Atomic Intervention

With the coming of the atom bomb, the U.S. press found itself confronted with one of the gravest and most difficult jobs in its history. It had the prime duty of giving readers the best possible under standing of the atomic age and of the technical processes that had brought it about. On the other hand, it had the responsibility of not giving away any information that might be of value to the enemy.

Last week AEC decided that one press enterprise had overstepped the danger line. It ordered the monthly Scientific American (circ. 78,878) to delete four technical paragraphs in a 5,000-word article on the hydrogen bomb by Dr. Hans A. Bethe, Cornell physicist and wartime chief of theoretical physics at the Los Alamos laboratory. Although the April issue containing the article had already gone to press, AEC summarily "requested" the presses stopped--the first time it had taken such a drastic step. It burned 3,000 copies already run off, melted down the type and impounded every galley proof and the manuscript of the original story.

Although Gerard Piel, publisher of the Scientific American, had consented to the deletions, he protested that everything removed from the article had been "widely published and is well known to nuclear physicists the world over." Dr. Bethe confirmed this, and added: "In my opinion, it was in the interest of the AEC to have it printed, but the AEC disagreed. That is their business. I have no complaint."

As published last week, Dr. Bethe's article was an exposition of the political and destructive effects rather than the technical problems of the hydrogen bomb. While it is not true, he wrote (in the uncensored portion of his article), that the bomb could set the world's atmosphere afire, it "would cause almost complete destruction of buildings up to a radius of ten miles . . . Chicago with all its suburbs and most of their inhabitants [could be] wiped out in a single flash." Bethe asked for new efforts to reach an atomic agreement with Russia, and a unilateral declaration, by the President or Congress, that the U.S. will not be the first to use the bomb.

It was clear that AEC was not so much concerned with what Dr. Bethe had written as with the fact that it was written by a man who was privy to almost all the work done on the bomb. In AEC's view, technical expositions coming from such a person, even if it was material previously published by lesser-known physicists, would give the Russians "verification" of the data.

The censorship underlined the drastic tightening a fortnight ago in AEC's security regulations. AEC has instructed all scientists and employees connected with atomic projects not to give out any information or discuss technical aspects of the hydrogen bomb even though the material is already in print. In view of this, it looked as if the press might find AEC's blue pencil busier in the future.

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