ITHE TRUTH ABOUT THE HYDROGEN BOMB

THE HELL BOMB

I first heard about the hydrogen bomb in the spring of 1945 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where our scientists were putting the finishing touches on the model-T uranium, or plutonium, fission bomb. I learned to my astonishment that, in addition to this work, they were already considering preliminary designs for a hydrogen-fusion bomb, which in their lighter moments they called the “Superduper” or just the “Super.”

I can still remember my shock and incredulity when I first heard about it from one of the scientists assigned to me by Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer as guides in the Dantesque world that was Los Alamos, where the very atmosphere gave one the sense of being in the presence of the supernatural. It seemed so fantastic to talk of a superatomic bomb even before the uranium, or the plutonium, bomb had been completed and tested—in fact, even before anybody knew that it would work at all—that I was inclined at first to disbelieve it. Could anything be more powerful, I found myself thinking, than a weapon that, on paper at least, promised to release an explosive force of 20,000 tons of TNT? It was a screwball world, this worldof Los Alamos, I kept saying to myself, and this was just a screwball notion of my younger scientific mentors.

So at the first opportunity I put the question to Professor Hans A. Bethe, of Cornell University, one of the world’s top atomic scientists, who headed the elite circle of theoretical physicists at Los Alamos. Dr. Bethe, I knew, was the outstanding authority in the world qualified to talk about the subject, since he was the very man who first succeeded in explaining how the fusion of hydrogen in the sun is the source of energy that will make it possible for life to continue on earth for billions of years.

“Is it true about the superbomb?” I asked him. “Will it really be as much as fifty times as powerful as the uranium or plutonium bomb?”

I shall never forget the impact on me of his quiet answer as he looked away toward the Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) mountain range, their peaks turning blood-red in the New Mexico twilight. “Yes,” he said, “it could be made to equal a million tons of TNT.” Then, after a pause: “Even more than a million.”

The tops of the mountains seemed to catch fire as he spoke.

Long before it was discovered that vast amounts of energy could be liberated by the fission (splitting) of the nuclei of a twin of the heaviest element in nature—namely, uranium of atomic mass 235(235 times the mass of the hydrogen atom, lightest of all the elements)—scientists had known that truly staggering amounts of energy would be released if one could fuse together four atoms of hydrogen, the first element on the atomic table, into one atom of helium, element number two on that table, which weighs about four times as much as hydrogen. In December 1938—three weeks before the discovery of uranium fission was announced in Germany—Dr. Bethe had published his famous hypothesis about the fusion of four hydrogen atoms in the sun to form helium. This provided the first satisfactory explanation of the mechanism that enables the sun to radiate away in space every second a quantity of light and heat equivalent to the energy content of nearly fifteen quadrillion tons of coal. And while Dr. Bethe was the first to work out the fine details of the process, scientists had been speculating for more than twenty years on the likelihood of hydrogen fusion in the sun as source of the sun’s eternal radiance.

American audiences first heard about hydrogen as the solar fuel in a lecture, on March 10, 1922, at the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, by Professor Francis William Aston, famous British Nobel-Prize-winning chemist, who even at that early date warned mankind against what he called “tinkering with the angry atoms.” His words on that occasion have a strange prophetic ring, though most of what he said is now known to be wrong. “Shouldthe research worker of the future discover some means of releasing this energy [from hydrogen] in a form which could be employed,” he predicted, “the human race will have at its command powers beyond the dreams of scientific fiction, but the remote possibility must always be considered that the energy, once liberated, will be completely uncontrollable and by its violence detonate a neighboring substance. If this happens, all of the hydrogen on earth might be transformed [into helium] at once, and this most successful experiment might be published to the rest of the universe in the form of a new star of extraordinary brilliance, as the earth blew up in one vast explosion.”

