Biggest Show on Earth?

"I had a feeling I might be looking into eternity," recalled a witness to an atomic-explosion test in 1952. "Space is annihilated; time is measured in millionths of seconds; temperatures approach those at the center of the sun. There is an empty feeling in the pit of the stomach when out of the stillness a great ball of light plunges into vision . . . a rush of heat, like the opening of a furnace door." The witness was obsessed by the horror of the explosion he had seen, and as the months passed, he grew to believe that if all men could see it, they would strive to avoid it, and peace would result.

Last week the witness, Atomic Energy Commissioner Thomas E. Murray, formally proposed such a confrontation between man's representatives and the H-bomb. "I propose a meeting at the summit," he said, "this time at the atomic summit . . . I propose that we convene this meeting at our Pacific proving ground at the island of Eniwetok, and there detonate a large thermonuclear weapon before an audience of all the peoples of the world. History has seen many dramatic events. This one might outrank them all, because the earthly destinies of mankind are bound up with the whole meaning of the event . . . Man now has the power to put an end to his own history."

"To Implant Understanding." Murray suggested that "certainly the Soviet Union, Communist China and the European satellite countries" be present, and all the countries in the U.N. "They would, I should hope, later meet to talk about war and peace and about one essential condition of both: that is, the control of nuclear energy. All of them would talk more realistically and more fruitfully after their experience."

In support of his proposal, Murray placed a heavy stress on the fallout of radioactive strontium from thermonuclear explosions. He said that such particles would continue to settle down on the earth for years after an explosion, that they might enter the food supply and kill those who ate the food. He believes this danger has been inaccurately minimized in official public statements. He believes that for the U.S. there was no prudent alternative to the construction of the present terrible weapons. Yet if the peoples of the world, including those of the U.S., understood how terrible these weapons are, their fear would generate a new approach to peace.

Murray admitted that "inevitably, the demonstration at Eniwetok would be a demonstration of American power," but he emphasized that "it would not be a belligerent act, nor a threat of any American intention to start a war; there is no such intention . . . The purpose would not be to strike terror into the hearts of men, but to implant understanding in their minds."

To Spur the Soviets. Murray did not succeed, however, in persuading his four fellow members of the AEC that this biggest show on earth would be worthwhile. Commissioners Lewis Strauss, Willard Libby, John von Neumann and Harold Vance formally replied: "It should be noted that Russian and other foreign observers were invited to the tests at Bikini in 1946, where they witnessed atomic explosions of previously unimaginable destructive force. This demonstration, however, did not persuade the Soviet government of the need to join with us and other nations in an effective system for the international control of atomic energy in all its forms. On the contrary, it appears to have spurred them in their nuclear-weapons program."

It is hard to believe that the public anywhere in the world underestimates the destructive power of atomic weapons. The dictionaries of all languages have been combed for superlatives to describe the devastation that would ensue from atomic war. Could an observer from Russia or Burma or Bolivia take home a description more impressive than Commissioner Murray's own? In the U.S., physicists, generals and plain men, approaching the new weapons from different angles and at different levels of technical knowledge, all came to conclusions quite similar to Murray's own: that these weapons represent a danger of unprecedented magnitude to the survival of mankind -and that until an effective system of international control is established it would be folly to open the U.S. to thermonuclear attack by not being better armed in this respect than the Communists.

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