ATOMIC ENERGY SECRETS

Press, Volume LXXXI, Issue 24741, 5 December 1945, Page 7

ATOMIC ENERGY SECRETS

VESTED INTERESTS ATTACKED

PROFESSOR LASKI’S SPEECH (N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

(Rec. 12.15 a.m.) NEW YORK, Dec, 4. "No nation is fit to be trusted with the development of atomic energy,” said Professor Harold Laski, chairman of the British Labour Party, in a speech. “There is also no private interest working for profit to which its future could be safely confided, •‘I accept the need for a United Nations Organisation on condition that there be no secrecy and no invasion, of internationalism and public integrity. which are the’ glory of science and learning. Let the new institution for intellectual advance be given a chance lorthwith to show Plato was right when he said that ‘a Minister of Education must be more important than a Minister of War.’

“We in Britain have no more right to be content with slums than you in \ the United States have the right to evade the fact that you have acquiesced for 80 years in degrading - 12,000,000 negroes by force, fraud, and fear. I am not proud of the. British record in the evil years of appeasement. I have a deep sense of guilt when I see the tragic spectacle of Spain. Indonesian People “I do not think the ordinary citizen of Great Britain thought the war was being fought for the return, under any pretext, of the Indonesian peoples to the sovereignty of Holland or to organise conditions upon which an evil social system shall be imposed in the name of law and order upon the peoples of south-eastern Europe, who, ’ for the first time since the breakup of the Roman Empire, see the faint dawn of hope. “Let me add that I accept as the acid test of the bona fides of the Labour Government of Great. Britain that it shall not merely declare its desire to see a free self-governing India, but it shall organise the conditions necessary to the fulfilment of its desire without dispiriting that desire by delaying and postponing the outcome which is so clearly inevitable. V'

Businessmen In Society “If we want freedom, we must have peace. Sovereignty must go and also the interests. which sovereignty' protects must be recognised as outmoded in character and dangerous in operation. It is clear to any honest observer that a society dominated by businessmen could not be trusted to create the mental climate in which the development of atomic energy would be confined within the framework of ; peace. It is the businessmen who have i split our society in two—political society and economic society. They have made a policeman sanction of the first' and a threat of starvation of the. second.

“There is only “one country in the ' world to-day where this-division has 1 been transcended.- There is only one country also where' science and-tech-, nology can be developed without sacri- ? ficing the education of man and fear-. ing a breakdown of social well-being or community consciousness. It is sig-, *' nlficant that only in the new world of ; Russia has the businessman ceased to coimt. ; ' ■

“It is also significant that one of* the major pre-occupations of the great vested interests is now to keep a secret —which is no secret—from the knowledge of Russia. Ypu. know the result halt to confidence and the rise of ugly suspicion about the imminent chances ,of a third world war." '

DRUGS FOR FIGHTING MALARIA

SOLDIERS ASSIST IN EXPERIMENTS

LONDON, December S. Soldiers who volunteered-to act as human guinea pigs are helping experl- ' ments wliich may yield better drugs for fighting malaria. A War Office spokesman said that a malarial chemo-therapeutic unit, which began in 1943 and reproduced ” the German drug stebrin, is conducting research at the Royal Army Medical College at Millbank. The soldier volunteers • are infected with malaria from mosquitoes in gauze covered jars which are placed against the soldiers’ legs so that the mosquitoes bite'through the, gauze. The soldiers are given different doses of a hew drug and small samples of the men’s blood are taken daily to test for the presence of malarial parasites and the strength of the drug in the blood. If malaria is present "doses of mepacrine (the name given, to the British counterpart of atebrin) qre given to minimise suffering. ■ - ■