‘An entirely new situation’
Prime Minister Clement Attlee wrote a dramatic memorandum about the atomic bomb on 28 August expressing his thoughts about how this invention had created ‘an entirely new situation’, rendering the existing concepts of warfare obsolete.
He called for a new world order under the auspices of the United Nations and stated:
“We should declare that this invention has made it essential to end wars”
Attlee argued that measures to prevent the development of this new weapon across the world would be futile ‘unless the whole conception of war is banished from people’s minds and from the calculations of governments’.
Image: Memorandum on the atomic bomb by Clement Attlee (catalogue reference: CAB 130/3). View in the image library