Professor Einstein Urges Intelligent Planning

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26617, 13 November 1947, Page 7

Professor Einstein Urges Intelligent Planning

Professor Albert Einstein spoke of the “ ghastly tragic comedy being performed on the international stage.” He said ■ it would be different if the problem were not one of the things made by man himself, such as the atom bomb and other means of mass destruction, equally menacing to all peoples. It would be different if, for instance, an epidemic of bubonic plague were threatening the whole world. In such a case-the experts would be brought together, would work out an intelligent plan to combat the plague, and submit it to the various governments, which would speedily agree on the measures to be taken. They certainly would never think of trying to handle the matter so that their own nation would be spared whereas the next one would be decimated. Professor Einstein compared the world’s present atmosphere of fear to a plague threat and said the adapta-

tion to warlike aims and activities had corrupted man’s mentality. Intelligent, objective, and humane thinking had hardly any effect and was even suspected and persecuted as unpatriotic. The Herald Tribune says the prominent American statesman whose remarks of June 24, 1941, Mr Vyshinsky referred to, was President Truman, who was then a Senator. Mr Vyshinsky’s attack is the closest the Soviet officials have come to a direct personal attack on Mr Truman. The Associated , Press says Mr Truman’s full statement was: “If we see Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible, although I do not want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Neither of them (an apparent reference to Stalin and Hitler) thinks anything of a pledged word.”