Hydrogen Hysteria

Not long ago many scientists feared that the public was forgetting the menace of the atom bomb. What many responsible scientists fear now is public hysteria caused by exaggeration of the destructiveness of the hydrogen bomb.

Last week, on a radio round table sponsored by the University of Chicago, Associate Professor Harrison Brown sprang a chiller to top all chillers. The blast effects of hydrogen bombing, Brown told his nationwide audience, will be only the beginning; the radioactive aftereffects will be far worse. Hydrogen explosions, he said, will fill the air with fiercely radiating isotopes. They will drift with the wind, he believes, like a swarm of invisible locusts, killing people, animals, insects, plants.

Take a Continent. Warming to his subject, he told just how the U.S. might attack the U.S.S.R. All that is necessary, he said, is to explode large hydrogen bombs on a line extending north & south across Europe. The radioactivity "would be carried eastward by the winds, destroying all life within a strip 1,500 miles wide, extending from Leningrad to Odessa, and 3,000 miles deep, extending from Prague to the Ural Mountains."

Brown also described how the U.S.S.R. might attack the U.S. The bombs could be exploded in the Pacific, 1,000 miles west of California. Their radioactivity, drifting eastward, would lawnmower the whole U.S., reaching and sterilizing New York in about five days.

Tons of Neutrons. This week, on a similar broadcast, Brown repeated his shocker. Physicist Leo Szilard of Chicago added that 50 tons of neutrons released by hydrogen fusion could ring the earth with a radioactive dust layer capable of killing the earth's entire population. Physicists Frederick Seitz of the University of Illinois and Hans Bethe of Cornell, appearing on the same program, were more moderate, but they went along generally with their emphatic colleagues.

To this sort of talk, other equally informed physicists react with astonishment or distaste. They point out that no one knows accurately how much continued radiation is needed to kill a man. There may be preventives or cures. No one knows how H-bombs will work or how soon they can be made to work. Kindly critics say that Brown, Szilard et al. have been led by emotion to confuse the worst possibilities of the future with the sufficiently alarming present. Some, not so kindly, charge that the alarmists, however well-intentioned they may be, are helping to frighten the U.S. public into forcing dangerous concessions to Russia.*

No scientist pooh-poohs the hydrogen bomb. The uranium bomb itself is a fearful weapon, capable of cutting the guts out of a great city. Hydrogen bombs, if they work as well as expected, will be many times more fearsome than uranium bombs. But there is an enormous difference between a bomb that will disrupt a city and kill its people and one that will wipe all life off the face of a continent or the earth.

Both uranium and hydrogen bombs will leave some radioactive residues. If a uranium bomb is exploded near the ground (as the first one at Alamogordo), the "fission products" make a small area radioactive for a long time. But most of the fission products rise high in the atmosphere. When the bomb is exploded 1,80b ft. above the ground (as at Hiroshima), virtually all the fission products are carried up, where they do no damage.

The most serious radioactive aftereffects were those from Test Baker at Bikini, where a uranium bomb was exploded underwater. The water of the lagoon and the lagoon's bottom stayed "hot" for a long time. But even then the effects were limited to a relatively small area.

Special Bomb. Hydrogen bombs, too, will leave radioactive residues. The uranium detonators will contribute their usual fission products. The "fusion" of hydrogen isotopes will probably free a great number of neutrons. Some of the neutrons will react with the nitrogen of the atmosphere (78%), turning it into radioactive but comparatively mild carbon 14. Others, reacting with elements in the bomb's casing, will form more dangerous isotopes. It would be possible to supply special elements for the neutrons to react with.

This might increase the amount of active materials created by the bomb, but it would probably reduce the bomb's overall destructiveness.

According to many well-informed physicists, it would be extremely difficult to design a bomb whose radioactive residues would do serious damage at a distance. The mushroom clouds created by a bomb look big in a photograph, but they would be specks if imposed on the map of a continent. To cover the U.S. or the U.S.S.R., such clouds would have to be diluted to the point of virtual harmlessness.

Inconstant Winds. Another flaw in the continent-scorching theory: winds do not blow uniformly from west to east. Their general drift is that way in the north temperate zone, especially at high altitude, but they usually blow every-which-way on any particular day. They cannot be depended upon to carry a killing cloud across a hostile continent.

All scientists admit that a sufficient number of hydrogen bombs (or uranium bombs, for that matter) might raise the radioactivity of the entire atmosphere. But to kill the world's inhabitants, the amount of reactive material used would have to be improbably large.

At present, scientists know about as much about hydrogen bombs as they knew about the uranium bomb in 1941. They will know more when one has been tested. If the H-bomb succeeds, it will be sufficiently terrible, with no need for exaggeration. But not for a long time, if ever, will any kind of bomb threaten the life of a whole continent.

Drs. Seitz and Bethe made one telling complaint: that the prevailing atmosphere of fearful secrecy makes it almost impossible for the full facts to be known. If the world does acquire the ability to commit suicide, the world's people, they insist, should be told.

*In the famed nursery tale, Chicken Little was hit on the head by an acorn. She thought that the sky was falling. Her friends Ducky Lucky and Goosey Loosey got panicky too. Then Foxey Loxey led them all into his bombproof cave and ate them up.

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