The Grey River Argus MONDAY, December 20, 1948. ATOMIC BOMB AS ECONOMIC BOON!

Grey River Argus, 20 December 1948, Page 4

The Grey River Argus MONDAY, December 20, 1948. ATOMIC BOMB AS ECONOMIC BOON!

SOME at least of our primary producers, in urging that we dare not lean too greatly towards industrialism, have reasonably pointed out that the count i v is better adapted for a semi-pastoral-than for a mainly urban or manufacturing economy. Their contention must find illustration in the varied reactions to Britain’s present economic, if not also hermilitary exigencies. Her Minister of Agriculture declares her absolute! v dependent for a laige part of her food upon North America, where a bad crop year would for Britain, as for other countries, prove, he says, a disaster. Her recovery plan, however, is based on industrialism, with dependence on oversea food sources, but the risk evidently has not yet opened the eyes of the people’ to the utterly unbalanced nature of their economy.. There are farm lands even to-day being turned over to forestry, and the self-sufficient farmer is given no encouragement. Massingham and other radical economic writers lament the blindness 01. the ruling elymcnts to the iniquities of all engulfing industrialism, not only on grounds of security, but grounds of ethics, health and individual, liberty.. It is well beyond a century since Cobbett called attention to the suicidal aspects of a process where, he said, sheep had been eating men, but he also had in mind the certainty that sheep in turn would give way to machinery. Meantime Britain is bargaining in various directions to cheapen her food imports, and hesitates as to going in solidly for a policy of producing much more of her own foodstuffs. All authorities now agree that no manufactures are destined to remain as inadequate in supply for the remainder of this century as must be the supply of food for a world population increasing by something like twenty-five millions per annum. The countries, strangely, where people have had the greatest food shortages will be the ones which will exhibit the most marked consistency in the birthrate. The best fed populations are not in fact the ones which increase at the greatest rate. Thus the British birthrate may actually rise if the food supply per capita remains less than it used to be.

In spite of such a possibility the post-war period has been notable for more advocacy of emigration from Britain than at any. previous juncture this century. Visiting statesmen have left Britain with the impression that emigration on purely economic and social grounds is urgent, saying that the urban conditions are bad and threaten to worsen. Now. there comes an Australian scientist urging Britain to get rid of twenty million people if she wishes to weather an atomic war, after, say, another decade, or else to be resigned to a policy of peace at any price, because otherwise she is unfitted to survive such a val either economically, industrially, geographically or strategically. This 'scientist, of course, is true to type in the respect that he is ready fbr no end of generalising on a very hypothetical, if not even imaginary' basis. His only alteinative to wholesale emigration is some indefinite defence scheme. to negative atomic attack. Her inadequate food stocks and her concentrated industries could be rectified with dispersal of Britain’s people on the land and of many factories in rural regions. The effect, quite apart from the military consequences, would be beneficial physically' and culturally. At anyrate the one inference this Australian scientist does emphasise is that capitalistic industrialism is being overtaken by Nemesis in the military sense in our clay no less than it had earlier been also in the social sense. The replies to him deal simply with the • \nilitary technicalities of atomic'development, whereas th'.

case for a. reaction against modern industrialism is for Britain far stronger socially and otherwise. It would hold good even in the event of atomic warfare being outlawed, and in view of such risks as those instanced in Britain’s case such warfare ought undoubtedly to be outlawed more absolutely than even poison gas warfare or bacterial warfare. No little of the argument on the atomic bomb is attributed to the possibility of its being available within a decade for Eastern use against the West, but the radical fact is that it already has been unashamedly given Western use against the East. It may be called in theory an insurance, but it actually’ is a provocation. It might, however, prove something better should it yet force a modification of the congestion which is one of the worst evils of industrialism.