By 1945 we had learned that many things were wrong in Professor Aston’s prophecy. It had been definitely established, for example, that it would be impossible to “transform all the hydrogen on earth at once,” no matter how many superduper hydrogen bombs were to be exploded. In fact, we had learned that, under conditions as they exist on earth, we could never use common hydrogen, the element that makes up one ninth by weight of all water, either in a superduper bomb or as an atomic fuel for power. On the other hand, ten years after Dr. Aston’s lecture a new type of hydrogen was discovered to exist in nature. It was found to constitute one five-thousandth part of the earth’s waters, including the water in the tissues of plants and animals. It was shown to have an atomicweight of two—double the weight of common hydrogen—and was named deuterium. The nucleus, or center, of the deuterium atom was named the deuteron, to distinguish it from the nucleus of common hydrogen, known as the proton. Deuterium also became popularly known as “heavy hydrogen.” Water containing two deuterium atoms in place of the two atoms of light hydrogen became known as “heavy water.”

The most startling fact learned about deuterium soon after its discovery in 1932 was that it offered potentialities as an atomic fuel, or an explosive, of tremendous energy, provided one condition could be met. This condition was a “match” to light it with. And here was the catch. The flame of this match, it was found, would have to have a temperature of the order of 50,000,000 degrees centigrade, two and a half times the temperature in the interior of the sun.

Oddly enough, the discovery of the principle that made the atomic bomb possible also brought with it the promise that a “deuterium fire” might, after all, be lighted on earth. Early studies had revealed that the explosion of an atomic bomb, if it lived up to expectations, would generate a central temperature of about 50,000,000 degrees centigrade. Here, at last, was the promise of realization of the impossible—the 50,000,000 degree match.

The men of Los Alamos thus knew that if the atomic bomb they were just completing for itsfirst test worked as they hoped it would, it could be used as the match to light the deuterium fire. They could build a superduper bomb of a thousand times the power of the atomic bomb by incorporating deuterium in the A-bomb, the explosion of which would act as the trigger for the superexplosion. And they also knew that the deuterium bomb held such additional potentialities of terror, beyond its vastly greater blasting and burning power, that the step from the duper to the super would be just as great as the step from TNT to the duper.

The hydrogen bomb, H-bomb, or hell bomb, as the fusion bomb had become popularly known, thus became a reality in the flash of the explosion of the first atomic bomb at 5:30 of the morning of July 16, 1945, on the New Mexico desert. As the men of Los Alamos, of whom I was at that time a privileged member, watched the supramundane light and the apocalyptic mushroom-topped mountain of nuclear fire rising to a height of more than eight miles through the clouds, they did not have to wait until they checked with their measuring instruments to know that a match sparking a flame of about 50,000,000 degrees centigrade had been lighted on earth for the first time. The size of the fire mountain and the end-of-the-world-like thunder that reverberated all around, told the tale better than any puny man-made instruments.

And there in our midst, as we learned only recently,stood a Judas, Klaus Fuchs, a name that “will live in infamy” along with that of other archtraitors of history. By the greatest of ironies, there he was, this spy, standing right in the center of what we believed at the time to be the world’s greatest secret, waiting at that very moment to tell the Russians of our success and how we achieved it. As he confessed five years later, he betrayed to them the most intimate details not only about the A-bomb but about the H-bomb as well—details that he learned as a member of the innermost of inner circles. For, alas, he was a trusted member of the theoretical division, the sanctum sanctorum of Los Alamos. This select group of scientists, behind doubly and triply locked doors, discussed in whispers their ideas about the superduper.

His associates at Los Alamos, who should know, sadly admit that Fuchs made it possible for Russia to develop her A-bomb at least a year ahead of time. It is my own conviction that the information he gave the Russians made it possible for their scientists to attain their goal at least three, and possibly as much as ten, years sooner than they could have done it on their own. Yet, though Fuchs confessed everything he told the Russians, the content of his confession is still kept a top secret from the American people, who sadly need information on one of the greatest problems facing mankind. The reason given is that we cannotactually be sure that Fuchs told the Russians all that he says he did, and, if published, his confession might, by his tricky design, give the Russians additional information. Of course, anything is possible for a warped mind such as that of Fuchs. Nevertheless, it seems highly implausible that this traitor, who went to the Russians voluntarily, should withhold any vital information from them for as long as five years. The best evidence that he didn’t is the Russian A-bomb.

