The Secret

In the troubled sky of a world at peace, the awful afterglow of the atomic bomb still lingered. Just before leaving for London, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes sharply castigated loose talk that the U.S. might give away the secret (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). In London, however, there was persistent cackle about placing the bomb at the disposal of the United Nations Security Council, to threaten or punish an errant nation--while keeping the actual technique an Anglo-U.S. secret as long as possible.

Russia made it clear, indirectly, that she had not been offered the bomb. An angry article in New Times (successor to the Soviet trade unions' War and the Working Class) urged international pooling of atomic data. New Times bastinadoed the "Hearst-Patterson-McCormick press" for suggesting that the U.S. hold the bomb threat over international negotiations, and added: ". . . The fundamental principles are well known, and henceforth it is simply a question of time before any country will be able to produce atomic bombs."

How Long? Plain people everywhere anxiously wondered how long the secret could or would be kept. The Smyth report, released by the U.S. War Department (TIME, Aug. 20), had been amazingly frank about production methods. It even hinted at the basic mechanism of the bomb itself--the sudden bringing together of two or more lumps of explosive material to form one lump which is over the "critical size" and which instantly explodes. The possibility that the secret might be discovered by some other nation creates no immediate dangers, because at this stage of the bomb's development huge production plants (which exist in the U.S. alone) are necessary. But over the next ten or 15 years the prospect was one in which even the bomb's first victims found a bitter grain of comfort.

Speculating, as beaten men will, on the consolations of adversity, Tokyo's Mainichi observed: "According to the notions held heretofore no great power could exist that was not a strong power. Yet . . . can we not . . . build up for the first time in the history of mankind a great power without arms?" It added: "Inevitably the theory and production method of the atomic bomb will have to be made public before long."

The only nation that knew all about the bomb had on its hands two of the greatest intelligence problems of all time: 1) how to conceal its past and future development from other nations; 2) to discover what progress other nations may make.

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