Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer of the Los Alamos facility in New Mexico and Dr. H. J. Curtis of the Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee, both instrumental in development of the atomic bomb, testified before a Senate committee that the bomb could, in the future, kill forty million Americans overnight, about 30% of the population of the country at the time, "virtual destruction of the country", as Dr. Curtis added, in the event of a future nuclear war.

Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas had prompted the statement by Dr. Oppenheimer regarding the 40 million dead in one nuclear attack.

They urged the creation of an international body for the control of all aspects of atomic energy following the implementation of safeguards to assure its use only for peaceful purposes. Dr. Curtis stated that they both believed that the atomic secret should not be disclosed in scientific journals as it would be the equivalent of "giving a small boy a can of gasoline and a box of matches to play with."

In fateful coincidence, seventeen years from this date, the Kennedy Administration would be grappling for the second day with the most emergent circumstances, freighted with the potential for nuclear exchange, ever faced since the advent of atomic weaponry, and potentially the most deadly. Neither the country nor the Congress at that time, of course, had yet been apprised of the crisis, pending further confirmation of the presence of the missiles through additional U-2 surveillance photography, to take place in the ensuing four days through Saturday.

UMW head John L. Lewis had, in the national interest, called off the coal strike voluntarily after failing to reach any agreement in talks orchestrated between labor and management by Secretary of Labor Lewis Schwellenbach, those discussions having broken down on Monday. Fully a thousand mines had been on strike by the end of the walk-out, involving 200,000 workers, over half of the remaining workers still idle across the country, and half of the bituminous coal industry. Mr. Lewis told the union locals that the strike would be resumed at a more appropriate time, referring implicitly to the approach of winter, the need for massive domestic reconversion and aid to Europe. The strike, begun September 21, had been over union recognition of 26,000 to 50,000 clerical, technical, and supervisory workers.

The President would address Congress the following Tuesday regarding the peacetime draft. It was believed that he endorsed the plan of General Marshall to have such a draft and a large standing Army of 400,000 men.

Secretary of War Robert Patterson advocated joinder of the Army and Navy under a single Defense Department, as an essential step to future security of the nation.

The House Appropriations Committee recommended cutting 52.4 billion dollars from the budget for fiscal year 1945-46, 48.3 billion of which had already been appropriated and 4.2 billion in canceled war contracts. The committee called for more rapid demobilization of men in service and a faster reduction of discharge points.

Price Administrator Chester Bowles provided to the House Appropriations Committee a timetable for relaxing price controls. The thrust would be toward releasing controls too early rather than too late, he stated, without running the risk of a general increase in prices.

Rent controls would be selectively released based on area. Sugar, canned fruits, fats and oils, would remain controlled through the ensuing June. Milk and dairy products, fish, and canned vegetables would go off controls by April 1. Grains, legumes, field seeds, low quality meats, stew meat, and processed meats would be off controls by late spring.

Make note of it so that you may do your shopping accordingly.

Price controls on automobiles and other major metal-using items would continue indefinitely.

The National Association of Manufacturers and the United States Chamber of Commerce, in testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, called for a 20 percent reduction in individual income taxes for the following year. It would, they said, save taxpayers three billion dollars and result, by 1948, in a balanced budget. They believed that the House bill, which called for 5.35 billion dollars of tax reduction, was insufficient.

In Java, extremists of the National Youth Movement were engaged in street violence, killing and looting, thus far having shot or hacked to death 15 Eurasians at Depok, 20 miles from Batavia. Religious pictures were ripped from the walls of Christian dwellings and homes were destroyed. In a stroke of irony, British Ghurkas from India were fighting 800 of the rioters, 60 Indian riflemen at one point having been forced to hold back a mob until mid-afternoon when 300 reinforcements arrived—perhaps from the Crimea. The British reported, however, that the situation had been brought under control.

In Central Java, the British reported that extremists of the Nationalist Movement had imprisoned the relief workers and Red Cross workers trying to aid the Allied prisoners of war released by the Japanese. The Nationalists had served only rice to the prisoners for two days. Women prisoners were apparently being held hostage in some camps.

In Browning, Montana, on the Blackfeet Reservation, the National Council of American Indians planned to begin, at the point when it convened its second annual convention, a campaign to remove all racial discrimination. Delegates from 40 different tribes in 20 states were expected at the convention. The Council stated that Indians had earned the "privilege of equal rights by the noble way" they had conducted themselves in World War II.

Certainly the latter part of that statement was true, but the former, while understandable in context, was an improper conceptualization. No one born in the United States need earn equal rights. Nor is it a privilege of citizenship. It is inherent as a birthright. We do not ask our Government to bestow equal rights. We demand recognition of our inherent equal rights when any government employee or agency denies or chills same. We demand it. We do not ask plaintively or even courteously. We demand it, and we have every right in the world by birth to do so. Never forget that. Shout it in their deaf ears if you must.

