ARMAMENTS: The Unmentionable

There was, in dreadful truth, such a thing as the atom bomb. But strategists went on planning armies and navies as if it did not exist. Diplomats bickered away without ever mentioning it. To plain people it was a horror shoved in the back of the mind on the vague assumption that somebody would work out a way to subdue it for man’s good.

At a U.S. Cabinet meeting, Henry Wallace and others cited scientific opinion that the secret could not be kept, argued that the bomb be made available to the United Nations Organization. Said Britain’s Sir Stafford Cripps: “The thing I fear is that as the months and years pass the story of Nagasaki and Hiroshima will fade into the background and that . . . this new power of destruction . . . will cease to have its compelling force upon our political actions.”