Largest Ever

Early one May morning, a roaring pillar of flame hurtled up over Eniwetok Atoll. In brief and terrible seconds the fireball blossomed into the mushrooming cloud that hovers like some sinister symbol over atomic explosions. Afterwards, as soon as things were reasonably safe, scientists, construction crews and military technicians from Joint Task Force Three swarmed ashore at the "target" island. They measured what was left to measure, studied the effects of the blast that had been seen as far as Kwajalein, 375 miles away, made ready to conduct still more tests. Then, after two years of work and two months of grim experiment, the atom armada came home. They had exploded the largest bomb ever.

Last week, in a press conference that managed to combine intense satisfaction over atomic progress with an earnest effort to quiet public misgivings on the subject, the AEC reported the achievements of "Operation Greenhouse."

Five years ago at Bikini, bombs had been detonated underwater and dropped from planes. This time, all the charges--and the AEC would not give the number --were fired from steel towers that vaporized in the fierce heat of the explosions. Radio-guided, pilotless planes flew in & around the blast areas, carrying sensitive instruments to register a wide variety of effects. On the ground, close by the tall towers, other devices responded to events that took place in less than a millionth of a second, transmitted their observations to remote recorders before vanishing in the swirling turbulence. Pigs, dogs and mice, placed at carefully computed points, were later studied to determine the biological effects of blast and radiation.

AEC Chairman Gordon Dean was careful to point out that the U.S. does not yet claim to have an H-bomb. But it was clear that the atom has come a long way since the early days at Alamogordo. To allay U.S. worries about being on the receiving end of weapons several times more powerful than those that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Brigadier General James Cooney, radiation safety adviser to the task force, said: "The immediate radiation hazard from [an] air burst disappears after the first two minutes. Rescue . . . work can begin immediately in any area where there is life."

This sounded more reassuring than it was: it assumed that atomic warfare would always be conducted with bombs that explode high above the ground. Lingering radiation from underwater explosions would be something else, and on this subject, AEC had nothing to say.

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