The Road Beyond Elugelab

(See Cover) In 1946, Dr. Hans Thirring, a Viennese scholar without access to secret information, read certain published reports that could be found in any physics library. Going about the scientist's business of mating known facts to breed new facts, Dr. Thirring made and published calculations leading to the conclusion that out of lithium hydride could be constructed a bomb many times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. At the end of his austere equations, Dr. Thirring's scientific article flamed up into a prayer: "God protect the country over which a six-ton bomb of lithium hydride will ever explode."

Last week the U.S. learned some details of lithium hydride (or equivalent) explosions that had been set off--by the Russians and by the Americans. It learned that the force and horror of atomic weapons had entered a new dimension. It saw by television that the first full-dress H-blast (Operation Ivy) had turned the mid-Pacific sandspit named Elugelab into a submarine crater. While the shock and the prayer that Dr. Thirring had felt were both present in the communication of the news, the U.S. was given--and received--the information as calmly as it might hear of any other scientific discovery.

President Eisenhower at his weekly press conference called upon a calm-voiced guest to give the news, and Lewis L. Strauss, chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, made his report sound as matter-of-fact as the minutes of a previous meeting. Yet there was no headline big enough to measure the implications of what Strauss had to say.

In a nine-minute prepared statement, Strauss noted that "there is good reason to believe" that the Russians had gone to work on a thermonuclear bomb "substantially before we did . . . We now fully know we possess no monopoly of capability in this awesome field." The current series of U.S. H-bomb tests had thus far been successful "and enormous potential has been added to our military posture." As to the reports that the March 1 blast (TIME. March 22) had got out of hand, no such thing was true--"the yield was about double that of the calculated estimate--a margin of error not incompatible with a totally new weapon."

Educated Guesses. A few moments after Strauss had finished his statement, he got into a question & answer exchange with reporters--an exchange memorable for its substance and for its tone of understatement.

A Reporter: Many people in Congress, I think many elsewhere, have been reaching out and grasping for some information as to what happens when the H-bomb goes off ...

Strauss: Well, the nature of an H-bomb is that, in effect, it can be made to be as large as you wish, as large as the military requirement demands, that is to say, an H-bomb can be made as--large enough to take out a city.

Chorus: What?

Strauss: To take out a city, to destroy a city.

A Reporter: How big a city?

Strauss: Any city.

Reporter: Any city? New York?

Strauss: The metropolitan area, yes [i.e., the heart of Manhattan, as he later elaborated].

Scientific pundits, aided by some technical advice from uncensored Europe, took up the stark facts where Strauss left off. Their educated guesses: 1) Last month's two thermonuclear tests may have proved that H-bombs can be "manufactured far more simply than previously believed (see SCIENCE).

2) U.S. samplings (upper air readings, seismographic recordings, etc.) indicate that the Russians made this discovery seven months before the U.S. did.

3) The discovery means that any nation with a small supply of A-bombs may soon be able to use each A-bomb as a trigger for a thermonuclear bomb, thus easily and inexpensively multiplying the power of each A-bomb a thousandfold.

4) The U.S. still has a big lead in quantity of atomic explosive and its Air Force has a better chance than the enemy's of getting weapons on target. But this superiority soon will be reduced in effect because the inferior power may be able to cripple the superior one. Both might be smashed, but neither has any sure or even probable defense against the other.

The Hand Wringers. There it was--long forecast in rumor and speculation, but now clearly defined. What was mankind to think or say about it? The first and loudest reactions were not necessarily the wisest--nor were they typical.

P: In Britain's House of Commons, 130 Laborites impulsively signed a petition asking the government "to take the initiative in every form they consider advisable in order to prevent the explosion of any further thermonuclear bombs." CALL OFF THAT BOMB, cried the hysterical wing of the British press.

P: In India's Parliament, Prime Minister Nehru called for an end to H-bomb tests, and tried to drum up Asian racism by noting that most atomic damage had been wreaked on Asians.

P: In Chicago, Editor Eugene Rabino-witch of the influential (among scientists) Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists wrote in his editorial for the May issue: "Atomic retaliation has become something no sane person should ever consider as a rational answer to any political or military situation (short of direct Soviet aggression against the U.S. or Western Europe--if then)."

P: In a letter to the New York Times, Author-Critic Lewis (The Condition of Man) Mumford wrote: "Submission to Communist totalitarianism would still be far wiser than the final destruction of civilization . . . Let us cease all further experiments with even more horrifying weapons of destruction, lest our own self-induced fears further upset our mental balance . . . Let us deal with our own massive sins and errors . . . and have the courage to speak up ... against the methodology of barbarism to which we are now committed. If as a nation we have become mad, it is time for the world to take note of that madness."

