The New, Improved Attack

People who think they know the worst about The Bomb have some grisly surprises in store. Even long-range, atom-carrying rockets (still in the designing stage) are already an old-fashioned notion. In this month's Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Dr. Edward Teller, a Chicago University physics professor who played an important part in developing The Bomb, looks alarmingly ahead.

Atomic fission, says Dr. Teller, is still in its infancy, of course: "Actually it is quite unsound to limit our attention to atomic bombs of the present type. These bombs are the results of first attempts, and they were developed under wartime pressure. ... In a subject as new as atomic power, we must be prepared for startling developments. . . . Future bombs may easily surpass those used in the last war by a factor of a thousand. . . ."

An improved bomb, one thousand times as powerful as the "Model T" used at Nagasaki, might atomize an area of three or four hundred square miles (roughly the area of New York City). But Dr. Teller is not convinced that such direct use would be the most profitable in war.

Radioactive products, carried on the reliable westerly winds of the upper atmosphere, might do a better job.

"The radioactivity produced by the Bikini bombs," Dr. Teller points out, "was detected within about one week in the United States. It was weak, com pletely harmless. . . . But there is a threshold beyond which radioactivity has lethal effects. . . . Sufficiently strong radio activity will kill all living tissue.

"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.

. . . [This] is much more than a fantastic possibility." Gas masks? Useless. Deep underground shelters with efficient air filters might save a few people. But when the wind had passed, the survivors would doubtless find that all animals and plants had died with the unsheltered humans.

A careless atomic aggressor, Professor Teller admits, might outsmart himself by poisoning the atmosphere too strongly: the radioactive wind might sweep around the world and irradiate his own nation. But even this obstacle is not insuperable: "Different radioactive products have different rates of decay. The attacker is therefore in a position to choose the radioactive products best suited to his attack. With the proper choice, he could ensure that his victim would be seriously damaged by them, and that they would have decayed by the time they reached his own country."

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