If the synthesis of matter and energy led to the atomic age, what may we expect of the latest, all-inclusive synthesis? When Einstein was asked about it he replied: “Come back in twenty years!” which happens to coincide with the end of the hundred-year period recorded by the brothers Goncourt: God swinging a bunch of keys, and saying to humanity: “Closing time, gentlemen!”

The search for new intellectual syntheses goes on, and no doubt new relationships between the diverse phenomena of nature will be found, regardless of whether Einstein’s latest theory stands or falls in the light of further discovery. Physicists, for example, are speculating about a fundamental relationship between time and the electronic charge, one of the most basic units of nature, and there are those who believe that this relationship will turn out to be much more fundamental than that between matter and energy. Should this be found to be true, then the discovery of the relationship between time and charge may lead to finding a way for starting a self-multiplying positron-electron chain reaction, just as the relationship between matter and energy led inevitably to the self-multiplying chain reaction with neutrons. If this comes about, then closing time will come much closer.

Yet the sound of the swinging keys need not necessarily mean closing time for man at the twilight of his day on this planet. It could also mean the opening of gates at a new dawn, to a new earth—and a new heaven.

APPENDIX

THE HYDROGEN BOMB AND INTERNATIONAL CONTROL

In the fall of 1949 Senator McMahon directed the staff of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy to study the hydrogen bomb in relation to international control of atomic energy. The material in the following pages, with the exception of the comments in Appendix D, was prepared by the staff at the chairman’s request to assist the joint committee in considering the problem.

It is my belief that this valuable material, until now unavailable in such excellent summary form, will also assist Americans in general in considering this vital problem. Readers of this volume should find it helpful in arriving at conclusions of their own, particularly in the light of the facts and discussion presented in Chapters III and IV. I further believe that a careful perusal of the following material will lend strong support to my view that the international control of atomic weapons, as envisaged in the majority plan of the United Nations,—the only plan that may give assurance against a surprise atomic attack—had become wholly impractical even before the entry of the H-bomb into the picture, and that the imminent development of the H-bomb has made it so unworkable that any further plan to revive it would be futile.

This material makes it clear (a) that Russia never had any intention of reaching any agreement on international control and had set out to sabotage any plan from the very beginning; and (b) that no plan, no matter how foolproof, could hope to succeed in the absence of complete mutual trust and confidence. Events in Korea, I am convinced, have driven the last nail into the coffin of the UN control plan.

A
SIGNIFICANT EVENTS IN THE HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL CONTROL OF ATOMIC WEAPONS

May 1945: Secretary of War Stimson appoints interim Committee to study problem of atomic energy.