General Jonathan Wainwright provides the ninth in his series of articles on the fall of Bataan and Corregidor in April and May, 1942, this time discussing the Japanese strike at Bataan, beginning shortly after January 10, 1942. They had attacked in stealth from opposite sides of Mount Silanganan, between the mountain and the opposing lines of General Wainwright on the western side and General Parker on the eastern side.

By January 15, General Parker's positions were weak and the 45th Infantry had to be dispatched by General Wainwright to support him. The 31st Division was also transferred to General Parker to prevent the two forces from being completely severed by the enemy.

On January 16, the Japanese attacked General Wainwright's positions. The First Philippine Division, with the aid of the 26th Cavalry, was able to drive the Japanese back across the Moron River and thereafter fight a retarding action.

General Parker's position was in such bad shape that General Wainwright's position was endangered, creating a three-sided front, causing him to have to spread his forces too thin. By January 21, the Japanese had infiltrated around the right of his forces to win the Moron-Bagac road. He directed his men to wage a counter-attack on the enemy forces holding the road but the Japanese held, necessitating the retreat of the Allies along the beaches, causing them to have to abandon their equipment.

General MacArthur ordered the lines to fall back to the Pilar-Bagac road to the south, in less mountainous territory, to be accomplished by January 26. The new position reached down to the southern tip of Bataan at Mariveles.

Their spirits were continually drained by want of food, malaria, the steaming jungle, and the fainter hope by the day that reinforcements would arrive anytime soon from the United States.

A woman from England was provided a one year temporary visa pending application for citizenship after she had stowed away on a merchant vessel with her Merchant Marine husband, an American, to get to America after he had been discharged. The woman was pregnant.

Another couple, who had been married in Kansas City, did not fare so well. The groom was arrested immediately after the ceremony for failing to make three monthly support payments to his 14-year old daughter from a prior marriage. He was allowed first to have his wedding pictures taken and then ordered into custody when the judge held him in contempt after the defendant explained to the court that his wedding had cost over $20. He would remain in the calaboose until he paid the money or posted a $1,000 bond.

A flight officer who had lost his shirt with $368 in the pocket out of a C-47 transport plane somewhere over South Georgia was lucky enough to have it returned by a farmer in Halcyondale who found the items intact. The officer instructed the police to give the man a $100 reward and send the balance to him.

A wise-girl had sent him a nickel which he received that morning with a note stating the hope that he would, from then on, keep his shirt on. There's one in every crowd.

He could have sent the nickel back and asked her to lend her own. But then you never know what you might get at that point, maybe a circus tent or a tarpaulin for a baseball diamond.

On the editorial page, "Hypocrisy" comments favorably on the determination of Secretary of State Byrnes to have American journalists on the ground in the Balkans as observers. He had selected Mark Ethridge of the Louisville Courier-Journal to make a survey of Europe for the State Department.

"Lost World" seeks to dispel the fear in the populace that returning veterans would re-create the gangsterism of the 1920's, as a popular myth had arisen, generated by cheap crime novels and former detectives who wrote them, that returning World War I veterans with itchy trigger fingers had been the most likely profile for the gunzels of that era.

There would be no crime wave unless the country became maladjusted as after World War I, with Prohibition and eventual high unemployment.

The piece indicates that the crime rate among soldiers in Europe had been lower than in most large cities and so the report by General Betts appeared sound. The war left the veteran with his pre-war attitude intact. Because he emerged from such a time warp, he might seem strange at first. But the truth was that he was searching for a world which had disappeared, and so was simply lost.

"Self-Interest" finds it unremarkable that labor would want to increase its hourly wage to keep pace with the overtime wages paid during the war. It was likewise no surprise that industry wanted to keep wages as low as possible to insure high profits.

"Kamikaze vs. Pawn" remarks on the fresh rhetoric being used in the New York mayoral race, with Controller John McGoldrick of the Republican-Liberal-Fusion Party, calling his opponent, Newbold Morris of the No Deal Party a "kamikaze candidate" in his mudslinging. For his part, Mr. Morris had responded by calling Mr. McGoldrick "an evil combination of Tammany and Republican bosses seeking to take control of the city through this pawn."

The excerpt from the Congressional Record has Senator George Radcliffe of Maryland suggesting that the Congress could find many ways to spend money, but that its responsibility was to determine a sound policy, not just any possible policy, as he was hearing from Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire.

Drew Pearson discusses the debate over the atomic bomb secret. A bill had been hastily prepared to preserve the secret with the United States and, while General Leslie Groves, the Army director of the Manhattan Project, approved it, its own sponsors had not read the bill thoroughly.

The scientists were recommending that atomic energy be controlled by an international commission, that to seek renunciation of use of the bomb was useless. Only the world authority would be able to manufacture the atomic bomb.

