A Bomb of One's Own

In London recently, a tousled, youngish-looking man stepped into the empty vastness of a 50-passenger R.A.F. Hastings transport specially reserved for him. At Singapore, while the plane lay all night in the blaze of 50 searchlights, troops watched over the tousled man as he slept. A few days later, his plane journey over, the man boarded a Royal Navy frigate at an obscure port in northwest Australia and headed for a rendezvous 50 miles away.

The destination of the guarded man was a bleak chain of coral reefs and windblown wastes inhabited by lizards and black rats--the Monte Bello Islands, off the northwest coast of Australia. There, while planes crisscrossed overhead and a flotilla of eleven Australian warships plied the nearby sea to keep the curious away, Britain last week made its great gamble.

Out in the Cold. Six years ago, as the atomic age mushroomed, Britain suddenly found herself out in the cold without a bomb or blueprint. By act of Congress, foreign scientists were barred from U.S. atom laboratories, unceremoniously ending the wartime cooperation that led to the A-bomb discovery.

Austerity-bound Britain had few dollars to spare, but it did have a major asset named William George Penney. He was the man so securely flown to Monte Bello. Born 43 years ago in Gibraltar, the son of an army sergeant major, Penney got a top-grade education in nuclear physics by making a clean sweep of the best fellowships, including one at the University of Wisconsin. He worked at Los Alamos, sat in the observation plane (the only British scientist) when the third A-bomb exploded over Nagasaki.

A Z-Shaped Blast. The first Bikini A-bomb tests established his reputation for sagacity on a shoestring. Disdaining the elaborate, expensive apparatus that his U.S. colleagues set up to measure the blast, Penney filled 1,000 empty gasoline tins with sea water and sealed them with cardboard flaps. When, as he predicted, the bomb knocked out the official instruments, the amiable Briton studied his crushed cans, measured the lost water, "did a bit of a sum" and came up with the answer. The U.S. offered him four times his $8,000 salary as chief of Britain's armaments research, but Dr. Penney preferred his country's credit to America's cash.

Last week his country's credit came to Dr. Penney. Early one morning, as he watched over a special TV screen in the bowels of a naval vessel, he saw a bright flash, like a setting sun, light up the skies, followed by a dense, turbulent cloud that hugged the ground and slowly zigzagged upward in a Z shape curiously unlike the usual mushroom. Smaller than the usual U.S. blast, it was reportedly designed to verify a new technique aimed at reducing the amount of fissionable material needed to produce an explosion.

A few minutes later, 14,000 miles away, alerted by secret code, a beaming, triumphant Winston Churchill went charging down the corridors of Balmoral Castle, where he was a guest, to tell his vacationing Queen the great news. In London the Admiralty issued a scant, proud statement: "A British atomic weapon has been successfully exploded in the Monte Bello Islands."

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