‘ ~125- \ avoiding war, particularly atomic war, must be worked to the utmost. Clearly the more frightful war becomes for victor and vanquished alike the more effort must be devoted to the peaceful settlement of disputes and to remedying conditions that make for war, These trends in general thought were alircady --collective security and for economic and social co-operation which culminated in the San Francisco Charter, and in the reception which those plans found the world over. They have been strengthened in the interval of reflection which has followed the first shocked reaction to the reality of atomic weapons. onc instantaneous effect of the bomb that fell on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, was a revival of the federalist movement. Men who had previously thought of a world state as something too remote to be worth striving for, were converted overmight to the view that the race could not survive wnless states gave up their sovereignty and merged in one universal union, ‘There were even some whose attachnent to national individuality and international variety had made them hostile to the whole notion of world government, put who now, faced with the dread potentialities of the new weapon, proclaimed the sudden conviction that the peoples must unite or perish from the earth. A new cliché was added to our stereotyped vocabulary, namely, that the atom bomb had made an anachronism of the San Francisco Charter, That there was ample excuse for intellectual and spiritual disturbance cannot be denied. There is, it is true, very little evidence to support the advo- cates of immediate world federation in their apparent belief that the atom bomb has frightened away all the obstacles to the consummation of their desires. any event, terror is hardly the perfect basis for union. [In But one thing is clear, A powerful conviction is abroad in the world that, wnless means can be devised to prevent the competitive national production of atomic weapons, the existing plans for collective security will be worthless, It does not follow that the design so laboriously worked out at San 140