The answers to many of the questions which follow are obvious. The answer to other questions are less obvious. Each question has been selected to suggest and to illustrate the kind of problem which may be involved, whether easy or difficult of solution. It should be emphasized that the original United States proposals and the existing United Nations plan foresee and carefully take into account the possibility of an H-bomb, as evidenced by the language they contain. The same is true of the McMahon Act for domestic control of atomic energy within the United States.
[1]. All material in this appendix, except those paragraphs headed “Author’s Comments,” has been prepared by the staff of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.
1. Is the hydrogen bomb a more or less important weapon than the atomic bomb? Might hydrogen bombs prove to be decisive in war, or has their significance been exaggerated?
Dr. Harold Urey, a Nobel Prize winner in [chemistry], has suggested that the H-bomb would be militarily decisive; Dr. Hans Bethe, [and other noted physicists, have] indicated that the step from A-bombs to H-bombs is as great as the original step from conventional to atomic explosives. However, Dr. Robert F. Bacher, a former AEC Commissioner, states that—
while it [the H-bomb] is a terrible weapon, its military effectiveness seems to have been grossly overrated in the minds of laymen.
Some of the questions which may bear upon this difference of opinion are as follows:
(1) Shock effect.—To what extent do H-bombs excel A-bombs in permitting a highly destructive attack to be compressed in time?
(2) Comparative numbers.—What quantity of A-bombs are required to do the same job as a given number of H-bombs?
(3) Neutron economy.—How much fissionable material for A-bombs is sacrificed by using the neutrons available in reactors for making H-bomb materials?
(4) Deliverability.—Under various combat conditions, is the delivery of H-bombs cheaper and surer than delivery of an “equivalent” number of A-bombs?