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But with the evidence of Nazi evil before him, he confessed sadly that war was not the worst tragedy.
Some trace of civilized German behavior, Bohr had always argued, might be maintained if one conducted oneself as though other human beings were rational in their behavior. He had been proved wrong.
Bohr objected. “We cannot fight one barbarism with another barbarism.” “We won’t survive to fight for anything if we neglect this new weapon,” argued one of the chief researchers. “I cannot subscribe to violence,” said Bohr. “If you don’t resist violence, you’ll surrender to a violent ideology all the values of our civilization, built up by generations of struggle.” “But civilized behavior calls for non-violence.” “The freedom to behave in a civilized way must be defended, and sometimes that means using violence. . . .”
Churchill’s doubts and suspicions were based on hard experience. He felt that Nazism and other forms of tyranny were possible because men like Bohr clung blindly to their belief that reason is the strongest force in human beings. Because of this belief, Bohr had been vulnerable to German blandishments.
“The lesson of Munich was that free men should stand together. Churchill had not hesitated to share secrets with the United States from 1940 onwards because Americans shared the same traditions of freedom.
He had no reason to believe the Soviet Union would repay any such gesture. His experience of Russian leaders was that they behaved like other leaders of totalitarian states. They understood only one thing—power. This may have been a glum conclusion compared with Bohr’s idealism. But that was what Churchill had learned from his own position in history.”
“The easy way out is to pretend there are no crises. That’s the way to win elections. That’s the way we stumbled into war in the first place—there were too many men in power who preferred to see no threat to freedom because to admit to such a threat implies a willingness to accept sacrifice to combat it. There’s a considerable difference between being high-minded and soft-headed.”
“At the worst moment in Britain’s resistance in 1940,” he recalled, “John Buchan wrote: ‘The United States is actually and potentially the most powerful State on the globe. She has much, I believe, to give the world; indeed, to her hands is chiefly entrusted the shaping of the future. If democracy in the broadest and truest sense is to survive, it will be mainly because of her guardianship. For, with all her imperfections, she has a clearer view than any other people of the democratic fundamentals.’
“Abraham Lincoln captured its essence more than a century ago when he wrote: ‘What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, or bristling seacoasts, our army and navy. . . . Our defense is in the spirit which prized liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere.’
