The Hell Bomb
Potpourri
by .Knopf, $2.75.
In terms intelligible to the layman, Mr. Laurence — two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and Science Reporter of the New York Times — sets forth the nonclassified facts about the hydrogen bomb and from them deduces certain conclusions of his own. Mr. Laurence believes that “when we carry out the announced tests of the latest models of our A-bombs at Eniwetok in . . . 1951, one of them will be the first H-bomb,” The cost of an H-bomb one thousand times as powerful as the atom bomb is estimated at $4,500,000 if it can be made of deuterium. $166,000,000,000 if deuterium and tritium have to be used. The hydrogen bomb could, says Laurence, be so rigged as to destroy completely all human life. The book gives an estimate of Soviet atom bomb production and reports that Klaus Fuchs almost certainly betrayed to the Russians vital secrets about the H-bomb. In contrast to most authorities. Laurence holds the optimistic view that what with the ocean, radar, and an effective interceptor system, “the odds are against a single Aor H-bomb reaching our shores.”