Word: atomization
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Hiroshima changed a lot of things-basically, irreversibly. But man's ways of thought or thoughtlessness were not easily changed. Hundreds of statements began: "The atomic bomb proves. . . ."; or "In the atomic age we must. . . ."; or "The atom has settled the issue between. . . ." The rest of the sentence usually turned out to be what the speaker had believed long before there was an atomic bomb...
...ignorance, frivolity and rivalry the world played with the awful atom. Last week the U.S. Congress became the focus of the world's hopes and fears. The U.S. had the bomb; had it the genius to lay down an initial policy which would grow into man's domination of atomic power...
There was no real defense against the atom bomb. There was no precedent for handling atomic energy. There was no sure and safe policy. Congress would just have to do its frightened best. The rest of the world would act accordingly...
Remember Galileo! Truman's stand coincided with a gathering revolt of U.S. scientists. An important array of them feared that a U.S. policy based on illusions of secrecy might destroy the kind of free research which had made atomic fission possible. Even the sort of control recommended by the President would inevitably touch fields of research far beyond the military uses of the atom. Atomic development could not be totally controlled, nationally or internationally, without also controlling a large part of normal, peacetime scientific effort...
There were only a few divided votes, and on most of these the great opponents, the U.S. and Russia, were in the same camp. Both favored a U.S. city (probably San Francisco) as the permanent seat of U.N.O. Subcommittees even discussed control of the atom bomb without fissioning into factions...