\ . \ ~165It is not too soon to take the first step in the control pattern sketched in the preceding pages. The members of the United Nations should agree now to undertake instantaneous retaliation. The second step, the agreement for a drastic limitation on permitted atomic armaments and for a detailed and close inspection by an international agency of those armaments, may be taken when other nations have discovered independently how to produce the bomb, Is there any earlier date at which this step towards a fundamental solution of the control problem will become possible? Probably not, unless the United States is willing to make a gesture shich many people would regard as even more quixotic than "telling-all." This would be to give 40.the Soviet Union and to other AES ? <X% members of the Big Five a limited number of bombs and, perhaps also, the information necessary to make some more, The “eae number would not: have to be so great as to permit any other government to destroy the major cities of the United States, the It would have to be great enough so that the world would be sure United States would not be tempted to settle current international differ- ences by using or threatening to use the bomb. Needless to say, this is not a proposal which, in the present state of American opinion, the United States is prepared to make, Our conclusion must therefore be that a spectacular and permanent solution to the vexing and grave problem of international control of atomic weapons is not now within our grasp. What we can do now is to take the first in a series of steps which promise to prevent atomic warfare until that date when other nations have learned how to produce the weapon and a more fundamental consideration of the problem is in order.