COLD WAR: Let Us All Thank God

The world's greatest orator addressed himself this week to the world's most pressing problem. Somehow, it seemed appropriate that Sir Winston Churchill—born in the age of lance-bearing cavalrymen, a captain of two world wars, the statesman who first recognized the A-bomb as the free world's chief deterrent to Communist aggression—should recite the perils and promises of the thermonuclear age.

The hydrogen bomb tests, he told the House of Commons, "increase the chances of world peace more than the chances of war." In one of his most moving performances, the soon-to-retire, old (79) Prime Minister stepped forward to dam a flood of justified concern and political alarm which had hit Britain in the wake of the U.S. thermonuclear experiments.

"We might, I think, reflect for one moment how we should feel ... if it was the Soviet government instead of the U.S. government which was carrying out this series ..." said he. "Before we come to anything else, let us all thank God for sparing us that!"

So long as the U.S. stays ahead of the Communists in the search for more powerful weapons, Churchill continued, the hydrogen bomb will be a deterrent to war. The U.S. advantage also gives "time, though not too much time, to consider the problems which now confront us . . . and to talk them over in their new proportions."

Panic & Delay. Long lines—some said the longest in memory—formed outside Commons hours before Sir Winston strode in, to answer a Laborite motion labeling the thermonuclear bomb a "grave threat to civilization" and seeking a Big Three meeting. Sensational left-wing papers fed the public outcry with near-hysterical headlines. Trying to stave off the panic, Churchill at first nourished it last week by admitting: "We have not got [the facts]." But then he contradicted himself ("I am in almost hourly correspondence with the Government of the U.S."), and solicited from Washington a stream of confidential cables providing all the thermonuclear information that the U.S. could release under the terms of the McMahon (atomic security) Act. Then, in Commons, Churchill used it with devastating effect.

Pale-faced Clement Attlee was first on his feet. "Once there is a war in the modern age, in the last resort, any weapon will be used," he said. "There is no guarantee that in some country, at some time, there may not arise to power a fanatic who hated the human race or believed that all civilization might be destroyed." Equality of Annihilation. The old, familiar figure stumped up to the dispatch box. With a twinkle in his eye, Sir Winston threw in his well-assembled rebuttal. "I cannot feel that this is a day of tribulation," he said. "We are all naturally concerned with the prodigious experiments in the Pacific, but ... we would rather have them carried out there than in Siberia."