BRITISH THOUGHTS

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 21853, 25 October 1945, Page 5

BRITISH THOUGHTS

SOVIET REACTION AWESOME THEORIES EXPERT URGES CONTROL (By Telegraph—Press Assn.—Copyright.) (Special Correspondent.) (10 a.m.) LONDON, Oct. 24. Although it is apparently not being debated in Britain with the same intensity as in the United States, the atomic bomb and its possibilities nevertheless lies sombrely in the background of international and political thought here to-day. While Russia’s reaction to the bomb is daily ' becoming more apparent, Britain is being regaled with such ideas as, in the event o! war between Russia and America, she would be totally destroyed whichever side she fought on, possibilities such as the agents of hostile Powers leaving atomic time-bombs in suitcases in railway stations and of whole countries being laid waste.

Dorothy Thomson says that her information is that 10 bombs could kill every human being in New York within a radius of seven miles and Professor M. L. Oliphant, who worked in America on the development of the bomb, has declared it is certain that atom bombs equivalent to 2,000,000 tons of hign explosive can be made while it is probable that nuclear bombs releasing as much energy as 2,000,000 tons of high explosives can be developed in the near future. Saying there are no such things as secrets of the bomb, he remarks that the only effective control can be through the frank pooling of all information. He declares that British scientists, in the same way as American, are determined that no political jiggery-pokery shall prevent full and open discussion of the problem of international collaboration in the sphere of atomic energy and that it shall be used to the benefit of mankind as a whole and not as a pawn in Power politics.,-. Britain, he says, has no plant to produce the essential materials with which development can proceed, and it would take about’four years to get into production in Britain or other places in the commonwealth and at least a further three years to develop satisfactory sources of nuclear power. ".While the subject of the atom bomb has been discussed in the House of Lords, there have been only guarded references to it in the House of Commons.