Atomic Energy

on the World Today

LOOK for the appearance, during the summer, of a detailed and authoritative discussion of what happens when an atomic bomb explodes - what happens in terms of destruction and death by blast, heat, and radiation, and what can be done to safeguard civilians against them. And after the book has appeared, look for a profound clash of opinion on the question of freedom or secrecy of information about atomic weapons.

The book has been in preparation since early last fall, and is a joint project of the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Military Establishment. It undertakes to present the maximum of information with only the minimum of preachment and interpretation, and thus to be a factual handbook on the effects of atomic weapons.

The project was begun on the premise that through the delonation of the eight atomic weapons thus far utilized, and particularly through those exploded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, much knowledge has been gained, and that a great deal of this knowledge need not be classified and withheld. Local doctors, architects, and engineers, for example, may be planning a hospital. They should have available to them reliable information on weapon effects whether blast, heat, or radiation which will enable them to make the best possible allowance for atomic war, before they begin construction of their building.

No intelligent over-all approach to problems of civilian defense in atomic war can be made until information of this kind is widely available. In time of war, civilian defense depends on efficient planning and preparation at the local level. For instance, members of the local fire department may never be required actually to use a Geiger counter, but if they are to know how to— just in case— reliable information as the basis for instruction must be available in advance.

Similarly, widespread dissemination of basic information is required in the armed forces. Though the average infantryman max never be engaged in atomic war, the possibility that he might should be anticipated in time of peace.

Facts alone will meet these needs. Hitherto, not a little has been published as admonition and omen of what the future may bring. But nearly all of it has been the work either of persons who are utterly outside the atomic weapons project, and therefore know little about it, or of persons who serxed in a subordinate capacity in the enterprise and are therefore not only limited as to data but also subject to the requirements of security and of their own conscientious interpretation of those regulations.

As a consequence, much that has been written about the danger to eivilians in atomic warfare has consisted of ominous prognostication and preachment, with passing esoteric reference to facts that cannot be revealed, rather than the direct and objective statement of fact that is assential as the basis for formulation of plan and policy.

The people want the facts

It was to meet this demand for facts that the Atomic Energy Commission and tho National Military Establishment undertook the project which now nears completion. A second publication is in prospect: a book on the medical effects of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, designed primarily for the medical profession. The bald facts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by themselves do not suffice; fortunately for the future, it is possible to draw from them sound analogies for American cities, and this the forthcoming handbook will seek to do.

The task is not easy. For one reason, much that the average observer may consider withheld as a security measure is simply not known. For another, the proper interpretation of known data is not always clear, is rarely simple, and is often a subject of disagreement among the interpreters.

Any compendium of factual information designed to be at the basis of local and national planning to deal with disaster must come in the first place from high authority, and must be the work of authoritative people. The Atomic Energy Commission itself, under the terms of the Atomic EnergyAct of 1946, is the final source of definitive information on the subject. The handbook to be issued under its aegis and that of the National Military Establishment consequently will possess authority and effect by that fact alone.

Dr. Norris Bradbury, Director of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory which is the center for the manufacture of atomic weapons, is in operating charge of the project. The senior editor of the volume is Dr. Joseph O. Hirschfelder of the University of Wisconsin, a consultant to the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, who served on the special board of the Atomic Energy Commission which met at Los Alamos late in 1948 to survey the secrecy status of information concerning atomic weapons. The board recommended that information pertaining to the effects of atomic weapons be released to the public.

Among single topics to be covered in the various chapters are the blast effects of atomic bombs; the design of buildings to withstand such effects; the general description of the burst of an atomic bomb: the effects of an air burst; the effects related to blast in water; the radiological effects in water, such as those in the Bikini tests which have stirred such wide discussion: the particular military applications of atomic energy; the meteorological problems involved in atomic warfare; the medical effects of atomic weapons, including the injuries resulting from blast, heat, secondary fires, flying debris, and radiation.

Civil defense problems which may be expected from the use of atomic weapons will be discussed in an individual chapter. The volume will not present a civil defense plan; it will afford basic information essential to such planning.

The men behind the job

In order that the knowledge of fundamental physics necessary for an understanding of the effects of the atomic bomb may be intelligible to laymen, Dr. George Gamow of George Washington University, who is well known as the author of vivid general discussions of science apart from atomic energy, and who is a consultant to the Los Alamos Laboratory, has been chosen as one of the authors of the report. His chapter will offer a nontechnical explanation of the nuclear physics involved in the bomb. these are Dr. Shields Warren, Director of the Commission’s Division of Biology and Medicine, and Rear Admiral William S. Parsons, formerly of the Los Alamos Laboratory, now a member of the Military Liaison Committee on Atomic Energy, who performed the arduous duty of arming the Hiroshima bomb during the flight of the Enola Gay to Hiroshima in August, 1945.

