ATOMIC AGE: Two-Thirds

• Share

At Princeton this week, the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists met under the chairmanship of Albert Einstein to consider what they had accomplished in the year since their organization was founded. They were unhappy.

Dr. Harold C. Urey of the University of Chicago said that atomic scientists generally approve the U.S. plan for international control of atomic development. Furthermore, they do not think that the Russian alternative is workable. Urey's view was that no progress had been made, and no progress would be made, in the negotiations under U.N. auspices for atomic control. He predicted that the U.S.S.R. would have a stockpile of atomic bombs in eight years "unless they were lucky" and got it sooner. When the Russians can make atomic bombs, Dr. Urey believes war will be inevitable.

He and his brethren at the meeting called for a "supranational government, with powers adequate to the responsibility of maintaining the peace." They asked: "Is this realistic?" and answered by saying: "We believe that nothing less is realistic." The scientists did not go any further in examining the political realism of their world government proposal than Einstein's statement at the meeting that two-thirds of the people on the earth might be killed in an atomic war. That estimate (which is not scientifically checkable) seemed to be argument enough.