This transformation has been brought to pass in the seven years from Alamogordo to Eniwetok.  It is only seven years, but the new force of atomic energy has turned the world into a very different kind of place.

Science and technology have worked so fast that war’s new meaning may not yet be grasped by all the .peoples who would be its victims; nor, perhaps, by the rulers in the Kremlin.  But I have been President of the United States, these seven years, responsible for the decisions which have brought our science and our engineering to their present place.  I know what this development means now.  I know something of what it will come to mean in the future.

We in this Government realized, even before the first successful atomic explosion, that this new force spelled terrible danger for all mankind unless it were brought under international control.  We promptly advanced proposals in the United Nations to take this new source of energy out of the arena of national rivalries, to make it impossible to use it as a weapon of war.  These proposals, so pregnant with benefit for all humanity, were rebuffed by the rulers of the Soviet Union.

The language of science is universal, the movement of science is always forward into the unknown.  We could not assume that the Soviet Union would not develop the same weapon, regardless of all our precautions, nor that there were not other and even more terrible means of destruction lying in the unexplored field of atomic energy.

We had no alternative, then, but to press on, to probe the secrets of atomic power to the uttermost of our capacity, to maintain, if we could, our initial superiority in the atomic field.  At the same time, we sought persistently for some avenue, some formula, for reaching an agreement with the Soviet rulers that would place this new form of power under effective restraints—­that would guarantee no nation would use it in war.  I do not have to recount here the proposals we made, the steps taken in the United Nations, striving at least to open a way to ultimate agreement.  I hope and believe that we will continue to make these efforts so long as there is the slightest possibility of progress.  All civilized nations are agreed on the urgency of the problem, and have shown their willingness to agree on effective measures of control—­all save the Soviet Union and its satellites.  But they have rejected every reasonable proposal.

Meanwhile, the progress of scientific experiment has outrun our expectations.  Atomic science is in the full tide of development; the unfolding of the innermost secrets of matter is uninterrupted and irresistible.  Since Alamogordo we have developed atomic weapons with many times the explosive force of the early models, and we have produced them in substantial quantities.  And recently, in the thermonuclear tests at Eniwetok, we have entered another stage in the world-shaking development of atomic energy.  From now on, man moves into a new era of destructive power, capable of creating explosions of a new order of magnitude, dwarfing the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.