Yet some good comes even of the greatest evil. All the circumstantial evidence points to the fact that during the five-year period following the end of the war our work on the hydrogen bomb had stopped completely. The A-bomb was the mightiest weapon in the world, we seem to have reasoned, and it would take Russia many years before she would get an A-bomb of her own. Why spend great efforts on a superbomb?

The shock when Russia exploded her first A-bomb much sooner than we expected, topped by the second shock that Fuchs had handed Moscow all our major secrets on a platter—including, as must be surmised, those of the H-bomb—awakened us to the facts of life. It is no accident that President Truman’s official announcement of the order to build “the so-called hydrogen bomb or superbomb” came within three days of the announcement of Fuchs’s arrest and confession. The President gave his order with full knowledge ofFuchs’s confession, which made it evident that the Russians were already at work on the hydrogen bomb and had probably been working on it uninterruptedly since 1945. The tragic prospect is that instead of the Russians catching up with us, it is we who may have to catch up with them.

Five years after the first announcement of the explosion of the A-bomb over Hiroshima, even the most intelligent Americans still have only the vaguest idea about the facts. Yet these facts are within the understanding of the average man. If we keep the earlier analogy of the match in mind, it becomes simple to understand the principles underlying both the A-bomb, now more correctly identified as the “fission bomb,” and the hydrogen bomb, more properly described as the “fusion bomb.”

Our principal fuel is coal, which, as everyone knows, is “bottled sunshine,” stored up in plants that grew about two hundred million years ago. When we apply the small amount of heat energy from a match, the bottled energy is released in the form of light and heat, which we can use in a great variety of ways. The point here is that it requires only the application of a very small amount of energy from a match to release a very large amount of energy that has been stored for millions of years in the ancient plants we know as coal.

Now, during the past half century we discovered that the nuclei, or centers, of the smallestunits of which the ninety-odd elements of the material universe are made up—units we know as atoms—had stored up within them since the beginning of creation amounts of energy millions of times greater than is stored up by the sun in coal. But we had no match with which to start an atomic fire burning.

Then, in January 1939, came the world-shaking discovery of the phenomenon known as uranium fission. In simple language, we had found a proper “match” for lighting a fire with a twin of uranium, the ninety-second, and last, natural element. This twin is a rare form of uranium known as uranium 235—the figure signifying that it is 235 times heavier than common hydrogen. Doubly phenomenal, the discovery of uranium fission meant that to light the atomic fire, with the release of stored-up energy three million times greater than that of coal and twenty million times that of TNT (on an equal-weight basis) would require no match at all. When proper conditions are met, the atomic fire would be lighted automatically by spontaneous combustion.

What are these proper conditions? In the presence of certain chemical agencies, spontaneous combustion will take place when an easily burning substance, such as sawdust, for example, accumulates heat until it reaches the kindling temperature at which it ignites. The chemical agencies here are the equivalent of a match.

The requirement to start the spontaneous combustion of uranium 235, and also of two man-made elements named plutonium and uranium 233 (all three known as fissionable materials or nuclear fuels), is just as simple. In this operation you do not need a critical temperature, but what is known as a critical mass. This simply means that spontaneous combustion of any one of the three atomic fuels takes place as soon as you assemble a lump of a certain weight. The actual critical mass is a top secret. But the noted British physicist, Dr. M. L. E. Oliphant, of radar fame, published in 1946 his own estimate, which places its weight between ten and thirty kilograms. If so, this would mean that a lump of uranium 235 (U-235), plutonium, or U-233, weighing ten or thirty kilograms, as the case may be, would explode automatically by spontaneous combustion and release an explosive force of 20,000 tons of TNT for each kilogram undergoing complete combustion. In the conventional A-bomb a critical mass is assembled in the last split second by a timing mechanism that brings together, let us say, one tenth and nine tenths of a critical mass. The spontaneous combustion that followed such a consummation on August 6 and 9, 1945 destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Thus, if we substitute the familiar phrase “spontaneous combustion” for the less familiar word “fission,” we get a clear understanding of what isknown in scientific jargon as the “fission process,” a “self-multiplying chain reaction with neutrons,” and similar technical mumbo-jumbo. These terms simply mean the lighting of an atomic fire and the release of great amounts of the energy stored in the nuclei of U-235 since the beginning of the universe. The two so-called man-made elements are not really created. They are merely transformed out of two natural heavy elements in such a way that their stored energy is liberated by the process of spontaneous combustion.