The report can be counted on not only to lay the essential foundation of specific and dependable in formation for public thinking, but also to serve as a valuable corrective. On the one hand, it will provide a definitive standard of fact concerning what atomic bombs do and may be expected to do, against which other discussions can be gauged and by which deviations and distortions due to doctrinaire beliefs and political predilections, as in Fear, War, and the Bomb, by Professor P. M. S. Blackett, the British physicist, can be evaluated.

On the other hand, because the men responsible for the report insist on sticking to facts, it will puncture some of the balloons of emotionalism which frightened men have employed in the search for a place to hide from present and future problems. Much that has been written about the results of past atomic explosions and as prophecy of terrors to come has of necessity been made more ominous by vagueness and by cryptic reference to basic data which the author could not reveal. The forthcoming report should offer factual correctives to reduce some of the fog.

The need for secrecy

Apart from these prospective accomplishments, however, a special importance attaches to the report. Its appearance may bring into sharp focus the central dilemma of the nation’s entire atomic energy undertaking as a matter of national policy. This is the vexed and perplexing question of secrecy versus release of information. It has been at the core of the problem during the whole decade since physicists, shortly after the Bohr announcement in 1939, imposed on themselves a gentleman’s agreement not to publish the results of experimentation in the field. Secrecy was maintained during the war years by compartmentalization and military security under the Manhattan District.

Dr. Gamow’s colleagues include not only authorities now directly engaged in the operations of the nation’s atomic weapons program but also scientists associated with that program as advisers, and scientists concerned chiefly with the nonmilitary rather than the military implications of it. Among

The need for security regulations is explicitly recognized in the provisions of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, under which the Atomic Energy Commission functions, and in the administrative organization which the Commission has set up to carry those provisions into effect. And of course it is implicit in the thinking of scientist, Lawmaker, and everybody else — even the too numerous everybodies who pay heed to the atomic energy undertaking only when occasionally stirred up by some particularly spectacular pronouncement.

The clash of opinion over this question leads, on the one hand, to rumblinds of amendments to the Act of 1946, which would require that all atomic information without exception be held secret, and on the other hand, to the strongly argued thesis that the number of atomic bombs in the country’s possession should be publicly announced.

Along with the first contention runs the argument that information about how far, how high, or how fast a new airplane will travel must also be kept secret since the plane might conceivably one day carry a bomb. The case will not stand reduction to absurdity. The second contention can be made the vehicle for comparable extremes.

How much security?

The height at which the Hiroshima bomb burst is no secret. Japanese scientists, in fact, working by triangulation from the debris of the city, were able to figure it out as 1500 feet. Yet in some quarters there is a strong feeling that the fact should not be mentioned.

The Fifth Semiannual Report of the Atomic Energy Commission ran into a considerable storm of denunciation because it contained maps and photographs of atomic energy installations at Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Almos, some four fifths of which had been published as long ago as 1945. Part of the attack against the Commission was based on the charge that to assemble the photographs in this handy form made them more dangerous.

The reception of the Fifth Semiannual Report illustrates the general pattern of attack; from criticism of a specific point such as the maps and photographs, discussion moves into far wider generalizations, and the question becomes not the comparative hazard of the specific point but whether anything at all should be published, whether as much should be published as is consistent with security, or whether the minimum possible should be published.

The forthcoming report on the effect of atomic weapons plainly will be an excellent starting point for a repetition of this cycle, for it is to be packed with specific statements, offered in handy form.

Must we tell the Russians?

The general lines which controversy will follow, once the report has appeared, can be clearly discerned. Until we know that the Russians have an atomic bomb, one argument will run, we should not issue handbooks of this sort. The answer to this is that the American people should know what is necessary for their self-protection whether the Russians have an atomic bomb or not.

A second line of argument will be that, assuming the Russians do not have an atomic bomb, we should not, by publishing such a handbook, make plain to them what to expect and what to prepare for. This will be met by the reply that the American people need to know what to expect and what to prepare for and that their need should govern.

A third contention will be that the Russians aren’t telling anybody anything and we shouldn’t either—particularly not by publishing factual information in handy form. This will be countered by the proposition that the strength of this nation lies in freedom, and the maintenance of freedom demands openness of knowledge. Stress will also be laid on the fact that the concept of public accountability of governmental administrators and agencies demands public knowledge.

The whole thorny question of secrecy and security will be brought to a head. During the past two years the Atomic Energy Commission has been under a running fire of attack for the statements which it has issued in the effort to establish and maintain a sensible line between the releasable and the nonreleasable, and the attack may be expeeted to become heavier after the handbook is published.

Evidently both the Commission and the National Military Establishment, in undertaking the project together, regard this hazard of increased opposition as an acceptable risk that must be met in the effort to minimize the vulnerability of the United States in the event of atomic war.