Greymouth Evening Star. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1950. The H. Bomb

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 February 1950, Page 4

Greymouth Evening Star. THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1950. The H. Bomb

IIHTH the shifting of the centre of totalitarian! tyranny, from the West to the East, with the disclosure of Soviet ambitions as boundless and dangerous as Hitler’s, the most terrible armaments race in the world’s history has developed. The announcements regarding the awful destructive power of the hydrogen bomb paints in yet starker colours the penalty of failure to reach agreement. Unless international morality catches up with scientific, development, the forces that man has brought under his control may well destroy civilisation as we know it.

The precise destjpietive capacity of the new. hydrogen bomb has not been clearly defined,.but it is known to be many times more powerful than the latest atom bombs, which in their turn are many times more powerful than the bomb which turned the busy city of Hiroshima into a tortured waste. That is. a thought which should give the 1 nations pause. It requires no great, scientific knowledge to visualise what a war waged with "weapons of this kind would mean to civilisation. It would mean the end of it. Some will argue that bbth sides in the last war had dreadful weapons in the form of germs and poison gas at their command but did not use them. But there is no guarantee in that that the ‘new and immeasurably more powerful weapons available now "would not be used by a future aggressor. The temptation lies in the power and decisiveness of the new bombs, besides which bacteriological and poi t son gas weapons pale into insignificance. Logically the new bomb should be suffieiently awful in its potentialities to shock a little commonsense into the powerhungry rulers of the Kremlin. But that logic of this kind is not the Russian leaders’ strong point has been abundantly demonstrated by the readiness with which they have entered into an atomic arms race and by their refusal to a’gree to international control of atomic energy. This being so, the lesson for the democratic nations should be plain enough. They must draw together into a unity, they must present a solid front sufficiently impressive to convince the Soviet chiefs that war, with or without hydrogen bombs, would be a game not worth the candle. Moves have already been made in that direction — moves, indeed, unthinkable by pre-war nationalistic standards —but there is still a drawing back from the first essential unity, a lack of readiness to make the sacrifice of sovereignty essential to real success in such brave ventures in co-operation as Western Union. What the democratic nations have to contend with is the insidious, weakening influence of Communist-Social-ist propaganda. That is a force as destructive to Western unity as extreme nationalism itself.