Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1955. január-június (4. évfolyam, 1-26. szám)

1955-02-03 / 5. szám

February 3, 1955

9

AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZÓ

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4

FATEFUL DECISIONS

By Brig. Gen. Thomas R. Phillips, U.S.A. (Ret.)

Critical decisions which could eventually result in the annihilation of hundreds of millions of human beings are being made in secret councils with few citizens aware that their existence is at stake.

(Editor’s note: It is worth mentioning at this point that the above somber statement was made by Gen. Phillips before the latest Formosa crisis. Late developments underscore the significance of his analysis.)

The decisions leading to the precipice from which mankind cannot draw back are based on overly simple military thinking concerned only with 'the mathematics of comparative military power. •

It is the same kind of narrow military logic that would accept any sort of challenge in the Far East to make war now rather than later, with no regard for the more important issue that the chances of war lessen the longer it is • avoided.

Precursor of Atom Race

It is the same kind of military logic that advised dropping atomic bombs on Japan with the justification that this act would save American lives. This act. which has been criticized as a political blunder, was the precursor of the atomic arms race. It made atomic war probable

Part of the reason we nave been caught in this trap of our own devising is the American habit of looking for the easy way of winning a war. Dr. Konrad Z. Lorenz,' director of the Max Plane Institute of Behavior Psychology in Buldern, Germany, says that pushing the button to destroy á 'efty would be less emotionally upsetting than slapping a defenseless little girl.

V

Dollar Saved, Lives Lost

Another American’drive toward atomic weapons is economy. Tfh^Aleterrent strategy” of capacity for “massive 'retaliation,” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles declared in an address last Jan. 12, will make it possible to get, and share, more basic security at less cost.” The minority official group in Washington that still hopes to find a means to prevent atomic war wonders whether this may not be setting off a lesser cost in dollars today against millions of lives lost in a not distant tomorrow.

Atomic secrecy and the necessarily weighty influence of military advice in international affairs have permitted determinations of the fate of millions to be made without public discussion of what is going on.

One estimate from an official source held that ’ a deliverable hydrogen bomb could be made that would vaporize every particle of steel and concrete in a circle with a diameter of 10 miles, leaving a hole of varying depth with glowing molten earth at the 'bottom This would completely obliterate any city on earth.

Explosions of such magnitude create a. fire storm winch will bum everything in a radius of 12 to 15 miles. Winds at the center sucked up by the blast reach velocities- of more than 1,( 00 miles an hour.

Radioactive Fallout

Dr. Ralph E. Lapp estimated in the November issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the radioactive fallout from the ground burst of a 10-megaton hydrogen bomb would cover an area about 40 by 100 miles, or 4000 square miles. The lethal dosage would vary with the distance fromGround Zero, Lapp estimated that fpr the first day, every one in the area would receive a serious to lethal dosage.

"The explosion of 50 superbombs,” he wrote,

. “could blanket the entire northeastern United States in a serious to lethal radioactive fog.”

The United States is estimated to have about 10,000 atomic weapons. Within the next two or three years this fissionable material can be used to manufacture 100,000 hyrogen bombs. These would suffice, not thinking of radio-active

fall-out, to vaporize or burn and blacken, if evenly distributed, every square mile of the entire surface of the United States or of European Russia. ,

Such figures have to be interpreted. In an all- out atomic war, half the population of the United States and Europe could easily be killed before the insanity of mutual suicide ended.

A hopeful school has grown up which contends that the prospect is so appalling that nations will not go to war. To anyone familiar with the thinking in the Pentagon and the State Department, this thinking is pure whistling in the dark. The Pentagon warriors think in .terms of “absorbing” the enemy’s bombs and are not in the slightest deterred by fear of them. It is probable that the planners in the Soviet Union look on our deterrent threat the same way.

Small Group of Worriers

The small group of officials who are worrying about the decisions that are taking us past the atomic destruction point of no return believe that, Congress, the public and the Administration should be made to realize where thesé apparently minor lecisions on military planning and organization are leading.

They should urgently seek an agreement not to use atomic weapons, w7hile being prepared to use them if enemy action makes it necessary. In the meantime, they would go ahead with the negotiations for controls and inspections and all the paraphernalia of assurances that an agreement will not be broken.

Preventive war talk is silly

Bv LOUIS BROMFIELD

(Editor’s .note: How fast the Eisenhower administration knucled in to the “War Now7” clique of Knowland, Radford and the Chine Lobby is dramatically reflected in the column below. It was written by the novelist-columnist Louis Bromfield, noted for his conservative political views, a few weeks before the Formosa crisis.)