Who Is Wildly Wrong? Emotional reaction along these lines was sharply opposed to the reaction of the U.S. Government, which knew a year and a half ago most of the facts that the public learned last week about the H-bomb. The Government, working with these facts, did not recoil in horror and abandon the new weapon. Instead, it built upon its H-bomb knowledge the Dulles policy of possible "massive retaliation" against further Communist acts of aggression.

Who was tragically, wildly wrong? Eisenhower and Dulles? Or last week's hand-wringers?

The answer--important for all men alive--lay not in the H-bomb alone, but in the whole world picture of which the bomb is a part.

The nature of Communism was fixed before any atomic bomb was made. Out of that nature came acts of Communist aggression that are facts of the world picture--facts as hard, as definite, as explosive as any bomb. The Communists conducted their experiments in aggression not on remote Pacific Ocean atolls but upon populous lands where anciently established peoples were trying to live their lives in freedom. Not tuna, but men and women by the millions, were deliberately killed or contaminated by terror in the Communist experimental aggressions in Estonia, Poland, Greece, China, Malaya, Indo-China. These explosive experiments have already cost the world the price--in lives and in dollars--of many large cities, perhaps of more cities than bombs will ever destroy. And there is no sign that the Communist experiments in aggression will stop of their own accord at any point short of world domination.

Winston Churchill believed, and forcefully said at Fulton, Mo. in 1946, that only the U.S. atomic-bomb superiority deterred the Communists from much larger aggressions. This Churchill doctrine became the basic conviction underlying the policy of the non-Communist world. The Communists supplied further evidence of its truth by a series of aggressions which in their calculations were not quite large enough to invite atomic retaliation. They backed away from their grabs at Berlin and Greece (both of which they could have taken by Red land forces), but they managed to localize the free world's resistance to their aggressions in China, Korea, Malaya and Indo-China.

The Dulles policy of possible "massive retaliation" was developed as an extension of the Churchill-Truman policy, as an answer to the Communist success in evading effective punishment for piecemeal aggression.

Agonizing Premises. While the atom was playing this passive, but partially preservative, role on the world scene, a crisis arose among the Americans responsible for top decisions of atomic production. The story of that crisis contains in embryo all the doubts, all the controversy that now turn around the public disclosures of the new bomb's power. And that story also contains the record of the quiet, courageous decisions that a few men had to make alone, that millions are now asked to accept on the same agonizing and inescapable premises.

In September 1949 the Russians achieved an atomic explosion. By that time, some U.S. scientists were convinced that a much more powerful H-bomb could be made by the U.S. or by the Russians. The Russian explosion, threatening to take away the U.S. deterrent power, caused some U.S. leaders to propose that work on an H-bomb begin promptly. David Lilienthal, then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was against the proposal. So was the powerful General Advisory Committee of Atomic Scientists, headed by Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer. This group had long lists of reasons, ranging from morals to technology. AECommissioner Lewis Strauss (TIME, Sept. 21) argued against the majority that the Russians would most certainly try to make H-bombs, and that if they succeeded, the U.S. A-bomb pile would be valueless as a deterrent.

Short Cuts. Strauss was supported in the technological side of his case by two nonconforming physicists, Dr. Ernest 0. Lawrence, director of the University of California's Radiation Laboratory, and Dr. Edward Teller, a young theorist who had tentatively explored the thermonuclear (H-bomb) idea at Los Alamos during World War II.

In a battle that split the AEC, Strauss and his converts finally got a go-ahead from President Truman on Jan. 31, 1950. Teller became director of the program, and in a phenomenally short time found short cuts through Oppenheimer's technical objections. By January 1951 the AEC was ready for preliminary tests and launched a task force of 12,000 men for Eniwetok and Operation Greenhouse.

The day before the trial shot--in late April--Teller climbed a tall tower to check the delicate mechanism. That night, after he had confidently briefed a delegation of Congressmen, he moodily confided his misgivings to his friend Ernest Lawrence. "It won't work," he growled. Lawrence snapped back: "Edward, I'll bet you five dollars that it does."

Just before dawn next day, the trial thermonuclear device was exploded on schedule. But not until they got in to check the instruments did the physicists know whether the proper percentage of tritium and deuterium had burned, so that they could decide whether their next step had a chance of success. Lawrence had not heard the details when Teller met him late in the afternoon and, under the tight secrecy regulations. Teller could not tell him. But quietly, Teller passed Lawrence a five-dollar bill. Just as quietly, Lawrence clasped Teller's hand in congratulations.

