The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Washington

ON THE WORLD TODAY

INFLATION is the number one domestic problem in America. Why the notion should have prevailed that somehow the end of the war would sidetrack this danger is beyond comprehension. It was held that, with the end of wartime work, the thing to be feared was deflation. There would be no more overtime, pay envelopes would shrink, work would be unavailable for millions. Controls of all kinds were dropped, the theory being that the absence of control would speed up production.

What was left out of account was the combination of the huge pile of wartime savings and a spending psychology pressing upon a limited volume of civilian goods. The arithmetic of this situation is inflation, and inflation is here, as any shopper can testify.

Some of the controls are now being recaptured. Priorities for beef are being reinstated for the armed forces. Allocations of building materials are being restored. In both cases the return of a free market was having a disastrous effect. The packers were diverting short supplies to civilian markets, which have been starved. Short building materials were going into the construction of race tracks, roadhouses, and other nonessentials designed to produce quick profits. There were no homes for returning veterans.

Congress, however, hesitates to take the necessary steps. The President wanted a year’s extension of his war powers, but Congress gave him only six months, and businessmen are still fighting price controls.

Price controls are vital in these inflationary times. On the OPA rests the responsibility for safeguarding the purchasing power of our dollars. Thus the campaign against Chester Bowles by business interests is shortsighted. OPA has made mistakes, but Chester Bowles has become Horatius at the Bridge, and deserves national support. He is chagrined over Congressional action on war powers. Rightly he fears that goods will be held off the market on the assumption that in six months all controls will expire and sellers will be able to charge all that the traffic will bear. He wants price control extension for a year to be voted right now.

Army-Navy rivalry

A single Department of National Defense will be one of the big issues in the forthcoming session of Congress. The President’s recommendation was clear and forceful. It made new converts in Congress, which had already seemed to be sympathetic with this idea. The facts had spoken for themselves.

Divided command in the war made for waste of time, money, and lives. As demonstrated in the Pacific, it produced the worst kind of rivalry, so that the simplest orders to commanders in another service had to be channeled through Washington. Mr. Truman, reviewing this situation from his vantage point as chairman of the Special Senate Committee Investigating the National Defense Program, concluded eighteen months ago, in a magazine article, that “a Divine Providence watches over the United States.”

During the war the need for unification appealed even to the admirals. A committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a year ago found the testimony overwhelmingly in favor of it. To the official inquirers Admiral Nimitz, referring to unification, declared, “ I think the sooner you can get this thing under consideration, the better it will be.” Admiral Halsey said he was " probably one of the lone Naval officers in favor of a single department.”

These and other admirals since then have sought to disown their conclusions. They say they had no chance of reflection when visitors arrived in the war zone, that what they said was offhand, conversational. But they are on the record, and Congress knows it.

WASHINGTON (continued)

Most of the feuding over the merger issue has been carried on by the civilian members of the two departments. The new Chief of Staff and the new Chief of Naval Operations — Eisenhower and Nimitz — have been dignified. They take every opportunity to demonstrate their friendship. At the Gridiron Club dinner, for example, where a skit was played about the “shotgun wedding” of Army and Navy, Eisenhower got out of his seat, walked over to Nimitz, and put his arm around him.

But the battle has left scars that will not heal for many a day. Word-slinging has been unbridled. The civilian Secretaries and their assistants have warred openly in the “Battle of the Press Conferences.” Brochures have been circulated throughout the country. Spokesmen from the two departments have expressed themselves before public audiences.

Feeling has run so high that the President several times has been importuned to put a stop to the departmental propaganda. He could have done so by reminding the various protagonists that a section of the Criminal Code forbids departmental use of public money in payment of propaganda for or against any bill before Congress without express authorization of Congress. The President doesn’t seem to be aware of this prohibition. For, after he had sent his unification message to Congress, he disclaimed any intention of “ muzzling ” the armed services.

Mr. Truman’s plan

Mr. Truman’s idea of unification is to merge authority at the top. There would be one Secretary and one Under Secretary. In this respect it differs from the Hill proposal, which reflects the Army point of view. Senator Lister Hill would provide for three Under Secretaries, for Army, Navy, and Air respectively. The danger here is that, while one Secretary would represent all branches of the armed forces in the Cabinet, he would be bedeviled by the three Under Secretaries as advocates of their respective branches.

