Butterflies for Bombs?

The U.S. was still uneasily aware of the responsibility it had brought on itself by prying open the secret of atomic explosion. Some of the scientists who had worked on the bomb were particularly disquieted.

Recently 17 of them met in Chicago and voiced something of what they felt. Said Dr. Samuel K. Allison, chief of the Institute of Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago : "All of us who worked on the atomic bomb had a momentary feeling of elation when our experiment met with success. But that feeling rapidly changed. . . ." He and his colleagues had hoped that the surrender of Japan could have been brought about by demonstrating its effectiveness to the Japanese in some uninhabited area.

"It was a real tragedy," said Dr. Allison, "that so important a scientific discovery had to be revealed under such circumstances" -- i.e., the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On one point he and his 16 colleagues were more than uneasy, they were indignant: the virtual imprisonment of atomic scientists by the strictest kind of government censorship. Said Dr. Allison: "There is no real secret about the atomic bomb.

. . . Unless the Government again permits the free exchange of scientific information, the research workers in America will abandon their quest for further secrets of atomic power and devote them to the study of the butterfly."

But Washington held different views. Interior Secretary Ickes took steps to reserve the Alamogordo Air Base in New Mexico, where the bomb was first tested, as a national monument commemorating a "forceful influence toward . . . world peace." President Truman sternly forbade the sale of all U.S. public lands which contain radio-active mineral substances.

This week Harry Truman was getting ready to announce a commission to control future atomic research. And in the House hopper was a bill to impose the death penalty on anyone who divulged secrets of the atomic bomb to a foreign power.

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