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By ROBT. F. HALL

Byrnes reveals aim |,

of Marshall Plan

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—WASHINGTON

HE publication of SPEAKING FRANKLY, the

memoirs of former US Secretary of State James F.
Byrnes, is an event of no little importance. One can

observe the book on the desks of most government officials,
and it is being serialized by the pro-administration Wash-
ington Post and the Montreal Standard. Not many Wash-

ingtonians have yet
but its main tenets have
been excerpted, reprinted here,
and sped around the world by
the news services. Byrnes is ar-
guing for the abolition of the
Council of Foreign Ministers, the
last remnant of Big Four Unity
and for forcing the Soviet Union
cut of Germany, with atom
bombs, if necessary.

He contends that the “tough”
attitude towards the Soviet
Union which he, as_ secretary
of state prosecuted so assiduous-
ly, is the lineal descendant of
President Roosevelt’s admonition
to be “patient but firm” in
American-Soviet relations. He ad-
mits that it was his interven-
tion which resulted in Truman
expelling Henry Wallace from
his cabinet.

The commercial press greeted
Byrnes’ book with considerable
acclaim. The New York Daily
News, which was always bitter-
ly hostile to FDR, used Byrnes’
material to support its own esti-
mate of the late president. Ar-
thur Krock, in the New. York
Times, wrote that it “makes a
number of sensational revela-
tions in decisively mild lan-
guage.” Max Lerner, one of the
editors of the newspaper PM
found fuel for his anti-Soviet

_ flames in the Byrnes charge that

Molotoy and Hitler almost made
a pact in October, 1940.

These newspapers have evident-

ly concluded that Speaking

is going to be very

useful to them in building sup-

port throughout the next year,

or longer, for every reactionary, ~

anti-Soviet or pro-war move they
will advocate. But they have
effect of

Byrnes’ revelations on the people
of Europe.

‘Palmiro Togliatti, Italian Com-
munist leader, interviewed by
the Rome correspondent of the
New York Times, indicated what
will probably be a fairly typical
“reaction abroad. Commenting on
the: reporter's remarks that the
Soviet Union ‘wants to extend
her domination over the whole
of Europee,” Togliatti exclaim-
ed: ;

“I have never read that a
leader of the Soviet Union pro-
posed to throw an atom bomb
on Wall Street, but this morning,
I read in all the newspapers
that a political leader of the
United States suggests that an
atom bomb should be dropped
on the Kremlin.”

YRNES’ book is only one of
many recent developments

which have: been piling proof.
upon proof that the US. offer
of aid under the Marshall Plan
is an effort toward world: dom-
ination. 3 :

A few days ago, Senator Brian
McMahon (Dem., Connecticut),
made a very significant remark
in an address before the Asso-
ciation of Catholic Charities’ in
New York.

‘If we .find it necessary for
our own safety,” the Senator

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 31, 1947

ploughed

through the book

said,
this country of essential mater-
ials, it is only sensible to see
to it that other countries whom
we hope to save be requested to
agree not to ship the same kind
of articles west of the Iron Cur-
tain.”

Such conditions will be ad-
vanced, it was learned, under
the pretext of defense measures,
to prevent the export of “strate-
gic” materials to eastern Eur-
economy.

*

“to bar shipments from -

JAMES F. BYRNES

There are already widespread
reports here that the U.S. State
Department is deeply disappoint-
ed at the failure of the -Paris
conference of the 16 to suggest
a top administrative organ in
which the U.S. would play a
dominant role. Such an organ
is necessary to allocate goods
U.S. is to have veto power over
all exports from the 16 partici-
pating nations, and thus a
stranglehold on their internal

ope. But ominous as this is,
it has a broader implication.
Under the Marshall Plan, «the

in acordance with certain priori-
ties, it is claimed, but even a
simpleton knows that the power

to allocate is the power to con-

trol. Any nation which does not
toe the line would simply, be
cut off, not only from shipments
from the U.S., but from trade
with the other participating na-
tions. :

Senator Styles Bridges (Rep.,
New Hampshire), spelled out the

American policy in some detail:

when he told French government
leaders that the U.S. was watch-
ing how they dealt with the
strike of the French maritime
and subway workers. Failure to
take drastic action would mean
no Marshall Plan funds, Bridges
said, and just about that blunt-
ly. .

In his last press conference, on
the afternoon after his resigna-

— SCIENCE FEATURE

Much ado

about ‘nothing’

a couple of years you may
walk into a grocery store and
buy a bag of dry orange juice.
Or a package of powdered but-
ter. Or granulated tomato catsup.

If this sounds crazy, it is no
more foolish than the idea of
a doctor phoning the drug com-
pany for a bottle of blood pow-
der. It’s done every day. At this
moment a large factory is going
up in Florida, supervised by sci-
entists and engineers who are
experts at making one of the
weirdest commodities ever pro-
duced. They turn ow “nothing.”

This nothing is big business
now. There is actually a large
new industry that makes ma-
chines. for making nothing. This
kind of nothing used to be
called ‘vacuum.” But now the
experts call it “low pressure.”

