The Evening Post THE UNTIED NATIONS

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 118, 15 November 1945, Page 6

The Evening Post

THE UNTIED NATIONS

What kind of a world is it necessary to have if civilisation is to endure? This is the question, Mr. Attlee told the United States Congress, that the President and he are discussing. The kind of world required for civilisation's salvation is a world enjoying security against such instruments of wholesale destruction as the atomic bomb. To approach that security, Mr. Bevin argues, it is necessary that the Great Powers should put the cards on the table, face upwards. That done, the next step would be to make those cards fit into a common and agreed pattern, which would not be impossible provided that all the cards were on the table; hut Russia, it is implied, has not put down her cards to the extent of signifying what is the limit of her demands. If (1) all the Powers disclosed their full demands; if (2) those demands were met, in a compromise way, with a tolerable degree of satisfaction all round; if (3) the Security Council could then be,constituted on a more united basis with less veto—then might be created that kind of world in which civilisation might feel secure, or sufficiently secure to warrant a sharing of atomic bomb secrets. Does the road to greater security lie through an immediate removal of atomic secrecy, or through Anglo-American-Russian candid talks reaching agreement, and thus prising open various secrets in a natural manner? In short, does the approach to trust lie through all-round candour? Or is the big secret to be revealed on •the gambling chance of buying trust?

Not long ago an American printer made a very significant mistake. He printed "the United Nations" as "the Untied Nations." What the printer did, and what the proof reader did not see, was at once turned to profit by other publications. One commentator suggested that as the thread tying together the members of the Security Council was half cut through wherever one of the vetoes cropped up, the name Untied Nations seemed to be a happy if unintentional discovery. But may there not be as much danger in a tight tie-up as in a loose one? Another commentator imagines a British delegate summing up the San Francisco Conference and the Security Council in the following terms: "We've no guarantee that the bombs will not come again. Everything depends upon agreement between the United States, the Russians, and us. The .other two are quite unpredictable, you know. We [British] would have gone farther towards collective security [in the Security Council], but even if Russia and America had seemed willing to go farther with us, there was always the danger that one or both would turn back. So we did not try to push them. . . . The Americans are in this thing as far as we—that, is the important point." It is probably still a fact that Britons who take a long view hesitate to "push" America into tightlytied bonds that might later become irksome to Americans. So there is no trace of pushfulness in Mr. Attlee's appeal to America to help to preserve civilisation. It is especiaUy fitting that this appeal, when made directly to the U.S. Congress by a British Prime Minister, should be sober and restrained, at the same time eloquent. And it was one of those occasions on which Mr. Attlee can capitalise his limitations. He struck the right key.

In the air, said Mr. Attlee, "the old defensive barriers" do not exist. There is no River Rhine (not even a Rubicon) for an air-Caesar to cross, or to be confined b,y. No uncrossable moat, such as the British Channel or the Atlantic Ocean used to be, and no range of mountains piercing the stratosphere, can provide'defence against the atomic bomb, the rocket, and suchlike. Civilisation is therefore thrown back, by a cynical physical world, on its own mental resources. But those resources are considerable. "In facing world problems," Mr. Attlee told Congress, "it is a mistake to think constantly of war and the prevention of war; we have to think, rather, of the best means of building up peace." Possibly Mr. Attlee has been reading, in "Hamlet": "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." This text at any rate suits his purpose better than another from Shakespeare: "I can live no longer by thinking." What an imperilled civilisation needs is thinking that will express itself in action and conduct. Technological thinking has created an abyss which only another kind of thinking can avoid. This is the thinking for which Britain appeals to the 'descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers.

WELLINGTON, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1945.