So It Was Plutonium?

The bad news had been labeled "Top Secret" but it had leaked out. One leak was Colorado's Senator Edwin C. Johnson, member of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, who unwarily blurted it out on a television program in an argument for tighter security regulations. The news: the Russian atomic bomb contained plutonium.

U.S. Intelligence, scientists guessed, must have collected an appreciable quantity of radioactive dust thrown up to the stratosphere by the U.S.S.R.'s bomb blast revealed last September. The two fissionable materials, uranium 235 and plutonium, leave different residues. If enough dust was collected by high-flying aircraft, the residues could have been identified by laboratory analysis.

Plutonium is made in a chain-reacting pile, the trickiest, most hair-raising item of industrial equipment. Every interior detail of a pile must be right from the start; after the pile has been in operation, its innards are too radioactive to be tinkered with. The controls must be perfect, too, or the pile will destroy itself with a bang.

After the plutonium has been formed in the pile's uranium rods, it must be separated from the uranium by a chemical operation which is delicate and difficult, because the rods are fiercely radioactive. All the manipulations in the refining process must be performed by remote control from behind massive shields. Every bit of apparatus that has been used in refining plutonium is poisoned and dangerous to handle.

For these and other technical reasons, scientists heard the news about Russian science with respect and foreboding. If the U.S.S.R. is producing plutonium, it has come a long way in the four years of its sped-up atomic-bomb program.

While Senator Johnson was before the television camera, still arguing for tighter security, he also gave to the world several other U.S. secrets:1) that U.S. scientists, in trying to make a superbomb, have already made one six times as powerful as the Nagasaki "Model T"; 2) that the U.S. goal is a bomb 1,000 times as powerful; 3) that the present effort is to "find some way of detonating a bomb before the fellow that wants to drop it can detonate it."

Some of this information had been rumored; all of it could be guessed at by competent physicists. But Senator Johnson's dope, presumably coming direct from the Atomic Energy Commission, was far more valuable to an enemy than any rumor that might have been planted deliberately. Last week Congressional leaks (i.e., Senator Johnson) got a sharp rebuke from President Truman, who demanded that such leaks stop. But the beans the Senator spilled had already rattled their way around the world.

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