bombs and we wouldn't have anything. So you say the only way out of that dilemma, if you are going to have these materials produced at all, is to locate the plants strategically. This is one of the things I contributed to the plan, and some people don't like the word strategically. I don't either. It is rather ominous. Locate them strategically in the United States, Britain, maybe France, Russia, where else you will, a major country, so that if one wants to get a little funny and seize one of these plants to try to get the benefits of surprise attack, that is notice to everybody else who has one in his territory to seize it also and go to it on a relatively equal basis. You see, if there is not much immediate peacetime usefulness for this material, all you do by having these plants is to run the risk of some kind of seizure. There is a temptation if there is a stockpile around, for someone, perhaps, to seize it and try to get the edge on someone else. I think that is a subject that is open to a good deal of discussion, but if that position is taken, then your atomic energy authority, if it is adopted, becomes a purely negative institution. As I said before, if it is just a police outfit, it is pretty hard to keep up much enthusiasm for it and pretty hard to make it a nucleus for the development of international governmental control in the field of warfare.

One of the provisions of this plan was that private plants for the production of power could be licensed and would be furnished the material on a sale or lease basis, and that the material would be contaminated. Some doubt has come into that question of contamination since the report was written. What do I mean by contamination? I can't tell you about the contamination of plutonium. I am not competent to do it in the first place and I think I'd run into security restrictions in the second, but I can tell you about it with reference to the isotope uranium 235 which will maintain a chain reaction. One of the bombs that was dropped in Japan was uranium 235, the other was plutonium.

Uranium 335 in nature already comes poisoned, which means it is only seventenths of one per cent of natural uranium. Nearly all the remainder, all but a very minor fraction, is uranium 238, which will not sustain a chain reaction. So the isotope separation plants that were built down at Oak Ridge are for the purpose of getting, shall we call it, the poisonous 338 out of the uranium 235. Now you come to some degree of purification in which an explosive chain reaction could be maintained. I don't know whether you can realize this i£ you haven't studied the Smythe report. Every step beyond every other in the 4000 stages that are required in the gaseous diffusion process is just one infinitesimal step toward the result. If you had a product which was 10% uranium 235 and 90% uranium 238, which would be "poison," and if 20% wouldn't be (and I don't know what that percentage would be, so don't take this as giving you any information), it would be a terrific job to purify it to that degree. Those who proposed it had a great deal of hope that contaminated materials could be used for peacetime power or for production purposes, since it would not be explosive and could not be made so except by the most elaborate industrial processes.

I have already spoken to you about the proposed research in atomic weapons to be carried on by the atomic energy authority. I am always very doubtful about that. The United Nations isn't supposed to be carrying on atomic warfare, and why, then, should it be engaged in research with respect to such weapons? The sole reason, and it has a good deal of validity, is that if in the various nations people were surreptitiously carrying on research in this field, then the only way to keep an atomic authority on its toes with respect to the detection of such surreptitious efforts would be to keep it way ahead of the game.

And that leads me to the final point of the plan, the problem of control by inspection. That is the alternative which the Soviet Government—and that is the only dissident government, really, in this picture—has proposed. That is the exclusive method which it is prepared to support. It is the method which was proposed early in the discussion in this country, and particularly by the Carnegie Peace Foundation. It was therefore the first of the items and not the last which was investigated by our Board, and our conclusion was that it was utterly impractical to organize an inspection and accounting organization, a United Nations organization, which would be adequate to give any substantial degree of assurance that international treaties on this subject would not be violated. That does not mean that if you did have an atomic authority which had a monopoly, so to speak, in this field, it would not need such an organization, but it would not be so much dependent on it and it would not have so much to do.

I think it is worthwhile to discuss the nature of such an organization. It would have to have the right to go into any country, into any plant in any territory that it wanted to. No restrictions of any kind, with the exception of limited military plants or perhaps private homes, could be permitted. I mean by that that if you had an international authority, it would have to have the right without anybody's say-so, except maybe a little procedural courtesy, to go into the General Electric plant or to come into Dartmouth College or to go anywhere else it wanted to. What would be the use of its going in unless it had a very considerable competence? The kind of thing we are dealing with here takes scientists and very highgrade technologists. Policemen can't do it. You have got to have people who know how to handle Geiger counters, electroscopes, know chemical analysis, know their physics, and are up to date on those things. To be sure, you could have a few assistants of a supernumerary character, but the kind of talent required to detect and to deal with the various elements involved in this subject would have to be first-class talent. I doubt if there is enough of it in the world at the present time to do the job if that were the only means that we had to rely upon for international control.