The President has knocked down the idiotic suggestion of a “preventive” war on more than one occasion and he has restrained the chiefs of staff who voted to involve us actively in the mess at Formosa. Each public utterance is aimed at inducing the American people and Congress to keep their heads and to employ common sense rather than hysteria.

The truth is that in Formosa we have a bear by the tail and that our principal problem is how to let go. In the long run there is no solution but to let it go. Let us supppse the Chinese were in possession of Catalina Island just off the coast af California or even of some of the islands off the Atlantic Coast. That is exactly the situation we are in through supporting Chiang Kai-shek and his aging army on Formosa. Eventually, for the sake of our own protection and for world peace, we shall return Formosa to the Chinese, whether under the present government or another one. The main problem is how7 to evacuate to, some safe refuge the remnants of the old Chinese armies under Chiang. It would be well if we faced the truth now7.

•

THE WHOLE FORMOSA situation results from our illfated and even calamitous policy of attempting to run the wrhole world and the equally calamitous policy of attempting to encircle Russia and China. We are indeed a great and rich and powerful nation but we cannot attempt to run everbody and everything without disaster. Ie seems this should be apparent to any child, yet there are men in the armed forces advancing intervention in remote areas impossible to conquer or hold.

There are, of course, many ways of looking at a situation, and sometimes it is wise to look te the other fellow’s point of view7. Let us take the question of the occasional shooting down of one of our planes7 engaged in “weather reconnaissance.” By now it must be clear that sometimes our planes are flying where they ought not to be.

OR TO PUT IT another w7ay, let us suppose that Russian or Chinese planes were flying constantly alohg the Canadian and Mexican borders or outside the three-mile limit along the Atlantic or Pacific coasts. What would we expect our own air forces to do abovd*circumstances ? A lot of these questions require some honest and clear thinking, not only on the part of every American citizen but especially on the part of the brass in our armed forces. And never let us forget that •the brass is trained for war and not for peace and that when given too free a hand, they can set off a war to end all wars and the human race along w7ith it.

The most alarming factor of the new Congress with its Democratic domination is that the Democratic Party may reveal itself as the war party; A . number - of their louder-mouthed spokesmen are constantly shouting for more conscription, more arms bigger armed forces, to a point w'here to some other nations in the w7orld wre are beginning to look ridiculous.

END THE SHAME OF SILENCE!

Excerpts from an article By HOWARD FAST

When the vote of the French parliament on rearming Germany wras counted and recorded certain deputies rose and branded those who had voted for the rearming as “traitors!” in loud cries w7hich will echo up and down the halls of history for many decades to come.

But the treason is a broader treason than simply to France; it is a treason directed at all mankind and at the best and fondest hopes of mankind; and the traitors are not only those craven and prideless French deputies who so readily did the bidding of their. . . masters—but those who betray with silence.

It is a very strange world we inhabit here in America, a world of many shining refrigerators and washing machines, and even a world of two televisions in many a home—a world of short memory and tragic ignorance and blunted conscience. Last week, on a national television and radio hookup, the Jew, Walter Winchell screamed with wild joy of the triumph of a rearmed Germany; and the millions of Jews who must have been listening to him—one third of those people had been massacred by this same Germany—listened with indifference or, rather, with, carefully repressed anger.

I speak as an American, as a Jew, as a writer —and I know hundreds and hundreds of Americans who are Jews and writers and others who are writers and not Jewish, but were once people of comscience; but the silence among them is all-pervading. Silently they accept what happening, even though they accept what is horror of it.

If Germany can be rearmed, then certainly a rearmed Germany will embark on war—and w7ho among us will survive that war? Ihe p.e- cise horror of the French action lay in its suicidal nature. Laws of common experience seemed to be defied and set asside; but our own action here in the United States is equally suieida., even though the connection may not be so immediately apparent.

The root of the matter is anti-Sovietism, anticommunism; and that was both its beginning and its nurturing. The silence we find today v as imposed and underlined by nine years of savage and unremitting persecution'of those w7ho broke silence to speak of matters of principle, honor or humanity. The conscience of the American people was blunted by a long and bitter attack upon that conscience, the enoblement of liars, renegades and stool-pigeons, the use of courts in u ; most shameful way to frame political prisoners*,— by the acceptance of dishonesty and the loo Jug of the public wealth in a manner never equal ed before. And the rationale for thjs current rr 1- ness was carefully prepared through nine long years of the most vicious anti-Soviet pro* :i van It. and by swift and savage punishment for those who exposed this propaganda. Whereupon toe