Russian Cosmos

General Electric's tough-minded,soft-spoken Nobelman, Dr. Irving Langmuir, said last week that Russia might win an atomic race if the world let itself in for one.

In such a race, Russia would depend largely on two scientists: big, bulky Abram Feodorovitch Joffe, distinguished for work in electronics and molecular physics; and Dr. Peter Kapitza, who visited Moscow in 1935, after 13 years at Britain's Cambridge, and was refused permission to leave when he made ready to return. Tweedy, pipe-smoking Peter Kapitza has been there ever since, and he said he was perfectly happy when Dr. Langmuir saw him in Moscow last June.

Last week Moscow's Izvestia lifted the recent blackout on Dr. Kapitza, said, that he had helped equip a great new laboratory on Mt. Alagoz, a remote eminence in remote Soviet Armenia. Kapitza's announced activity: research in stratospheric cosmic rays, a roundabout approach to the harnessing of atomic energy. U.S. scientists, pondering the sparse accounts from Moscow, were willing to swear that there was nothing roundabout in Dr. Kapitza's other atomic doings.

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