Madam, - In 1919 Charles Parsons, Ireland's greatest engineer and the man who revolutionised the production of electrical power, presided at the meeting in Brighton of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In his address on "Science and the War" he reflected that in the future England would be unable to maintain its industrial eminence if it were to rely on conventional sources of power, that is "failing new and unexpected discoveries in science, such as the harnessing of the latent molecular and atomic energy in matter."
As a footnote he wrote: "For example, it may some day be discovered how to liberate simultaneously the energy in radium, and radium contains 2½ million times the energy of the same weight of TNT". Just one generation later this possibility was realised at Los Alamos.
His thoughts did not end there. Prophetically he reflected on what would be the significance of such a weapon of mass destruction. "The possibility of the uncontrolled use on the part of a nation, of the power which Science has placed within its reach, is so great a menace to civilisation that the ardent wish of all reasonable people is to possess some radical means of prevention through the establishment of some form of wide and powerful control."
The United Nations still struggles to achieve this goal. Just how difficult it is for a single nation to get it right can be seen in the experience of the United States in having, correctly as it proved to be, suspected Germany - and more recently Iraq - of having weapons of mass destruction. - Yours, etc,
WG SCAIFE,
Claremont Road,
Sandymount,
Dublin 4.