When you wake up in the
morning and flick on the light
by your bed you depend on a
special kind of ‘nothing” in the
lamp bulb. Low pressure gas.
You get the morning radio news
because radio stations are able
to use “high quality nothing” in
their transmitting tubes. You
can see the chilly autumn tem-
perature, on the thermometer,
only because some. very good
nothing is in the little glass tube
above the mercury. And your
thermos bottle keeps your lunch
coffee hot because there is
nothing inside the hollow glass

jacket.
The atom bomb also came into
being because scientists develop-

By DYSON CARTER

ed might new machines that
pump nothing, as if it were water
er gasoline or compressed air.
The same is true of the wonder-
drug penicillin. Without a great
deal of nothing, penicillin would

have remained a scientific curi-

osity.
/*:@

} latest ‘nothing machines”

‘are going to pump orange
juice into the kind of outfits
used to make pure penicillin and
dried: blood. These machines will
produce vacuum as fast as a
fire pump shoots water up to a
high building. The vacuum takes
all the moisture out of frozen

orange juice. It leaves nothing

but solid, powdery stuff that can
be mixed with water when you
are ready to drink it.
‘ Experimental machines are
also working on “dry” butter

and on other foods, like catsup,
with all their water removed by
vacuum. Tremendous saving in
freight and spoilage will come
from this research. In fact, we
seem to be just on the verge of
a new age of vacuum or low-
pressure engineering.

How did it start? Scientists
have used vacuum for many
years. The first machines were
crude pumps, like bicycle pumps,
that sucked air out instead of

pushing it in. For a’long time

it looked as if “high vacuum,”
which means nearly pure nothing,
would always be expensive to
make, too costly for use on a
large scale.

Then came Langmuir and
Gaede with a marvellous little
gadget called the diffusion pump.
It had no pistons.‘ It blasts a
tornado of heavy mercury gas

‘through a specially shaped glass

tube. The mercury molecules hurl
everything along with them, just
as a few dozen husky men can
push hundreds of people down
a crowded stairway.

So, when you connect a bottle
of penicillin, or a radio tube, to
this mercury tornado, the blasts
throw out the water and air
molecules. It puts “nothing” in
their place. When the pump has

finished, the penicillin is dried
out, and the radio tube is empty
of - air. TAs oe

- Later on engineers built ‘larger
and more powerful mercury
pumps. Now: you can put a 100-
pound block of ice in these .out-

fits and- watch it disappear. into
‘ T% 3 : hy

' Daily

* sion,

tion as undersecretary of state
was announced, Will Clayton re-
peated the often heard remark
that perhaps the Soviet Unton
and her “satellites” would bar
trade with the Marshall Plan na-
tions. But Clayton preferred to
be hopeful, he said, that the
old trade channels would cut
through despite political em-

bargoes.

The remark appears the sheer-
est hypocrisy to anyone who digs
into what has happened to Am-
erican-Soviet trade during re-
cent months. The New - York
News’ revealed recently
that -American exports of petro-
leum, electrical and metal work-
ing machinery to the USSR had
gone into a nosedive since July.

“The Atomic Energy Commis-
state and agriculture de-
partments are scratching more
and more goods off the list which
can be shipped to Russia,” it
said, y :

It developed that under the
export control law, the U.S. was
demanding the Soviet government
fill in blanks with complete and
detailed information on its na-
tural resources and industry be-

fore permitting shipments.

If the Soviet Union came
through with the information,
the U.S. would have succeeded
in a clever bit of espionage. If
the Soviet Union refused, as it
apparently has, it is denied raw
materials and machinery neces-
sary for the rehabilitation of its
“war damage. %

nothing. The new vacuum pumps
will tear molecules of ice right
out of the block. So fast that
some machines remove 24 tons
of ice from frozen orange juice ©
every shift.

‘W discoveries are coming
each month. A thermos bottle
has a pressure around one pound
per square inch. It “was a big
advance when engineers got the

._ gas in neon tubes down to hun-
dredths of a pound. Now we

have pumps that suck the pres-
sure down to billionths of 2
pound.

Biochemists are making new
vitamin preparations by turning
high-vacuum on certain fish oils.
‘The different oil molecules can
be separated, and the valuable
cnes “sorted out.” The same
idea is used for making superior
floor’ waxes and motor oils.
Magnesium metal is produced by
a vacuum method. But the big.
field|.seems to be in foods.

Many foods contain much wa- —

ter. Some foods can be dried by
heating the water out. Sugar
for example. But heat destroys

the flavor and food value of

many edible products. By freez-
ing such foods, and then pump-
ing out the water in super-
vacuum machines, the stuff is _
dried without loss of taste oF
vitamins. 3

- With the water goné, food is
much lighter. It keeps longer. —

Like flour or dry peas it doesn’t
need to be refrigerated to save
it from spoiling. A great deal
of space is saved. Clearly, such
processing will sharply cut the
cost of shipping, storing and
selling many foods, =

‘It looks as if these new pro-
‘cesses are being put aside. While
the food monopolists are. able
to make super-profits by charg-
ing us fantastic prices, the com i
sumer and farmer cannot hope
to benefit from. new, cheaper |
foods. Science today is bossed
by the same greedy few who aré’
heading us straight for another —

crash.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAGE 12

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