ATOMIC ENERGY DEVELOPMENT

Timaru Herald, Volume CLVIII, Issue 23375, 5 December 1945, Page 5

ATOMIC ENERGY DEVELOPMENT

No Nation Fit To Be Trusted Laski Condemns Secrecy By Telegraph—N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright (8.45 p.m.) NEW YQRJi, Dec. 4. “No nation is fit to be trusted with the development qf atomic energy,” said Professor Harold Laski, president of the British Labour party, in a speech. “There is also no private interest working for profit to which its future could be safely confided.

“I accept the need for a United Nations’ organisation qn the condition there be no secrecy and no invasion ol internationalism and public integrity, which are the glory of science aiid learning,” ftp continued. “Let the new institution fqr intellectual advancement be given a chance forthwith to show that Plato was right whgn he said that the Minister of Education must be more important than the Minister of War. ' We in Britain have no more right to bp content with slums than you in the United States have the right to evade the fact that you have acquiesed 80 years in degrading 12,0000.000 negroes by force, fraud and fear. ‘T am not proud of the British record in the evil years of appeasement. I have a deep sense of guilt when I see the tragic spectacle of Spain. Ido not think the ordinary citizen of Great Britain thought that the war was being fought for a return under any pretext of the Indonesian peoples to the sovereignty of Holland qr to organise conditions upon which an evil social system shall be imposed in the name of law and order upon the peoples of South-eastern Europe who. for the first time since the break-up of the Roman Empire, see a faint dawn of hqpe. “Let me add that I accept as the acid test of the bona tides of the Labour Government of Great Britain, that it shall not merely declare its desire to see a free self-governing India, but it shall organise conditions necessary to the fulfilment of its desire without dispiriting the desire by delaying or postponing the outcome so clearly inevitable.

Sovereignty Must Go "If we want freedom we must have peace. Sovereignty must go also. The interests which sovereignty protects must be recognised as outmoded in character and dangerous in operation: “It is clear to any .honest observer that a society dominated by businessmen could not be trusted to create a mental climate in which the development of atomic energy would be confined within the framework of peace. It is businessmen who split our society in two—political society arid economic society. They made a pplipeman sanction of the first and a threat of starvation a threat of the second. ’’There is only one country in the world to-day where this division has been transcended. There is only one country also where science and technology can be developed without sacrificing the education of man and fearing the breakdown of social well-being or community consciousness. It is significant that only in the new world of Russia has the businessman ceased to count. It is also significant that one of the major preoccupations of the great vested iriterests is now to keep the secret—which is no secret —from the knowledge of Russia. You know the result — a halt to confidence and the rise of ugly suspicion about the imminent chances of a third world war.”