INSTITUTE OF CHINESE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 215 PARK ST. 2505A YALE STATION YALE UNIVERSITY NEW HAVEN, CONN

Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientist Gentlemen: About a year ago this October Jack Wheat and I were waiting in India to be shipped back to the States. The two of us were deeply impressed and not a little frightened by the concept of the harnessing of the basic forces of the universe for purpose of war. At the same time we both were painfully aware of how fast people forget things which they don't want to remember. We were both enlisted men and we had served with the section of OSS which dealt with Psychological warfare. When the war was officially over we were very quickly forgotten and to all intents and purposes no one was the least bit interested in the fact that we two were quietly sweating it out in India waiting to get back. As has been said, we both were engaged in propaganda work, Jack as an artist and I as a Chinese interpreter and liason man. We were both sharply aware of the fact that the greater mass of the people in the world will pay little head to anything that goes on outside their own door-yards unless it has direct bearing on their bellies, their personal safety, or the thwarting of any one of their deepest instincts/ From the way the other men were talking of atomic power we both realized that they know nothing of what it really meant. It is hard to get the average person to believe that there is a force which will make a two-ton block-buster look puny, because when you've seen one,