\ Chapter V \ 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, -1,0-