"Why Do You Ask?" In the fall of 1952, Teller was put in charge of a new $11.5 million H-bomb laboratory at Livermore, Calif., 32 miles from Lawrence's University of California laboratory. While the U.S. was in the midst of the 1952 presidential election campaign, a vast new task force began moving on the Marshall Islands for a full-scale test of a complete thermonuclear "device." This was dubbed Operation Ivy. Teller could not spare the time from his laboratory to watch the shot (the AEC sometimes has to wait weeks for suitable weather conditions), but he kept in touch by coded messages.

One night, under considerable strain from waiting for news, Teller and his laboratory manager Herb York popped into Livermore's Golden Rule Creamery for dinner. On the counter Teller noticed an automatic fortunetelling machine bearing a sign: "SWAMI. Ask me a question." Jokingly, he scribbled on a piece of paper: "Do we really understand what we are trying to do?" Back popped the answer: "There seems to be a trend of doubt." Teller tried again: "Will Ivy be a success?" The answer: "Why do you ask? Of course."

Even Score. Ivy was a success, as every TV viewer could plainly see last week. Beneath a lethal fireball 3 1/4 miles in diameter, the "shot" island, Elugelab, was transmuted into an ocean hole 175 ft. deep. But Ivy was a cumbersome, complicated test device that no airplane could carry.

On Aug. 12, 1953, the U.S. monitoring system picked up evidence of a Russian thermonuclear explosion that, if the educated guessers are right, was from a device far less complex, far more economical and far more "transportable" than Ivy's. Then, last month, came the U.S. explosion that Strauss described as being twice the estimated size. It became famous prematurely because an unexpected wind shift showered a Japanese fishing boat with radioactive ash. But the March 1 explosion (and the one that followed on March 26) had even more serious implications: in the global game of the scientists, where scores are read in terms of seismographic reports and air samplings, it notified the Russians that the score was more than even. The U.S. deterrent power against Communist aggression had not been shattered.

The Next Questions. This was the road by which the U.S. came to Elugelab. But what of the road ahead?

Is the H-bomb a morally permissible weapon? What of the possibilities of its control by international law? What does it do to the strategic concepts that have guided the U.S. and its allies? Does it require a new appraisal of defense policy? How does it affect the U.S. political and economic objectives in the world?

All of these questions had presented themselves to top officials of the U.S. when first the H-bomb became a reality. Now they have been thrown into public debate to be reviewed and, if possible, settled.

Each level at which the H-bomb raises a question seems to slope downward to the next level, descending from some of the broadest and oldest questions of ethics and theology to some of the most specific problems of practical politics and economics.

The Moral Level. Ironically, some of the loudest cries that the H-bomb should be abandoned on moral grounds, that even experiments with it should be stopped, came from those groups most affected by the rationalist or scientific--as distinguished from the traditional and religious--viewpoint. The basis of modern rationalist morality is largely statistical (see Dr. Kinsey), and the difference between the effect of the H-bomb and other weapons is also statistical, quantitative.

The older morality, still dominant in the U.S., and in most other western lands, finds no moral problem in the H-bomb that was not present in the Abomb, none in the A-bomb that was not present in the mass bombing of cities, none in these that is not present in war itself, and no grave problems in war that are not present in the basic question of the permissibility of force in any circumstance. This does not mean that the traditional morality does not meet a host of appalling questions in the whole area of when and how force may be morally used. It does. But it meets them on the basis of motive and law and of actual choice available. It looks at the man, not his weapon; at the circumstances in which he uses it, not at the number of the slain.

Judging from a nationwide sampling of this week's sermons, the U.S. clergy held with firmness to traditional Christian (and Jewish and Mohammedan) principles on this point. The news from Elugelab did not set off a wave of pacifist sentimentality. A passage in a sermon by Dr. Louie De Votie Newton, pastor of Atlanta's Druid Hills Baptist Church, was typical of the main strain of comment on the H-bomb. Said Dr. Newton:

"The thing to do now is for ministers and the press and radio and everyone else concerned with public opinion to undertake to fortify the people spiritually for whatever comes, now that the thing is upon us ... A sense of spiritual poise is essential if we are to be ready for whatever happens ... In the H-bomb era we can't go back to muskets. We've got to maintain anything essential to our defense, the H-bomb or any other kind of bomb."

The Legal Level. But if this was the moral answer, where was the practical ground upon which hope could function?

Civilized man, faced with a public danger of man's own making, turns to law; the U.S. and its allies turned there very early in their efforts to deal with the danger of atomic weapons. On June 14, 1946, the U.S. proposed in the United Nations the Baruch plan. Main features: i) the U.S. would turn its (then) atomic monopoly over to an international agency (with no veto power for members), and 2) the agreements of the atomic powers would be guaranteed by a workable system of inspection. This was no show-window design; it was perhaps the most remarkable offer in the history of nations, made in all good faith at a time when U.S. military power was demobilizing, and the U.S. was thus offering to give up its major weapon in a world where the Soviets still maintained great military power.

