A Deadly Feeling

Last week 300 citizens of Darwen, a cotton-mill town in Lancashire, England, assembled to hear a talk on unemployment, a subject of vital concern to them.

They listened with mild interest. Finally the speaker mentioned the U.S. policy of atomic secrecy. The audience stirred to nervous attention. Then 62-year-old Annie Yates, a spinster charwoman, rose to say: "We want all those atom-bomb places opened for us all to know what's going on in them." The citizens of Darwen broke into applause.

The Dark Future. The British people were angry and worried about Harry Truman's Navy Day speech (TIME, Nov. 5). To them the President's statement that The Bomb is U.S. property meant that the U.S. is holding out on Britain as well as on the Soviet Union.

Londoners harrumphed that the U.S. was acting like a brat with a new toy. The acidulous London Tribune summed up British opinion: "Since President Truman's . . . speech, there has been a rapid and unchecked growth of the deadly feeling that we are aimlessly drifting into some dark future which can only bring new and unprecedented disaster."

The House of Commons was uneasy. Then the Prime Minister rose to announce that he would fly to Washington (around Nov. 10), to talk over The Bomb with Harry Truman. Troubled Palestine (see FOREIGN NEWS) and the British-loan negotiations would also be discussed, but The Bomb would be the Prime Minister's No. 1 business in Washington.

Clement Attlee, who did not greatly impress the President during their first meeting at Potsdam, will argue that: 1) all atomic information be pooled in the Security Council of the United Nations Organization; 2) atomic research and development be internationalized; 3) military use of The Bomb be mutually renounced.

Canada's Prime Minister King will sit in on the talks. But Attlee's chief adviser will be Sir John Anderson, chief of Britain's atomic-research committee. Most of the other aides will be scientists from the staff of an atomic-research plant which the British plan to build at the Didcot-Harwell airport near Oxford.

Clement Attlee said last week that the British plant will spend as much time on looking for peaceful uses of atomic energy as on The Bomb. He will try to sell Harry Truman on the same idea.

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