Why, one may ask, does not spontaneous combustion of U-235 take place in nature? Why, indeed, has not all the U-235 in nature caught fire automatically long ago? To this also there is a simple answer. Just as in the spontaneous combustion of sawdust the material must be dry enough to burn, so must the U-235. Only in place of the word “dry” we must use the word “concentrated.” The U-235 found in nature is very much diluted with another element that makes it “wet.” It therefore must be separated first, by a very laborious and costly process, from the nonfissionable, or “wetting,” element. Even then it won’t catch fire, and could not be made to burn by any means, until the amount separated (“dried”) reaches the critical mass. When these two conditions—conditions that do not exist in nature—are met, the U-235 catches fire just as sawdust does when it reaches the critical temperature.

The fact that as soon as a critical mass is assembled the three elemental atomic fuels burst into flame automatically thus puts a definite limit to the amount of material that can be used in the conventional A-bomb. The best you can do is to incorporate into a bomb two fragments, let us say, of nine tenths of a critical mass each. To enclose more than two such fragments would present difficulties that appear impossible to overcome. It is this limitation of size, an insurmountable roadblock put there by mother nature, that makes the basic difference between the A-bomb and the H-bomb.

For, as we have already seen, to light an atomic fire with deuterium it is necessary to strike a match generating a flame with a temperature of about 50,000,000 degrees centigrade. As long as no such match is applied, no fire can start. It thus becomes obvious that deuterium is not limited by nature to a critical mass. A quantity of deuterium a thousand times the amount of the U-235, and hence a thousand times more powerful, can therefore be incorporated in an ordinary A-bomb, where it would remain quiescent until the A-bomb match is struck. Weight for weight, deuterium has only a little more energy content than U-235, so that a bomb incorporating a 1,000 kilograms (one ton) of deuterium would thus have an energy of 20,000,000 tons of TNT.

Here must be mentioned another form of hydrogen, named tritium. It has long ago disappearedfrom nature but it is now being re-created in ponderable amounts in our atomic furnaces. Tritium, the nucleus of which is known as a triton, weighs three times as much as the lightest form of hydrogen. It has an energy content nearly twice that of deuterium. But it is very difficult to make and is extremely expensive. Its cost per kilogram at present AEC prices is close to a billion dollars, as compared with no more than $4,500 for a kilogram of deuterium. A combination of deuterons and tritons would release the greatest energy of all, 3.5 times the energy of deuterons alone. It would reduce the amount of tritons required to half the volume and three fifths of the weight required in a pure triton bomb, thus making the cost considerably lower.

But why bother with such fantastically costly tritons when we can get all the deuterium we want at no more than $4,500 a kilogram, while we can make up the difference in energy by merely incorporating two to three and a half times as much deuterium? Here we are dealing with what is probably the most ticklish question in the design of the H-bomb.

To light a fire successfully, it is not enough merely to have a match. The match must burn for a time long enough for its flame to act. If you try to light a cigarette in a strong wind, the wind may blow out your match so fast that your cigarette will not light. The same question presents itselfhere, but on a much greater scale. The match for lighting deuterium—namely, the A-bomb—burns only for about a hundred billionths of a second. Is this time long enough to light the “cigarette” with this one and only “match”?

It is known that the time is much too slow for lighting deuterium in its gaseous form. But it is also known that the inflammability is much faster when the gas is compressed to its liquid form, at which its density is 790 times greater. At this density it would take only seven liters (about 7.4 quarts) per one kilogram (2.2 pounds), as compared with 5,555 liters for gaseous deuterium. And it catches fire in a much shorter time.

Is this time long enough? On the answer to this question will depend whether the hydrogen bomb will consist of deuterium alone or of deuterium and tritium, for it is known that the deuteron-triton combination catches fire much faster than deuterons or tritons alone.

