H-Bomb Hand-Wringing

Harry Truman's valedictory warning to Stalin on U.S. atomic development caused remarkably little reaction. One prime reason is that leaders of the U.S. armed forces have been so closemouthed about the explosion of the experimental H-bomb last November at Eniwetok that nobody really knows what, precisely, Truman was talking about.

Last week Washington newsmen tried to get beyond the curtain of hand-wringing and eye-rolling to establish some measure of the H-bomb's magnitude. The TNT blockbuster of World War II, they reported, weighed about eleven tons, and could destroy a square city block. The old-fashioned atomic bombs (i.e., uranium and plutonium) are measured in "kilo-tons," or thousands of tons of TNT; the Hiroshima blast rated 20 kilotons. The H-bomb, by comparison, is measured by the "megaton"--a million tons of TNT.

The recent test H-bomb explosion had a force of 3.5 megatons.

Columnists Stewart and Joseph Alsop said last week: "Such a bomb would severely blast an area of 140 square miles, and moderately to severely blast an area of 260 square miles . . . The fireball . . .

would send a heat flash sufficient to ignite combustible material, or to cause killing third-degree burns on exposed skin, within an area of 300 square miles."-- Said the Alsops: "We can no longer doubt that men can make . . . the ten-megaton bomb with a force of 10 million tons of TNT." Air Secretary Thomas Finletter was just as gloomy as the Alsops. He said: "The destructive power of atomic weapons includes not only explosive blasts of force and heat but also the gamma ray--a ray which is deadly to human life. The gamma ray is, as it were, a horrible new byproduct--a deadly dividend--of the atomic explosion. "It seems to be impossible to understand the political and military implications of the existence of atomic weapons.

Indeed, these implications are not even understood by the experts. Man is about to destroy himself unless he has a corresponding revolution in his political thinking to equal the incredible advance which the scientists have produced for him in his ability to destroy fellow men." This is a remarkable statement from a man in Finletter's position as the civilian chief of the military arm charged with responsibility for delivering the nuclear weapon on an enemy in case of war. Who is supposed to think through the "political and military implications" of the H-bomb? Not the public, which heard officially of the H-bomb only last week.

Not "the experts," who are experts in nuclear physics rather than strategy or politics. The really frightening aspect of the H-bomb, as disclosed in Truman's speech and Finletter's interview, is that nobody within a radius of 9.8 miles of the White House has accepted a clear responsibility of thinking through the dreadful--but not hopeless--problems that the new bomb raises.

* 151; A circular area of 300 square miles has a radius of 9.8 miles.

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