LANGUAGES ALSO A PROBLEM

There is something else. There is the question of languages. A United Nations organization doesn't inspect what is going on in the United States using Americans as inspectors. They are supposed to be possibly biased in favor of a little fast work over here. What you would use here would be Chinese, Russians, Frenchmen, Swedes, and other people. However, they would not be of much use unless they knew the vernacular well enough to catch the stuff that was going on on the side; not a reading knowledge, but a real knowledge of how people speak and what they mean when they are speaking idiomatically around the campus or around the shop would be required of any group good enough to really pick up something wrong that was going on. In other words, they would have to be scientifically and technologically very highly equipped, and linguistically they would have to be of an exceptional order. That could be done. The Army and the Navy both trained people very rapidly in languages during the war with the new language- teaching techniques, but a very large number would have to be subjected to that process. How many people would want to do it? It means living away from home and it would not go very well. But there are other complications in inspection if it were made the major dependency. I can't conceive of anything more politically dangerous or more irritating than to have a group of people with the right to go anywhere they please and to inquire into anything that they want to, and that is what is involved if international control is to be secured by inspection.

So the hope would be that the set-up of the international authority with its monopoly on ores and production, plus inspection, would be sufficient to do the job. How much assurance is there of that? I have been just as anxious as anyone that the American people should not be misled on that subject or any aspect of it. There is no possibility whatever of giving anything like an absolute assurance as to what would happen in the future under this or under any other plan unless someone has a means of getting assurance that there will be no war. Then there is no assurance whatever that there could not be a violation of any agreement on this subject, as there has been throughout history on almost every conceivable subject, particularly those relating to the use of armed forces.

That leads me to the veto problem. I never have discussed the veto problem in public for the reason that it seemed to me good taste, if it wasn't anything more than that, not to subject the United States representative to any embarrassment whatever by the expression of a position different than he was taking during the progress of negotiations. Mr. Lilienthal and I personally begged Mr. Baruch not to introduce the veto problem in connection with his presentation of the plan. My expression of it was, "If you do it, all you are doing is creating a blind alley which will give the Russians their opportunity to dance up and down indefinitely." I think there is something to that.

VETO DISCUSSIONS CONFUSED

Time has gone on and there has been less discussion, or what discussion there was has not been very clear, because people did not know whether you were talking about a veto in the Security Council against the trial of charges against some nation charged with violating the treaty, or whether it extended to the management of the international atomic energy authority itself. The discussion was not very clear, as such discussions very frequently are not. A short time ago I appeared by request before the managing committee of a body then known as the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace, a creation of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ. I was asked to talk on atomic energy. Mr. John Foster Dulles, an intimate friend of mine, chairman of this commission, and very active in United Nations matters, also appeared. He discussed the developments in the year's history of the United Nations Assembly, and they were very hopeful developments. Then I talked more or less briefly, saying what I did to you in the beginning, that the relative importance of the atomic bomb was decreasing as time went on, and that other means of mass destruction were developing, and quit when I had said my little piece. And then someonethis was a small and closed meeting- said, "How about the veto problem?" And then I related substantially what I have just said to you, that it seemed to me a mistake to introduce the veto problem. I could not see that it had much to do with the question. Of course, it offends us to be told that anybody accused of committing a crime or a misdemeanor shall be able to veto an inquiry into the facts as to whether he has or not. But in this situation the question is irrelevant.

And that is exactly the fact. That is, if you have an international agreement, signed treaties on the part of a lot of these nations to turn this whole subject over to an international authority, and then you find someone violating this agreement, you are not going to wait for about nine months' inquiry by the Security Council. War has already been declared if you are satisfied that a violation has been made. Then the question of veto is irrelevant. All the nations are entitled to defend themselves under the United Nations Charter, under certain conditions, and if these are not sufficiently explicit, they could be made to be so in the Charter. But when a nation is found violating an agreement of this kind, war has already started. There is no use fooling with the thing any more, and the debate on veto questions is irrelevant. It hasn't got much to do with this subject.

