Today's News is Tomorrow's Collectors' Item - 09 May 2003

For the first time in six months the front page of the New York Times last Tuesday morning presented a strange, almost miraculous, appearance.

For the first time in six months the front page of the New York Times last Tuesday morning presented a strange, almost miraculous, appearance.

Never a double headline about Iraq. One small story in a single column.

If that hadn't been there, the Times front page would have been a collectors' item, to be auctioned off 20 years from now at a price exceeding the present fortune required to buy, say, an old cinema theatre poster of Casablanca or a personal letter from Winston Churchill.

Which reminds me. Somewhere in some unopened drawer I have a letter - a long, handwritten letter - from Leo Szilard, one of three obscure Hungarian refugees from Hitler in the late 1930s.

They were physicists in a specialty so exotic that neither the statesmen nor the public knew that it existed. It came to be known to us simpletons as atomic physics.

These three refugees - Szilard, Wigner and Edward Teller - were top men in their field and in America kept up with their specialty through letters from old colleagues - Jews mostly - who in turn had taken refuge in various safer parts of Europe.

In the late spring of 1939 they heard from a woman scientist in Sweden telling them something that would have meant absolutely nothing to the army, navy and airforce but that rocked Szilard, Wigner and Teller.

The Germans had suddenly started banning all exports of uranium ore from Czechoslovakia, which they occupied.

This, to them terrifying, news meant only one thing - the Nazis were going to start making an atomic bomb.

This led to Szilard and Wigner, on a drenching hot New York day in July 1939, getting out a map of Long Island and driving down to the end of it to give the bad news to the teacher and friend they called "the old man".

The first trip failed to find him but they tried again on 2 August and they found him in a summer cottage that he'd rented from a doctor.

And on that day the old man wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, which led to the United States getting ahead on the Doomsday Project - making and using the bomb that abruptly ended the Second World War.

The letter was datelined Nassau Point August 2, 1939. It was dictated and signed Albert Einstein in the cottage a few hundred yards up the road from us, on our lonely little peninsular called Nassau Point.

Leo Szilard's letter many, many years later, was a fascinating reply to one from me quizzing him about the circumstances of the drive down the island and the fateful session with Einstein.

It's somewhere in the tumbling ragbags I call my files. it must be precious now. I never thought that one day it might help to pay the rent.

Now the unique absence of an Iraqi headline on the front page of the New York Times offers me a decent excuse to take a rest from the immense, perhaps insoluble problem of recreating Iraq.

That I think is the best word - not rehabilitating, not returning it to normal - normal in Iraq is a chaos of factions and tribes and religions, each of whom in the frenzy of liberty are looking forward to shoving into power their own dictator - that's all they've ever known.

It's left to a few scholars, lawyers, businessmen and other intelligentsia theorists to think about this weird fetish of George W Bush called - how's that again? - democracy.

And even the late word that Saddam's son pulled off, the night before the invasion, the biggest bank robbery in history, the thought of what $1bn might do by way of buying weapons, terrorists, lord knows what - that is too huge a speculation to be gone into now, we have to wait and see.

So what else that's toothsome is on the menu?

A report, or rather one sentence, in a scientific report issued last month by the Royal Society was enlarged to a five-column piece, and rightly so, because that single, short sentence could affect the habits, the lives of millions of people and even foretell the doom, in time, of a whole industry. This is the fateful sentence:

"For the first time there has been established the existence of nervous system receptors in the head of a fish that respond to damaging stimuli."

A roundabout scientific way of saying that for the first time we know that fish feel pain, or think we know.

This statement defies the conventional wisdom of centuries, held certainly by the ancient Romans, and in our time laid down by HG Wells, that the wriggling and thrashing of a hooked fish is a muscular reflex not caused by the wince in the head that signals pain.

Now my first thought - being a man who loves fish and therefore is determined to find an argument which proves that fish do not feel pain - my first thought was about all the worms I've used for bait and when you've cut a long one in half why does the lower half go on wriggling if it has lost all connection with the brain?

After further thought I should tell you this doesn't get you very far.

As a matter of truth I have to confess that in my fishing years, which came before my late discovery that a day good for fishing is also a day good for golf, I believe I always behaved as if I knew the fish were in pain.

So I always unhooked the victim, took him - I made a gallant point of never catching females - I took him by the rear end and smartly slapped his head against any neighbouring piece of wood, knowing by then he was certainly dead, the only thing left to do was to clean him, fillet him, bake him and eat him.

Well of course the industry's that threatened is nothing less than the fishing industry through the conversion of millions of meat eaters to vegetarianism.

A world of vegetarians, what a bleak thought.

The most thorough-going vegetarian I ever knew is a great friend of ours, a young middle-aged woman of extraordinary beauty.

Early on in our friendship I noticed several things about her appearance and I remarked on them.

"Most people," she said, speaking to me as a reporter, "most people are incredibly unobservant."

And even close women friends have never remarked on the remarkable fact that not only does she eat no animal or fish but wears absolutely nothing that was made from animal tissue - no belt, sweater, shoes, gloves, nothing of wool, leather.

If she were condemned to wear sackcloth and ashes she would of course turn down the sack cloth - made from goat or camel's hair - and ask ashes of what or whom?

Yet she has such taste that you don't notice her plastic or other artificial material, you just observe that she's an elegant lady.

She once told me that if she were to break the rules, the one thing she would eat would be game, for the sensible reason that of all animals used for human consumption a partridge, a pheasant, has a free winging life till ping - it's all over.

I mentioned this once to a friend who is a fierce anti-shooting man but he loves veal.

How can anyone who knows how a calf, of all beasts, is brought up - cabin confined, stuffed with antibiotics, kept from acquiring muscle - how such a one can also refuse to eat a liberty-loving bird that's snuffed out in one second, I concluded that what he has against birds is the people who shoot them.

A veal eater, surely, has a very poor moral case against a partridge.

I have to admit though that on this whole topic - the consumption of beef, pork, calves, chickens and now fish - I can plead only the force of habit over morality.

Once in the early days of my reporting I went into the Chicago stockyards and saw for the first time what you might call the assembly line slaughter of beef cattle.

It was a grisly sight indeed. I was appalled. For a day or two I had vegetable soup and eggs. Why eggs never crossed my mind.

Then I went back to one of the American glories - roast prime ribs. As Mark Twain once said: "I was lofty in those days. I have survived."

Well, I must say that for about half the American people who live in the south neither fish, nor fowl, nor Iraq, nor Afghanistan, nor North Korea, nor Syria's intentions, nothing that happened at home or abroad could have touched their consciousness since last Monday or nothing that could better confirm the feeling we've had lately of living in Biblical times, living through the Book of Revelation, than the arrival in one minute of their lives of 90 tornadoes across eight states - about half the area of Europe.

First there is a darkness across the sky, a silence and then the sound of an approaching train when no train is in sight.

Then there comes at you this high, whizzing, black cone of wind, a spinning corkscrew at an outrageous speed.

It whirls in, and in about 30 seconds has reduced a small town to a thousand sticks a pile of ash.

It's not describable so I must believe that you've seen the appalling films.

From Georgia, tearing up to and through the border state of Missouri, where several towns have left only rows of stone and brick buildings, so damaged, so frail that they'll have to be pulled down.

"What then?", a bulky old Missourian was asked.

"Then," he said, folding his arms, "we'll build it up again. I'm not leaving this place. It's my home."

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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