Survival-the Real Issue of Our Times

• Published in: Bulletin of the atomic scientists 1952-08, Vol.8 (6), p.173-175
• Main Author: McMahon, Brien
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0096-3402; 1938-3282
• DOI: 10.1080/00963402.1952.11457314

The threat of atomic war, the necessity of rebuilding the world so as to make such a war impossible and to prepare the country to meet it if it comes, have received scarce, if any, attention by the platform builders and convention orators in Chicago. Senator McMahon seemed to be the only American statesman of note who thought (and kept saying) that this is the most important problem confronting Americans in the present generation. As chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, he was in a position to know what he was speaking about. The positive way in which he spoke of the hydrogen bomb as if it were an accomplished fact represents, to our knowledge, the first authoritative assertion of the success of the thermonuclear weapon project. As such, it is a statement of enormous implications. Senator McMahon was not satisfied with reminding Americans of the threat; he also offered a two-point program to overcome it. First, he suggested that America must build hundreds of hydrogen bombs to prolong the period in which aggression can be prevented by threat of American retaliation; second, use this time to seek agreement with the Soviet Union on general disarmament and diversion of armament funds to finance world-wide cooperative plans for increasing productivity and reducing hunger and poverty. Some will dislike the first part of his plan; some, the second; but atomic scientists, at least, are unlikely to quarrel with Senator McMahon's diagnosis of the main problem of our time, and will support his conviction that it can be met only by bold and imaginative action on a world-wide scale.