ATTITUDE ALL-IMPORTANT

Now where do we stand? I am not going to try to sum up what I have said. I think it is more important to talk about the attitude of mind that I think we should have. If you take it seriously, you can't really get mixed up in this subject without it's becoming an obsession, I guess, for life. I can't get it out of my head at all. What ought to be the attitude? Is it hopeless? It's grim enough. There has been no progress made on are international agreement. International tensions have been developing apace. Progress is being made on these massdestruction armaments. Many nations are working on atomic energy. No doubt we ourselves are piling up plutonium and bombs. We are trying to perfect the machinery to defend ourselves. General Groves announced, according to the newspapers a little while ago, that by 1950 we would have our plans for reducing our vulnerability, and you may be sure that if they amount to anything and we stand for them, they will create an economic problem in this country which will make the present income tax difficulties look rather mild.

Well, the first thing to say is that you must not get hopeless about the inability to see the solution of a difficult situation. Let me give you an example. This is after the fact. The Social Science Research Council a year or two ago got a group of fellows to do a job on historiography and they decided to take civil war histories as a good field to work in. As I recall it, they found there were many civil war histories and there were some of them in the class known as single cause. There was one cause only for the war. The only difficulty is that histories differ as to which was the cause. Then there was another group called multi-cause histories; the thing didn't depend upon just one cause. It was a great complex of two, three, four, five or ten things; and there were a number of histories written of that kind. Unfortunately they did not agree as to what were the multi-causes that were involved. And others were non-causal histories that did not find any cause of the war. It was just one of those things. But my point is that you can look back to the Revolutionary War in this country. After it is all over, atid you have read all the history, you still do not see how this nation could have worked out its destiny, but it did. I think you can read, at least I can—perhaps I don't read enough—the histories of the period following the Civil War, and you wonder how this country could have hung together, but it did. It must have looked pretty hopeless to an awful lot of people.

We do not see the solution of the future. But we have to be prepared to make the sacrifices that facilitate a solution that we cannot see. Now the greatest obstacle in this country, and probably others, to making ready for the evolution of a solution of this terrible difficulty of international strife under modern conditions, is that we must be willing, not foolishly and not rashly, to give up some part of this myth called national sovereignty. My definition of national sovereignty is the right of a nation, of a people, to do what it wants to by persuasion, manipulation or the use of force, and I see no chance to maintain that kind of right in its pristine purity, if you get what I mean—the kind of thing that politicians like to orate about on the Fourth of July—and maintain any kind of a safe world for ourselves or for our children to live in.

I have carried you from where you were left by the physicists and the scientists up to the place where the battle is going on now in the United Nations. There the issue is confused with all sorts of difficulties and interests—l think, among others, an inferiority complex on the part of some of our neighbors and a high-hat complex on the part of America. We have it and we are not quite aware how sensitive other peoples are. I went to Russia in 1939 and I was ashamed of the way some Americans behaved. And the farther down you are in the scale, the more you resent being high-hatted internationally or personally, on the campus, or any place you can conceive of. What we can do is to develop, particularly among groups like yourselves who ought to go out into this world as intelligent leaders of our society, the correct attitudes for acting like humane, human beings and properly appraising what we give up when we try to get security.

CHESTER I. BARNARD, whose lecture on international control of atomic energy, printed here, concluded the third main section of Great Issues.

JANUARY VISITOR TO GREAT ISSUES COURSE: Lester B. Pearson, left, Canadian Under Secretary of State for External Affairs and Canada's delegate to the United Nations General Assembly, shown with President Dickey on January 12 when he lectured to the Dartmouth senior class on "The United Nations."

PRESIDENT, NEW JERSEY BELL TELEPHONE CO.

Mr. Barnard, a member of the Secretary of State's Committee on Atomic Energy, spoke in the Great Issues Course on December 8. His lecture, entitled International Control of AtomicEnergy, and the following day's discussion brought to a close the third main section of the course, which dealt with The Scientific Revolution and, the Radical Fact of Atomic Energy. Two previous lectures had covered the scientific history of atomic energy and its domestic use and control. As was true of the texts previously printed in the ALUMNI MAGAZINE'S Great Issues series, Mr. Barnard's lecture is presented here just as it was recorded, as a colloquial talk to the senior class and not as an article prepared for publication.