The Most Significant Event of Recent Times - 31 March 2000

Some years ago I was speaking before the National Press Club in Washington and although I can't now recall most of the questions that followed the talk there was one that was a blockbuster.

An old reporter, whom I'd known through many presidential campaigns, got up and without notice wondered what I thought was the most significant event of recent times?

A preposterous question but of the sort that all of us, at some time or another, wonders about. Well it threw me or, as the Victorians would have said, I was taken aback.

At that time we had most of the 1980s behind us, we'd had the terrible mess of the American hostages held by Iran and President Carter's failed attempt to rescue them in the desert. And then, soon, the arrival of Ronald Reagan, freeing the hostages and producing a revival of pride in the country that was never confidently attributed to anything more than Reagan's genial temperament and a remarkable gift for leadership.

There was a stretch of prosperity and then the black day of the stock market crash in 1987.

Over 100m people faced famine in Africa.

The United States and several European countries imposed economic sanctions on South Africa and told it to mend its ancient ways.

A workers' union overthrew the Communist dictatorship in Poland and in the Soviet Union a new man, Mr Gorbachev, started to reform the Communist system, not knowing then that he would thereby kill it by mistake.

Iraq and Iran had fought an eight-year war and lost millions that we scarcely heard about.

Now I shan't pretend that this series of events slid through my mind like a run of colour slides in the five seconds or so I was allowed to think. I'd just looked them up in a short survey of the 1980s.

But, at the time, I had an instinct - a hunch. I heard myself pronouncing a word - an event - that wasn't in that survey at all. I said: "Chernobyl."

And the more I thought about the word the more I was convinced that Chernobyl was as likely as anything that happened since the Second War to have impressed the world's leaders anyway. Now maybe this was an assertion masking a hope.

I'd better say, for the very young, who had the luck not to be aware of Chernobyl that it was the place in what was then called the Ukraine where a nuclear reactor exploded. True, it killed only 36 people, but the innumerable thousands who were wounded by it or doomed to a later death from radiation lived in a stretch of Europe from northern Finland to southern Italy.

At one extreme, the reindeer sickened and died. At the other, thousands and thousands of acres of fruit and vegetable farms were poisoned beyond saving.

I suppose my instinctive thought was that the range and deadliness of even a small nuclear explosion would give pause to every nation mounting a nuclear arsenal and even to that rogue tyrant with the bomb we've all come to think about and fear.

Well there's no way of knowing how deep and lasting was the effect of Chernobyl then or now but I have to say that the only people who ever bring it up are physicists and nuclear experts. Let's hope that their anxiety and prudence extend to the gurus of terrorism.

One thing I do know: 50 years ago the secretary general of the United Nations warned the Security Council that every nation which came to possess a nuclear weapon would not double but compound the chances of one of them being fired.

"If six nations get the bomb," he warned, "the chance of a nuclear exchange is inevitable."

And that same 50th year the House of Commons suspended a night session so that the prime minister - Mr Atlee - could fly overnight to Washington and beg President Truman not to use the atomic bomb in Korea.

Mr Truman had not the slightest intention of doing so. What caused the mischief of a positive rumour was the misreporting of an English correspondent, standing beside me as it happened, at Mr Truman's most recent press conference.

At that time - we're talking about 1950 - fear of the bomb and popular demonstrations against its manufacture were at an hysterical peak. Sincere young rebels lay on the street and the lawn outside the American Embassy in London.

The cry of "ban the bomb" was a mighty chorus from John O'Groats to Los Angeles.

At the same time Mr Winston Churchill - his halo fast disappearing in the view of the young - was saying that "America's bomb is our umbrella."

It seemed to some a dotty proclamation, a wishful superstition, but he was right. In 50 years the only nuclear explosions have been accidental.

At any rate there doesn't seem to be any better, any more sophisticated, explanation of why throughout 55 years and with more and more nations claiming the bomb, what Secretary Hammarskjold warned us was absolutely bound to happen in half the time has not happened.

The awkward and continuing problem for the big powers and most of all for the only superpower is to convince smaller nations who want nuclear missiles that our possession is all they need for their security. President Clinton ran head on to this puzzle the other day when he begged India and Pakistan to abandon their nuclear ambitions. Mr Clinton got nowhere except an invitation to go home in peace.

The Pakistanis' response, stripped of its diplomatic jargon, was to say: "You built the bomb to protect you against the Russians and what's sauce for you is sauce for us. Our bomb will protect us against India."

Now if that original grave question were put today - I'd been asked: "What is the most significant event of recent times?" - I believe, if it were put to me today, I should have to preface my answer with an apology.

That almost a month has gone by since a world-shaking event happened. It was exposed on every television set in the world. The immensity of it was there to ponder every day and night of the past month or so, and yet I never mentioned it.

It is simply the message the Pope gave to the world on his tour of the Middle East and of the land that is holy to at least three religions.

It was the undreamed-of apology for the Catholic Church's sins against unbelievers throughout the past 2,000 years, the crusades, the Inquisition, the burning of heretics who might have been loyal to their own faith, the witch hunts in Europe and America, a declaration that the most characteristic - the most rooted institutional practices of the church - against people who were either outside it or questioned it from within - that these formal practices of the church had, over 20 centuries, constituted a huge historic blunder.

I don't think any gesture of this magnitude has ever happened in the history of any religion or in the history of the ideologies of the Western World.

Since the Pope recited his apology on the first day of his tour all the stops along the way took on a sadness and a sincerity that was at times grievous for he was moving from one sacred place to another, from one faith to another faith and especially between two faiths which are kept in tumult and in murderous conflict through, mainly, hate.

One of our television networks did a truly moving and thoughtful job of matching each of the Pope's appearances with, say, 15-20 seconds showing the reactions of various sects to what he'd just said. And it managed, in the end - and unwittingly - to provide a heartbreaking view of the tour.

When, for instance, he came to tread, for the first time, on the soil most sacred to him and his faith we saw and heard compliments and applause from one set of rabbis and then we moved on to another set which, with grim faces, told him to go back to Rome - we want no part of him.

That little documentary ended with short interviews with various Jews who actually lived in Jerusalem and appeared to know absolutely nothing whatever about Christianity. All they knew is that its leader was a man named Christ and that he was the enemy.

And while the Pope prayed at the Wailing Wall, not a stone's throw away, there were Arabs and Jews threatening each other, punching each other, spitting at each other.

The only rousing hopeful thing was the succession of leaders of all the religions that the Pope saluted and embraced who blessed the Pope for being there.

Even the most arrogant alien priest bowed for a moment before the stamina, the grinding, pitiful determination of this tottering and fragile old man to have his say - to beg repentance, forgiveness on behalf of his church to the highest and the humblest.

Inevitably in our civilisation, in our democracies, the dissenters - the unbelievers - have to have their say.

The Pope had no sooner flown home than big speculative pieces appeared under Rome datelines about the parlous state of the Pope's health and the question of his retirement. It's being debated from the cloisters of the Vatican to the corridors of Wall Street.

The chairman of a big New York securities firm put it his way bluntly: "What corporation would put up with a chief executive officer like this for long?"

I'll leave you with the vulgarest sentence of the week - perhaps, it may come to be, of the century.

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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