USE OF NEW BOMB

Southland Times, Issue 25746, 9 August 1945, Page 5

USE OF NEW BOMB

BRITISH POLICY TO BE STATED URGENT PROBLEM FOR ALLIES (Rec. 8 p.m.) LONDON, August 8. Mr Attlee will make an interim statement on the British Government’s attitude towards the production and use of the atomic bomb as soon as Parliament reassembles after the State opening of the new session by the King on August 15, says the political correspondent of The Daily Mail. The British and American Governments, for the time being at any rate, will control the production and use of the atomic bomb. This great advance in science, with its revolutionary potentialities affecting human outlook and industry, has presented both Governments with one of the most urgent problems of the age. Members of the Labour Government apart from Mr Attlee had not the remotest idea that the atomic bomb had been made and was to be used against Japan. The Daily Mail in a leader says: “It is imperative that from the very hour of discovery not a moment should be lost in making plans for the control of the new power and make it a good servant, not an evil master of mankind. We must put out of our minds all wishful thinking that it may remain keeping a few passionless supermen pledged to use it to preserve the world’s peace.

“Control will also be necessary in peacetime. The application of atomic energy to our way of life and the vast industries on which millions of men and women now depend for their existence may in a few years be made obsolete. Provision must be ready for those who are uprooted by the change.” The Times in a leader says: “Schemes for world security founded on the maintenance of bases at strategic points of the globe will call for exhaustive reconsideration in view of the discovery of the new power. Beyond all doubt, unless atomic power is turned to serve the aims of peace _it can speedily make an end to civilized life on the earth.”

The president of the Royal Society, Sir Henry Dale, in a letter to The Times said: “The abandonment of any national claim to secrecy about scientific discoveries must be a prerequisite for any kind of international control which is obviously indispensable if we are to use atomic energy to its full value and avoid the final disaster its misuse might bring.” Sir John Anderson, broadcasting, said: “The control of atomic power calls for statesmanship of the highest order. The establishment of any organization for the maintenance of world peace and security would obviously be sheer mockery if means could not be found of guaranteeing the effective control of such a potent instrument of war. There is no higher task for United Nations statesmen around the conference table.”

The Vatican Newspaper, Osservatore Romano, in a leader says: “This instrument of unbelievable destruction will remain a temptation if not for our horrified contemporaries, then for posterity who learn so little from history and so readily forget the lessons of experience.” END OF WAR “The end of war, as it is known at the present time, will be the development of the atomic bomb,” says The Daily Express. “No battleship could stand a near miss from an atomic bomb or a hit from a torpedo fitted with an atomic fuse, and no plane could last with atomic shells bursting in the sky nearby.” A British scientist, who helped in the development of the atomic bomb, said that if the Germans had developed it first “none of us in Britain would be here now.” He added that it was impossible yet to measure the destructive effects of the bomb. “At a conservative estimate the bomb is one-tenth of the size of a 40001 b blockbuster,” he said. “One bomb dropped on a town would be the equivalent of a severe earthquake and would utterly remove the place.” The Daily Express says it was once believed that splitting the atom on a large scale as happens in the atomic bomb would make all the other atoms in the world split in sympathy, but experiments carried out at Cambridge disproved such a theory. The world’s supply of uranium is very small, but using an apparatus called a cyclotron scientists at Cambridge were able to give the properties of uranium to other substances which may eventually be used in atomic weapons. Not only bombs, but torpedoes, artillery and naval shells and infantry weapons may be filled with an atomic explosive. A British aircraft official stated that industrially harnessed atomic energy could drive the liner Queen Mary across the Atlantic on a teacup of fuel. The new discovery is by far the greatest in modern times, but its real effect will not be felt until it is applied to peaceful uses. When atomic energy comes into industrial use a small amount built into a car could operate it for a lifetime. It would be simple to provide central heat for a large house with atomic energy because it would require hardly any fuel. Such developments would not be possible for many years yet