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Chapter V
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INTERNATIONAL CONTROL OF ATOMIC WEAPONS
By
William T. R. Fox
From the Second World War all that victory was expected to bring was one
more chance to solve the problems so badly mishandled during the inter-war
period,
Victory itself was not supposed to,
ude the answers.
<
g.2
What victory
was not supposedto bring was a new problemdwarfi g in importance all those
left over from the war itself and the “neti,ensen preceded the war.
experience of 1919 seems to be repeating itself,
The
In 1919, it was an explosive
new idea, the Bolshevik idea, which seemed to be threatening the foundations of
Western political life.
atomic energy.
In 196, it is an explosive new material force, that of
The statesmen of the West are as mich appalied by the spectre of
the atomic bomb as were their predecessors of a generation ago by the spectre
of Bolshevisn,
Traditional ways of playing the diplomatic game seemed pitifully inadequate
in 1919 and they seem pitifully inadequate today,
To their peoples clamoring
for a period of calm after the stormy years of war, the statesmen can only repeat with G. K. Chesterton:
"No more of comfort shall ye get
Than that the sky grows darker yet,
And the sea rises higher ,83
"The hope of civilization," President Truman has declared, "lies in international arrangements looking, if possible, to the renunciation of the use of
the atomic bomb,"
8),
Many would go further and say that such a revolutionary
development in war technology demands a revolutionary change in the organization
$3.
Quoted by Eustace Percy in The Responsibilities of the League.
London,
Hodder and Stoughton, 1919, p. LLL, when writing of the alleged menace of
em after the First World War.
8h.
Message to Congress on atomic energy, October 3, 19h5,
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