Atomic Energy

on the World today

ATLANTIC

December 1949

PRESIDENT TRUMAN’S announcement of evidence of an atomic explosion in the Soviet Union was received with equanimity at the outset. There is no way to tell how long that equanimity will continue. Perhaps the people of the country have been more alert than authorities anticipated to warnings during the past few years that there is no secret of the bomb, and therefore they received the announcement as something to be expected. In any event, a nation that since 1940 had invested 4.5 billion dollars — as much as the total national debt up to 1918 — in creating a national industry out of the most powerful source of energy appeared to take the news of the end of its weapon monopoly with encouraging calm.

Addition of the clause, “Now that the Russians have the bomb,” to the accustomed arguments on the world situation had a clarifying effect somewhat akin to a feeling of relief. It did not, however, alter the arguments greatly. One hopeful theory is that the availability of the bomb to the two greatest powers may mean a standoff as far as atomic war is concerned, with the atom bomb occupying the position in future which poison gas had in the Second World War.

Given such a standoff, some observers are of the opinion that a better opportunity exists for a rapprochement with the Soviet Union, preferably within the framework of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. The Baruch proposals for the present seem as little likely of realization as they have been in the past.

The optimists see in the standoff the chance for an agreement between the two bomb-holding powers to place a moratorium on the bomb for a year or more, in which discussion of a lasting solution could proceed. Efforts towards such an armistice through action in the General Assembly of the United Nations got under way shortly after the announcement of Russian success. Argentina advocated an immediate atomic armistice between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., and Australia requested a new agency within the UN to frame an international control plan.

The pessimists

The less optimistic foresee a continuation of the cold war, a rush by the United States to increase bomb production and swell stockpiles of the weapon, with a concomitant effort on the part of Russia to proceed from a single “atomic explosion" to the mass production of weapons and ultimately to match strength with the United States.

The great ltalian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, who directed the famous Stagg Field experiments which culminated on December 2, 1942, in the first self-maintaining nuclear chain reaction, has said that if the United States maintains its present ratio of superiority over the Soviet Union in atomic matters, there will be no war for twenty years. Dr. Fermi’s additional remark, that he is a fatalist and will continue to sleep as well as his insomnia permits, took some of the edge off this hopeful comment.

General Walter Bedell Smith, who through his service as American ambassador in Moscow has firsthand knowledge of Russian potentials, predicted six months ago that Russia might soon test an atomic bomb, but held that it might take the Soviet Union ten years to develop the powerful type of bomb that the United States has stockpiled. Such solace gets a dash of cold water from American atomic physicists Harold C. Urey and Harrison Brown, who denounce the belief that the United States has a ten-year lead over Russia in bomb construction, disagree flatly with General Smith, and hold that Russia can be expected to make a substantial supply of bombs in the next few years.

Still a third view of the total situation accepts the idea of a continuing cold war, of competitive stockpiling— in short, of an atomic armament race— but argues that this is only another way of reaching the standoff. Protagonists of this view hold that the nalion making the greatest progress in the peaceful, industrial utilization of atomic energy will in the end win out.

On this possibility, the United States has in the past been pretty confident, relying on its welladvertised know-how and on the fact of nearly ten years’ progress in the further understanding not merely of atomic fission but of the great barriers that must be surmounted for its successful industrial application. It must be recognized that confidence on the part of the average citizen has been shaken a bit by the fact that the Russians have been able to bring off an atomic explosion considerably earlier than had been generally expected.

There is no guaranteed secreey

Surprising though the Russian speed may have been to the man in the street, it was no shock to most scientists. It is a cold fact that if any qualified physicists, even if they had had nothing to do with the wartime bomb-building effort, had been called in three years ago and asked to review the published literature on atomic energy, to relate it to their general physical knowledge, and to apply the result to such questions as how to build reactors, how to separate raw materials, and how to build a bomb, they could have come up with the correct answers.

The physicists Frederick Seitz and Hans Bethe some three years ago published a discussion pointing out the possibilities of Russian success on about this basis. These possibilities bear directly on the crippling business of security of information, and specifically on the blandly bandied allegation that “leaks” of restricted information from this country expedited the Russian accomplishment. The Smyth report on which our hypothetical physicists would have had to base much of their work was published in 1945 by the Manhattan District.

From security of information to security in the sense of protection of people against atomic bombardment is a short step, shorter than ever now that the Russians have the bomb. Security of information— secrecy is, as before, subject to two extreme views: Abandon it entirely; increase it to the utmost.

With two powers possessed of atomic weapons, the sensible mid-course will probably be that propounded by Commissioner Strauss, who has urged the publication of all scientific information not possessing military value and cited the need of continued secrecy on matters having to do with the development of atomic energy and other military weapons.

Whatever the course, security of information, particularly where it involves protection of the people, is still a stumbling block. Publication of the so-called weapons effects handbook, a joint project of the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Military Establishment, which was scheduled for the summer, was postponed. That such a volume is more urgently wanted under the present conditions is obvious. But the problem of classification of information still remains.

Meantime the Commission has had all the published literature relating to civilian defense rechecked and reviewed. Some four hundred and fifty titles with which medical men, city planners, municipal authorities, and the like should be familiar have been singled out.

