Prescription from Princeton

Several immediate explanations are available for the limp, unenthusiastic manner in which the nation's press yesterday handled the recommendations of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists which met at Princeton with Professor Albert Einstein as chairman. Possibly it was felt that these suggestions could be roughly lumped under a "World Government" label and were, as such, old stuff. And that the mention of Professor Einstein's name, which once could inject palpitating interest into any news story, has lost its striking edge through his previous pronouncements on the subject. The press is also not always proff against the frame of mind which watches without alarm while former hardware tycoons shape our diplomatic fortunes, but which dismisses all social thinking by scientists as fuzzy and fruitless, by definition. But while these considerations partly account for the failure of the press to do handstands, undoubtedly the biggest enthusiasm-quencher was the Committee's urgent insistence that all nations transfer some of their sovereignty to a central body.

This raising of the necessity for a World Government is understandably distasteful to the many papers and periodicals which have been saying with a little shrug that war does, after all, seem the only way out. But to those who are not quite so perfervid about getting into it now, the Committee's ideas seem sound. Some of these ideas are old, familiar, yet supremely important--that there is no defense against atomic weapons; that if by a mutual, unspoken agreement we simply abandon the idea of world government, we must logically begin an immediate preventive war; that the possession of bomb piles by states moving in terms of classic nationalism must also mean war.

These scientists, unlike the more volatile elements in our press, feel that other states--even the advertised Eurasian mind of Russia--will come along if a world peace plan is seriously attempted, as a matter of simple self-maintenance. Their conference over, the scientists are heading back to laboratories that the war-now advocates feel they should never have stirred from. Yet their brief lucid interval of thinking on the problem of our time will quite conceivably prove more worthwhile to the cause of peace than the efforts of the small battalion the press maintains for this purpose on a year-round basis.