We were already working with tritium in Los Alamos as far back as 1945. I remember the time when Dr. Oppenheimer, wartime scientific director of Los Alamos, went to a large safe and brought out a small vial of a clear liquid that looked like water. It was the first highly diluted minute sample of superheavy water, composed of tritium and oxygen, ever to exist in the world, or anywhere in the universe, for that matter. We both looked at it in silent, rapt admiration. Though we did notspeak, each of us knew what the other was thinking. Here was something, our thoughts ran, that existed on earth in gaseous form some two billion years ago, long before there were any waters or any forms of life. Here was something with the power to return the earth to its lifeless state of two billion years ago.

The question of what type of hydrogen is to be used in the H-bomb therefore hangs on the question of which one of the possible combinations will catch fire by the light of a match that is blown out after an interval of about a hundred billionths of a second. On the answer to this question will also depend the time it will take us to complete the H-bomb and its cost. To make a bomb of a thousand times the power of the A-bomb would require a 1,000 kilograms of deuterium at a cost of $4,500,000, or 171 kilograms of tritium and 114 kilograms of deuterium at a total cost of more than $166,000,000,000 at current prices, not counting the cost of the A-bomb trigger. Large-scale production of tritium, however, will most certainly reduce its cost enormously, possibly by a factor of ten thousand or more, while, as will be indicated later, the amount of tritium, if required, may turn out to be much smaller.

MAP BY DANIEL BROWNSTEIN

We can thus see that if deuterium alone is found to be all that is required to set off an H-bomb it will be cheap and relatively easy to make in a short time—both for us and for Russia. Furthermore, such a deuterium bomb would be practically limitless in size. One of a million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb is possible, since deuterium can be extracted in limitless amounts from plain water. On the other hand, if sizable amounts of tritium are found necessary, the cost will be much higher and it will take a considerably longer time, since the production of tritium is very slow and costly. This, in turn, will place a definite limit on the power of the H-bomb, since, unlike deuterium, the amounts of tritium will necessarily always be limited. As will be shown later, we are at present in a much more advantageous position to produce tritium than is Russia, so that if tritium is found necessary, we have a head start on her in H-bomb development.

The radius of destructiveness by the blast of a bomb with a thousand times the energy of the A-bomb will be only ten times greater, since the increase goes by the cube root of the energy. The radius of total destruction by blast in Hiroshima was one mile. Therefore the radius of a superbomb a thousand times more powerful will be ten miles, or a total area of 314 square miles. A bomb a million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb would require 1,000 tons of deuterium. Such a super-superduper could be exploded at a distance from an abandoned, innocent-looking tramp ship. It would have a radius of destruction by blast of 100 miles and a destructive area of more than 30,000square miles. The time may come when we shall have to search every vessel several hundred miles off shore. And the time may be nearer than we think.

The radius over which the tremendous heat generated by a bomb of a thousandfold the energy would produce fatal burns would be as far as twenty miles from the center of the explosion. This radius increases as the square root, instead of the cube root, of the power. The Hiroshima bomb caused fatal burns at a radius of two thirds of a mile.

The effects of the radiations from a hydrogen bomb are so terrifying that by describing them I run the risk of being branded a fearmonger. Yet facts are facts, and they have been known to scientists for a long time. It would be a disservice to the people if the facts were further denied to them. We have already paid too high a price for a secrecy that now turns out never to have been secret at all.

I can do no better than quote Albert Einstein. “The hydrogen bomb,” he said, “appears on the public horizon as a probably attainable goal.... If successful, radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere, and hence annihilation of any life on earth, has been brought within the range of technical possibilities.”

What Dr. Einstein meant by “radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere, and hence the annihilationof any life on earth,” was explained in realistic detail by such eminent physicists as Dr. Bethe, Dr. Leo Szilard, Dr. Edward Teller, and others. All of them may even now be engaged on work on the hydrogen bomb.