He next turns to the tendency of the President to make snap decisions. Friends were hopeful he would curtail the habit. He had made quick decisions on the Pacific island bases without consultation with all interested departments. He had made a quick decision on not sharing the atomic bomb.

The column notes that the most memorable problem occurring out of a snap decision of a President was that of Warren G. Harding, who stated at a press conference that Japan would not be able under the Pacific Security Pact to build bases in its own islands. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes had to recant the statement and sign a special protocol to assure Japan of the error. For the next twelve years, until FDR, press conference questions had to be submitted in writing in advance.

Finally, he comments that the House Un-American Activities Committee was becoming more like the Dies Committee all the time, that recently it had investigated the radio scripts of four liberal commentators, Cecil Brown, Johannes Steel, Sidney Walton, and William Gailmor.

When it was disclosed that a service station attendant in Connecticut, brother-in-law to V.M. Molotov, Soviet Foreign Commissar, might have a financial interest in the Bridgeport Herald, HUAC investigated and found that he had no ownership interest in the newspaper, all the while never having even seen a copy of the newspaper to determine its content.

He does not comment on whether soon they would also seek out the Commie Marlowe.

Marquis Childs suggests that the real test for General MacArthur in Japan had not yet occurred. The new Government under Premier Shidehara was some improvement over the previous governments, but still, said observers, it represented the militarist past. Shidehara, while never an advocate of military aggression, had favored the expansion into China and Manchuria as essential to creation of the Japanese Empire.

Occupation of Japan would have repercussions for years with regard to the U.S. position generally in the Pacific, as stressed by several experts on Asia. One of the best of these books, says Mr. Childs, was Solution in Asia by Owen Lattimore of Johns Hopkins. He warned that should the United States identify itself with the imperialistic past, its role in Asia would be brief and minor.

In the latter months of the war, the Japanese had put forth propaganda to the peoples of the Dutch East Indies and Malaya that the Japanese would return one day as allies, to enable freedom from the white imperialist. The propaganda was designed as delayed action, to take effect long after the Japanese barbarity during the war would be forgotten. U.S. policy needed to aim at neutralizing such propaganda.

Samuel Grafton discusses the failure of U.S.-Soviet relations at the London Foreign Ministers Conference and its impact on the future. It had already set in place the prospect of an arms race, the attempt of the United States to retain sole possession of the atomic bomb being its first manifestation.

A letter writer sends along excerpts of a letter from her son in the military, bitterly complaining of being retained in service after having seen combat, while nineteen year olds complained about the draft. He wanted the younger men to be drafted for occupation duty to allow the combat veterans to be discharged.

Another letter contests the figures used to justify an October 11 editorial titled "Consistency", carping at the inconsistent policy of removing price controls while retaining wage controls as a means to prosperity. He points out that the average wage of 64.4 cents in the textile industry would rise significantly were the minimum wage to go from its then current 40 cents to 65 cents, and that the manufacturers were complaining on that basis. The writer believes the editorial to have assumed the 64.4-cent average wage to have been a minimum wage of the industry.

The editors beg to differ, says that they had it right all along and that they stood by their previous stance.

Incidentally, would someone please point out the gas price trick of 2008? Mr. Romney simply misprepresents the facts, telling a shaded half-truth at best, when he suggests that gas prices were steadily at $1.80 per gallon when President Obama took office. Gas prices during the summer of 2008 were the highest in history, at over $4 per gallon. They nose-dived right before the election and continued to drop into January, then began to rise again. Wonder why. We remember it, made note of it at the time, with the prediction that the Republicans would seek to exploit it in 2012.

And the government-compiled statistics on the matter, as we have cited on October 11, do not lie. Take careful note of the 1990's compared to the first eight years of the last decade, and realize who is telling the truth. Gas is the first pop to the pocketbook and we suggest that someone quickly make the point and loudly. Stress that very substantive flaw, less silly things such as "binders full of women", an innocent comment by the Governor. The way people phrase things is not important, except to morons and children; it is substance which counts.

And on the gas price issue, there is no substance, only illusion, no doubt deliberately created by the Republican oil buddies. There may even be a colossal scandal there for some dedicated investigative journalist to unearth, assuming the breed still exists at all, that is, those not too preoccupied with looking for new car crashes and shoot 'em ups and murders du jour on which to predicate their practice of what they believe, without apparent chagrin at its inanity, to be the art of journalism.

By the way, here is a hint, networks: after a presidential or vice-presidential debate on serious topics, we really do not need to hear the "instant reaction" of the "blogosphere". For that blogosphere, one must understand and glean from the nature of many of its most "viral" aspects, is comprised of an average mental acuity of an average 8-year old, not meaning to insult sensitive 8-year olds. Concentrate on what the mature voting-age population who actually intend to vote think and you might actually stumble upon the pulse, the palpable pulse to anyone with eyes at all open, of the people, for a change.