The Big Binge

IS CAROLINA ON YOUR MIND? cried the headline in the Tory Daily Mail.

The nuclear bomb that fell in Florence, S.C. (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) had produced only a low-order explosion in the U.S., but it brought megaton repercussions in Britain. The Labor press broke into "we-told-you-so" editorials. Even the Conservative Daily Sketch had a suggestion about the H-bomb: "Keep it. But keep it on the ground."

The mishap in South Carolina fed fires already raging. By unhappy coincidence, Nikita Khrushchev chose this moment to write Bertrand Russell a 9,000-word letter attacking U.S. Secretary Dulles' stand on disarmament. This letter, published in the left-wing New Statesman, warned that "one absurd incident" involving a bomb-carrying plane could spread "horrible death," touch off a world war.

Shadow of Doomsday. Just such an incident was the theme of J. B. Priestley's antiwar melodrama called Doomsday for Dyson, which millions of Britons saw over TV. At Birmingham University a student "peace committee" put on a showing of the film, The Shadow of Hiroshima. The press reported daily the progress of a survey being made of university students by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Though the results were hardly conclusive —e.g., only 1,330 out of London University's 24,000 students even bothered to answer the questionnaire—the press gave the distinct impression that those who favored banning the bomb, missile bases and arming patrol planes with H-bombs definitely had the edge.

Viscount Hailsham, Tory leader in the House of Lords and sometime (1929) president of the Oxford Union, sternly denounced this sort of "government by undergraduate resolution," compared it to the pacifist days of 1933 when the Union overwhelmingly voted that "this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country." As for the suggestion that Britain should unilaterally forswear atomic weapons, he pointed out that only the U.S. and Russia are major atomic powers. "When you are running third in a race, you cannot, by giving up, give what is called a moral lead."

Cloak for Timidity. The London Times insisted that the South Carolina dud merely proved that the dangers of radiation from such an accident were "practically negligible." In Parliament, 100 Conservative M.P.s submitted a motion rejecting "any proposal to renounce unilaterally the use of nuclear arms while sheltering behind the protection of the American deterrent." Snapped Prime Minister Macmillan: "I can admire those who advocate a pacifist approach to these problems. But I do not respect timidity under the cloak of spiritual feelings."