Here is how “poisoning of the atmosphere” may result from the explosion of a hydrogen bomb: Tremendous quantities of neutrons, which can enter any substance in nature and make it radioactive, are liberated. In the case of a deuterium bomb, one eighth of the mass used—125 grams per kilogram—is liberated. In the case of a deuteron-tritium bomb, fully one fifth of the mass—200 grams per kilogram—is released, while in a bomb using pure tritium, fully one third of the mass—333 grams per kilogram—is liberated as free neutrons. There are 600,000 billion billion neutrons in each gram, each capable of producing a radioactive atom in its environment. The neutron is one of the two building blocks of the nuclei of all atoms.

These neutrons can be used to make any element radioactive, Professor Szilard and his colleagues point out. It follows that the casing of the bomb could be selected with a view to producing, after the neutrons enter it, an especially powerful radioactive substance. Since each artificially made, radioactive element gives out a specific type of radiation and has a definite life span, after which it decays to one half of its radioactivity, the designerof the bomb could rig it in such a way that its explosion would spread into the air a tremendous cloud of specially selected radioactive substances that would give off lethal radiations for a definite period of time. In such a way a large area could be made unfit for human or animal habitation for a definite period of time, months or years.

Take, for example, the very common element cobalt. When bombarded with neutrons, it turns into an intensely radioactive element, 320 times more powerful than radium. Any given quantity of neutrons would produce sixty times its weight in radioactive cobalt. If the bomb contains a ton of deuterium, 250 pounds would come out as neutrons. On the assumption that every neutron enters a cobalt atom, this would produce 7.5 tons of radioactive cobalt. That quantity would give out as much radioactivity as 2,400 tons of radium.

Now, this radioactive cobalt has a half-life of five years, meaning that it loses half of its radioactive power at every five-year period. So after a lapse of that period of time its radioactivity would be equal to 1,200 tons of radium, in ten years to 600 tons, and so on. If used as a bomb-casing it would be pulverized and converted into a gigantic radioactive cloud that would kill everything in the area it blankets. Nor would it be confined to a particular area, since the winds would take it thousands of miles, carrying death to distant places.

The radioactivity produced by the Bikini bombs was detected within one week in the United States. In that short time the westerly winds swept the radioactive air mass from Bikini, 4,150 miles away, to San Francisco. When it reached our shores, the activity was weak and completely harmless, but it was still detectable. That, by the way, was how we learned that the Russians had exploded their first atomic bomb.

But, in the words of Professor Teller, one of the Los Alamos men who made the preliminary studies on the hydrogen bomb, “if the activity liberated at Bikini were multiplied by a factor of a hundred thousand or a million, and if it were to be released off our Pacific Coast, the whole of the United States would be endangered.” He added that “if such a quantity of radioactivity should become available, an enemy could make life hard or even impossible for us without delivering a single bomb into our territory.”

One limitation to such an attack, Professor Teller points out, is the boomerang effect of these gases on the attacker himself. The radioactive gases would eventually drift over his own country, too. He adds, however, that since these gases have different rates of decay—some faster, some slower—the attacker is in a position to choose those radioactive products best suited to his attack. “With the proper choice he could ensure that his victim would be seriously damaged by them, andthat they would have decayed by the time they reached his own country.”

“It is not even impossible to imagine,” in the words of Professor Teller, “that the effects of an atomic war fought with greatly perfected weapons and pushed by utmost determination will endanger the survival of man.... This specific possibility of destruction may help us realize more clearly the probable consequences of an atomic war for our civilization and the possible consequences for the whole human race.”

On this point Professor Szilard is much more specific. “Let us assume,” he said at a University of Chicago Round Table, “that we make a radioactive element which will live for five years and that we just let it go into the air. During the following years it will gradually settle out and cover the whole earth with dust. I have asked myself, ‘How many neutrons or how much heavy hydrogen do we have to detonate to kill everybody on earth by this particular method?’ I come up with about fifty tons of neutrons as being plenty to kill everybody, which means about 400 tons of heavy hydrogen” (deuterium).

Now, obviously Professor Szilard was stating the extreme case. He merely called attention to the scientific fact that man now has at his disposal, or soon will have, means that not only could wipe out all life on earth, but could also make the earth itself unfit for life for many generations to come,if not forever. Here we have indeed what is probably the greatest example of irony in man’s history. The very process in the sun that made life possible on earth, and is responsible for its being maintained here, can now be used by man to wipe out that very life and to ruin the earth for good.