Mr. Truman would avoid this pitfall. His recommendation would make the national defense the activating influence in the Under Secretary as well as the Secretary. His plan would avoid the danger that an Under Secretary for Air might be the medium for absorbing Naval aviation.

The fear of Naval aviation that it might be submerged is justified. Army Air would love to take over Navy Air. Such fusion will be impossible if a bill modeled on the President’s plan is passed. Mr. Truman would safeguard Naval aviation by including it in the Navy branch.

Congress studies the atom

No committee of Congress is working more earnestly on its problem than the Select Committee on Atomic Energy headed by Senator McMahon of Connecticut. The members of the committee decided that they could not handle the problem without education. Accordingly they are taking a course in nuclear physics at the hands of the new head of the Bureau of Standards, Dr. John H. Condon.

They have gone over all the work that has been done in the “ Manhattan district,” the code designation of the Army division in charge of atomic bomb manufacture. That they have profited from their tuition, both academic and practical, is evident from their conduct.

The Senate committee stands in contrast to the House committee which accepted the May-Johnson bill. None of the members of this committee had even read the Smyth Report, the statement on atomic energy which the Army published after the bombing of Hiroshima. The country will be well served by the Senate committee.

The genii of the bomb

What exercises this committee is the need for an interim measure to take control of atomic bomb manufacture out of the hands of the military. Bigger and better atomic bombs continue to be made. In charge of the work is Major General Leslie R. Groves, a man of limited vision whose vast responsibility seems to have gone to his head.

Groves imagines that he is the guardian of the genii of this new Aladdin’s lamp, and his is the type of mentality that supported the May-Johnson bill, which would have set up an authoritarian state over the nuclear scientists and their work. An interim bill would take away Groves’s authority and vest it in a civilian agency. The committee would then consider what American policy should be for development of atomic energy.

Some of the conclusions drawn by the committee should make the country pause. An increase in the effectiveness of atomic weapons is possible in a short time, to the point where any nation can destroy any other nation. The United States is particularly vulnerable, because it is the leading world power, because it stands in the path of an aggressor, and because it has a concentrated industry and population.

Senator McMahon is driving home these conclusions to all and sundry. He feels that, in order to get action, it is necessary to make people’s flesh creep. When he hears people say the “ secret ” must be withheld, he gives them a short account of the committee’s preliminary findings, as he did when Mayor Kelly of Chicago offered him a conversational admonition to “ hold on to the secret.” He finds the facts are persuasive with other people, as they were with the committee.

The problem remains: What can be done about the atom bomb? Many of the atomic scientists feel that provision for international control and for free exchange of information are essential to any international accord on atomic energy. The establishment by the United Nations Organization of a Commission for the Control of Atomic Energy, recommended by the Big Three at Moscow, would be the first step in this direction.

Another suggestion is that the exploitation of the materials for making the bomb should be international. There are international bodies of government representatives for all manner of purposes. Why not private international banks and businesses operating under charters granted by the United Nations? The suggestion is made, for instance, that if oil is the international problem in Iran, an international corporation should be set up to take over all Iranian concessions.

Russian suspicion in Iran is based on the fear of rival exploitation. It is known that Russia felt that something dangerous to her strategic frontier was afoot when the Iranians turned to the United States for oil advisers and when American prospectors began to show up in Iran.

THE MOOD OF THE CAPITAL

The mood of the Capital on the Moscow agreement and on Secretary Byrnes’s explanation of it is querulous. Two objections were immediately entered: first, that the stage-by-stage internationalization of the atom bomb might leave us without any safeguards after we had parted with all our atomic secrets; second, that General MacArthur’s position and prestige were endangered by the creation of the Allied Council for Japan.

As to the first objection, Secretary Byrnes came back with a great concession when he got Russian acquiescence to the appointment of the Atomic Commission by the General Assembly. Everything will now be made public unless the Security Council, where the veto-empowered Big Five sit, determines otherwise. There can be no action by the Council without American agreement. The veto power cuts both ways.

As for General MacArthur, there is no diminution in his military authority. He will continue as an administrator instead of a proconsul.

Secretary Byrnes, despite the defensive tone in his explanations, feels that at last Russo-American relations are on firm ground. He is of the opinion, moreover, that a better atmosphere has been created for the General Assembly of the United Nations.