The majority of these deal with medical topics such as radiation injury or effects of blast, but a respectable number are concerned with the structure of buildings and the layout of cities. It is anticipated that a bibliographical treatment to speed the use of these materials will be available shortly. Demand for this sort of thing can be expected to grow in the months ahead, no matter how great the equanimity of the first few weeks after announcement of the Russian explosion. Already stress has been placed on the statement that the United States defenses against the bomb are pieces of paper.

Such a statement ignores radar nets, interception plans, coastal patrols, and other military measures. But its emphasis upon lack of earlier efforts to save as much civilian life and power as possible in the event of bombardment takes on a new vividness.

Don’t crowd the new plants

Hence there will be further advocacy of the development of satellite cities of 50,000 people, separated by open space; further argument that skyscrapers are specially vulnerable to atomic bombs and should therefore no longer be built; further pleading for underground installation not only of vital manufacturing establishments but also of stockpiles, workers’ quarters, hospitals.

There is reason in this course. There would be utter unreason in the hysteria that would urge a flight into quick decentralization, and the abandonment of our principal cities, even if that were economically, socially, and industrially possible.

The sound program will call not for decentralizing, but for halting our increasing centralization. The least we can do, it is argued, is to freeze matters about where they stand and, from now on, to back every effort at putting new construction, new industrial installations, new housing, at a reasonable distance from neighboring centers.

The Washington experience in the years since the war is in point here. When emergency agencies were blossoming like the nettles of doom, and space was at a premium, there was an exodus from Washington. Out, out, to Baltimore, to Philadelphia, to New York, to more remote places, went Patent Office and many other Office thousands, to make place in the main center for the mushrooming organizations whose job was to coördinate the nation’s lighting effort.

All roads lead to Washington

The war ended. Back to Washington have come the thousands, augmented necessarily, to add to the population, which has not diminished because the theoretically temporary wartime units are not completely extinct. The result is a greater concentration than ever before in a region as vulnerable as the worst enemy could hope.

Against this background, the too often unheeded example of the Atomic Energy Commission’s action stands out sharply. Only one per cent of that agency’s total personnel is in the capital city.

Since its very beginning the Atomic Energy Commission has consistently sought to show by example what it has no statutory directive or right to prescribe. It has taken the fullest advantage of modern communication and transportation facilities — teletype, leased wires, air and rail travel to decentralize its work. Notable is the fact that the Commission’s Chicago office is thirty-five miles from the Loop. Great corporations which at the present moment are moving their main offices from other cities into Manhattan might well heed these facts.

Whether they will or not, the problem of decentralization is a hot potato in anybody’s language. Local realestate values, existing rapid transit systems, municipal pride and prestige, the kudos of the Chamber of Commerce, not to mention settled customs of living, school systems, church systems, medical facilities, and other institutions are involved in any move toward changing the present physical pattern of American life.

He would be a courageous if not indeed temerarious public servant or politician who ventured any sweeping move by national legislation in that direction. But he would be a farseeing public servant indeed who set out to forestall any additions to the present congestion.

It is against this general background that American policy will have to be thought out in the days ahead. The Atomic Energy Commission may be expected not only to seek additional funds for the prosecution of the national atomic energy enterprise but also to seek elimination of the restrictions placed upon its freedom of judgment and operation by the last appropriation bill. Delays have become more critical since the announcement on September 23 of the Soviet atomic explosion.

Failure of legislation for a National Science Foundation to reach action by the Eighty-first Congress makes such greater freedom for the Commission all the more important. Never before has basic research been of more vital importance—an importance pointed up by the possibility that the Soviet may have used lithium for its atomic explosion rather than the uranium 235 of Hiroshima or the plutonium of Nagasaki.

Sniping seems trivial

Against this general background, too, the feeble pop with which Senator Hickenlooper’s charges of “incredible mismanagement" came to a conclusion was lost. It would be a sensitive Geiger counter which could have registered the end of the Hickenlooper investigation against ihe greater tremors of the September announcement.

The vote of ten to eight which brought the investigation to a close, however, is significant in its indication of a minority report which may be expected to take issue with the majority, which endorsed Chairman Lilienthal and his colleagues in their conduct of the atomic energy enterprise.

Perhaps, also, the most lasting record of the whole inquiry is to be found in the fact that the sixth semiannual report of the Commission, a detailed and admirable discussion of atomic energy in its relations to the life sciences, which appeared midway in the investigation, is guarded in tone and circumspect almost beyond necessity in its use of illustrations.

Against this general background, finally, must be appraised prospects for the immediate future. A resurgence of argument for returning the whole atomic energy undertaking to military control has been foreseen. One pungent answer to that is implicit in Senator McMahon’s declaration that he is satisfied that the military forces have access to atomic weapons instantly if, when, and as they need it.

A resurgence of jingoistic argument for a prophylactic war likewise has been forecast. Both the common sense and the tradition of the nation will be ample opposition to it.

Much interest will attach, on all these scores, to Modern Arms and Free Men, a volume by Dr. Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during the grim years of the war, and subsequently chairman of the National Military Establishment’s Research and Development Board.

Its evaluation of wars past and present, its appraisal of weapons and weapons systems, and its balancing of strengths and weaknesses of democracy as against totalitarianism will be valuable guidance for the hard thinking that must be done by citizens confronted with as great problems as ever Americans met.