Down through the years the Russians balked at both control and inspection, all the while shouting piously for a flat ban on the use of the atomic weapons (which would have been easy to check in the goldfish-bowl U.S., but impossible to check in uninspected Russia). In November 1951, at the U.N. meeting in Paris, the U.S., France and Britain changed their proposals in the light of the growing importance of the A-bomb as a balance to Russia's land armies. The new proposal called for 1) a step-by-step scaling-down of atomic and conventional armaments together, 2) continuous inspection, and 3) international control of the atom.

To this new proposal Vishinsky made his famous reply: "I could hardly sleep all last night. I could not sleep because I kept laughing." The stalemate was broken again by the U.S. last December, when, before the U.N., President Eisenhower suggested private conversations on control, and proposed the creation of an international pool of fissionable material for peaceful purposes. This plan thus far has borne no tangible results. Last week the U.S., France and Britain proposed a new meeting of the U.N. Disarmament Commission for resumed closed-door discussion.

All the good reasons that the U.S. and its allies had for making these proposals have been multiplied by the existence of the H-bomb. But the one reservation held by them has also been multiplied. Any international law controlling atomic weapons must be enforceable and it must be enforced. To disarm the non-Communist world and leave the Communist world armed with atomic weapons is not, on the record, a likely road to peace.

What the legal question boils down to is the Communist willingness or unwillingness to accept international restraint against aggression. Such acceptance is not impossible. Communism will not change, but Communists, being men, may change. The hope of a legal solution to the H-bomb lies in efforts, over a varied field, to change the minds of the Kremlin's leaders. Conceivably, even they may be made to realize that aggression will not pay.

The H-bomb's existence requires the U.S. to put much more strongly the case for international control of atomic weapons. Such control might impair unlimited national sovereignty as the world now knows it. It might imply a measure of world government. But the U.S. need not flinch at this prospect. Its own political history encourages the chance of a constitutional solution of a force so big that it calls for supranational control.

The Strategic Level. But there are no present signs that the Communists are moving toward acceptance of a legal solution. Meanwhile, the non-Communist world must protect itself, and in such a way as to exert maximum persuasion on the Communists to take the legal solution.

The H-bomb's existence does not vastly change the strategic situation. The U.S.'s resolve to maintain atomic superiority was reflected last week when the House increased appropriations to the AEC. The time may come when the race for superiority will be meaningless, but it has not come yet.

The Defense-Policy Level. President Eisenhower's New Look in national defense was shaped with full official knowledge of the H-bomb. That accounts for its emphasis on retaliatory striking power in the air. But the H-bomb does not lead to the conclusion that the U.S. must rely on H-bomb striking power alone. Secretary Dulles has repeatedly said that Red aggression in the future will be met with weapons chosen by the U.S. Some aggression might be met locally or countered elsewhere by non-atomic weapons. Such instruments of defense may be of special value in the political struggle which the U.S. must wage.

The Political Level. There is a vast agenda of political objectives, ranging from the defeat of the Communist parties in Western Europe to lowering the fever of the Israel-Arab hatred. What these objectives add up to is a strengthening of the health and unity of the free world. They are made more, not less, urgent by the existence of the H-bomb. The basic reasoning that relates the political agenda to the H-bomb runs: the greater the free world's weakness or division, the greater the danger of Red aggression; the greater the temptation to aggression, the more the danger of war--and therefore of atomic war--grows.

The Economic Level. In most of Europe, nearly all of Asia and in other areas, the political strength of the non-Communist world is sapped by economic conditions basically unacceptable to the people. It is not a simple question of poverty--almost all peoples are less poor than they have ever been in history.

Economic problems have taken an urgent and dangerous form in the presence of the possibility--evidenced by the U.S. itself--of enormous progress toward prosperity. Frustrated, this new hope becomes bitterness, political instability, even Communism. The U.S., whose example helped create the ferment, needs to go much further than it has gone in channeling economic discontent into practical programs for a rapidly rising productivity in the free world. The H-bomb solves nothing in this area, but progress in the economic field may help solve the problem raised by the H-bomb.

A Higher Challenge. What the H-bomb does is to restate age-old questions in new and much more urgent terms. Long ago, man got the news that something would surely kill him; that this was likely to be the evil in himself or another man; that law restraining evil was his hope and his duty; that sound politics and practical economics are the means to law, order and freedom; that the most desperate circumstances can call forth the noblest response. The road beyond Elugelab leads to a higher level of danger, of challenge, of opportunity.

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