It is inconceivable that any leaders of men today, or in the near future, would resort to such an extreme measure. But the fact remains that such a measure is possible. And it is by no means unthinkable that a Hitler, faced with certain defeat, would not choose to die in a great Götterdämmerung in which he would pull down the whole of humanity with him to destruction. And who can be bold enough to guarantee that another Hitler might not arise sometime, somewhere, possibly in a rejuvenated Germany making another bid for world domination or total annihilation?

It is more likely, of course, that an attacker, particularly if he is otherwise faced with certain defeat, might choose the less drastic method outlined by Professor Teller, selecting for his weapon a short-lived radioactive element that would have spent itself by the time it reached his shores. If he is the sole possessor of the hydrogen bomb, he may not even have to use it, a threat of its use being sufficient to end the war on terms to his liking. In the face of such a threat, as Professor Szilard pointed out, who would dare take the responsibility of refusing?

These are the stark, unvarnished facts about the “so-called hydrogen bomb.” They raise many questions to which the American people as a whole will have to find the answer. It is possible, and the odds here are more than even, that the very possession of the hydrogen bomb by both ourselves and Russia will make war unthinkable, since neither side could be the winner. This would be a near certainty if we had the answer to Russia’s Trojan Horse method of taking over nations by first taking over their governments, as was done in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Balkan countries. Suppose the Communists take over Italy, then Germany, by the same method. What would we do then? The answer is, of course, that if we wait until “then,” everything would be lost, no matter what we did. It therefore becomes obvious that our very existence may depend on what we dohereandnowto prevent such an eventuality.

Now that the hydrogen bomb has come out into the open after five years as a super-top secret, the authorities, and particularly the Atomic Energy Commission, may be called upon to answer some embarrassing questions. “Why,” we may ask, “was the work on the hydrogen bomb apparently dropped altogether during the past five years?” According to Professor Bethe, it would take about three years to develop it. This means that, had wecontinued working on it in 1945 and thereafter, we would have had it as far back as 1948. We have thus lost five precious years, our loss being Russia’s gain.

Some scientists and others contend that, because of our great harbor and industrial cities, the hydrogen bomb would be a greater threat to us than to the Soviet, because most Russian cities are much smaller than ours, while her industries are much more dispersed. There may be some truth in this. But on the other hand there are some great advantages on our side. With a strong Navy and good submarine-detecting devices we may have control of the seas and be able to prevent the delivery of the hydrogen bomb by ship or submarine. With a strong Air Force and radar system we could prevent the delivery of hydrogen bombs from the air.

By far the most important advantage the possession of the hydrogen bomb would give us against Russia is its possible use as a tactical weapon against huge land armies. Since they can devastate such large areas, one or two hydrogen bombs, depending on their size, could wipe out entire armies on the march, even before they succeeded in crossing the border of an intended victim. The H-bomb would thus counterbalance, if not completely nullify, the one great advantage Russia possesses—huge land armies capable of overrunning western Europe. The bomb might thus serveas the final deterrent to any temptation the Kremlin’s rulers may have to invade the Atlantic Pact countries.

Yet no matter how one looks at it, the advent of the H-bomb constitutes the greatest threat to the survival of the human race since the Black Death.

One is reminded of a dinner conversation in Paris in 1869, recorded in theJournalof the Goncourt brothers. Some of the famous savants of the day were crystal-gazing into the scientific future a hundred years away. The great chemist Pierre Berthelot predicted that by 1969 “man would know of what the atom is constituted and would be able, at will, to moderate, extinguish, and light up the sun as if it were a gas lamp.” (This prophecy has almost come true.) Claude Bernard, the greatest physiologist of the day, saw a future in which “man would be so completely the master of organic law that he would create life [artificially] in competition with God.”

To which the Goncourt brothers added the postscript: “To all of this we raised no objection. But we have the feeling that when this time comes to science, God with His white beard will come down to earth, swinging a bunch of keys, and will say to humanity, the way they say at five o’clock at the salon: ‘Closing time, gentlemen!’”

Back to Index Next