CORRESPONDENTS' VIEWS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 201, 25 August 1945, Page 4

CORRESPONDENTS' VIEWS

ATOMIC BOMBS

To the Editor

The Pope, the Dean of "West* minster, and I, seem to be in the minority in regard to atomic bombs. But methinks the protagonists of the bomb protest too much in order to disguise their own misgivings as to its destructive force. Their most unrealistic argument is that had our enemies thought of it first they would have had no compunction in using it. On that basis one might logically go on to justify our use in future wars of horror camps like Belsen and Dachau, and the starving torturing and burning alive of our prisoners. My protest against the bomb was not inspired by a "love your enemies" motive. I do not regard the Jap as a man and a brother. God forbid! I think him the lowest and most bestial, thing— with apologies to the beasts—that ever crawled out of the primeval slime, with most of the slime still adhering. I would thankfully see the earth purged of him. It is not necessary to have been at Nanking and Okinawa to visualise his ferocious crimes. lam not concerned with the relative comforts of his being disintegrated into a pinch of dust or liquidated into a lurid vapour, forming part of that balloon of thick smoke described by the scientists. My sole concern is that we are forging a terrible weapon whose point will sooner or later be turned upon ourselves and destroy the world and what is left of our much-depreciated civilisation. The bomb, it is claimed, has ended war. This conflict, perhaps, but not war. It has only opened the way to unimaginable horrors in the future. Can anyone delude themselves into believing that our clever and unscrupulous enemies will allow us to keep the deadly secret of the bomb? Its discovery and use will stimulate the master mirids of Germany; her brilliant scientists will make renewed efforts, will rise to greater heights—or depths—of destructive invention. Do these humanists and Christians, who condone the use of the bomb because of its ultimate benefit to mankind, ever stop to consider that if this diabolical thing is carried to its logical conclusion, then all mankind will, in a few short generations, have vanished from the earth, and ours will be a dead planet wandering through space, or completely "disintegrated"? ISABEE, M. CLUETT.