The hell bomb

by William L. Laurence

On this point Professor Szilard is much more specific. “Let us assume,” he said at a University of Chicago Round Table, “that we make a radioactive element which will live for five years and that we just let it go into the air. During the following years it will gradually settle out and cover the whole earth with dust. I have asked myself, ‘How many neutrons or how much heavy hydrogen do we have to detonate to kill everybody on earth by this particular method?’ I come up with about fifty tons of neutrons as being plenty to kill everybody, which means about 400 tons of heavy hydrogen” (deuterium).

Now, obviously Professor Szilard was stating the extreme case. He merely called attention to the scientific fact that man now has at his disposal, or soon will have, means that not only could wipe out all life on earth, but could also make the earth itself unfit for life for many generations to come, if not forever. Here we have indeed what is probably the greatest example of irony in man’s history. The very process in the sun that made life possible on earth, and is responsible for its being maintained here, can now be used by man to wipe out that very life and to ruin the earth for good.

It is inconceivable that any leaders of men today, or in the near future, would resort to such an extreme measure. But the fact remains that such a measure is possible. And it is by no means unthinkable that a Hitler, faced with certain defeat, would not choose to die in a great Götterdämmerung in which he would pull down the whole of humanity with him to destruction. And who can be bold enough to guarantee that another Hitler might not arise sometime, somewhere, possibly in a rejuvenated Germany making another bid for world domination or total annihilation?

It is more likely, of course, that an attacker, particularly if he is otherwise faced with certain defeat, might choose the less drastic method outlined by Professor Teller, selecting for his weapon a short-lived radioactive element that would have spent itself by the time it reached his shores. If he is the sole possessor of the hydrogen bomb, he may not even have to use it, a threat of its use being sufficient to end the war on terms to his liking. In the face of such a threat, as Professor Szilard pointed out, who would dare take the responsibility of refusing?

These are the stark, unvarnished facts about the “so-called hydrogen bomb.” They raise many questions to which the American people as a whole will have to find the answer. It is possible, and the odds here are more than even, that the very possession of the hydrogen bomb by both ourselves and Russia will make war unthinkable, since neither side could be the winner. This would be a near certainty if we had the answer to Russia’s Trojan Horse method of taking over nations by first taking over their governments, as was done in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Balkan countries. Suppose the Communists take over Italy, then Germany, by the same method. What would we do then? The answer is, of course, that if we wait until “then,” everything would be lost, no matter what we did. It therefore becomes obvious that our very existence may depend on what we do here and now to prevent such an eventuality.

Now that the hydrogen bomb has come out into the open after five years as a super-top secret, the authorities, and particularly the Atomic Energy Commission, may be called upon to answer some embarrassing questions. “Why,” we may ask, “was the work on the hydrogen bomb apparently dropped altogether during the past five years?” According to Professor Bethe, it would take about three years to develop it. This means that, had we continued working on it in 1945 and thereafter, we would have had it as far back as 1948. We have thus lost five precious years, our loss being Russia’s gain.

Some scientists and others contend that, because of our great harbor and industrial cities, the hydrogen bomb would be a greater threat to us than to the Soviet, because most Russian cities are much smaller than ours, while her industries are much more dispersed. There may be some truth in this. But on the other hand there are some great advantages on our side. With a strong Navy and good submarine-detecting devices we may have control of the seas and be able to prevent the delivery of the hydrogen bomb by ship or submarine. With a strong Air Force and radar system we could prevent the delivery of hydrogen bombs from the air.

By far the most important advantage the possession of the hydrogen bomb would give us against Russia is its possible use as a tactical weapon against huge land armies. Since they can devastate such large areas, one or two hydrogen bombs, depending on their size, could wipe out entire armies on the march, even before they succeeded in crossing the border of an intended victim. The H-bomb would thus counterbalance, if not completely nullify, the one great advantage Russia possesses—huge land armies capable of overrunning western Europe. The bomb might thus serve as the final deterrent to any temptation the Kremlin’s rulers may have to invade the Atlantic Pact countries.

Yet no matter how one looks at it, the advent of the H-bomb constitutes the greatest threat to the survival of the human race since the Black Death.

One is reminded of a dinner conversation in Paris in 1869, recorded in the Journal of the Goncourt brothers. Some of the famous savants of the day were crystal-gazing into the scientific future a hundred years away. The great chemist Pierre Berthelot predicted that by 1969 “man would know of what the atom is constituted and would be able, at will, to moderate, extinguish, and light up the sun as if it were a gas lamp.” (This prophecy has almost come true.) Claude Bernard, the greatest physiologist of the day, saw a future in which “man would be so completely the master of organic law that he would create life [artificially] in competition with God.”