The Clean Bomb

Three of the nation's leading atomic scientists were ushered into the White House one morning last week by Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss for a 45-minute conference with the President. The scientists: Edward Teller, credited with the theoretical discovery that led to a successful H-bomb, Ernest O. Lawrence, Nobel Prizewinning director of the University of California's radiation laboratory at Livermore, Calif., and Mark M. Mills, physicist and head of the lab's theoretical division. They brought a report of grave but potentially hopeful meaning. In the lab at Livermore, they told the President, scientists have found how to make H-bombs that will be 96% freer from radioactive fallout than the first models. Given more time and more testing, they added, the U.S. could make a truly nonradioactive weapon, "the clean bomb."

Implicit in the report was the new military fact that the U.S. could soon have H-bombs like "tremendously more powerful TNT'' (as Lawrence put it), to destroy limited military objectives rather than to contaminate whole provinces and nations. Beyond that, the meaning of the scientists' report was that the U.S. is approaching a major development in atomic power for peace: how to produce the vast energy of H-bomb fusion--perhaps controlled energy--by means other than using radioactive, atomic fission to set off the fusion process. -

The Scientists Say . . . The scientific finding came to the .President at a critical point in the Administration's thinking on nuclear tests and disarmament. Recently, in the National Security Council and in press conference statements, he has been hinting at trying for an agreement with the Russians on suspending nuclear tests, with only some monitory safeguards. Many of his leading advisers--notably Chairman Arthur Radford of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Dulles--were skeptical. But now the scientific finding was that the U.S.'s and world's best interest--for atoms for peace as well as for war--clearly lay in more nuclear tests rather than fewer. The scientists say, " 'Give us four or five more years to test each step of our development,' " the President reported at last week's news conference, " 'and we will produce an absolutely clean bomb.'

"Moreover, [the scientists] go on to say this. If you are going to get the full value out of the atomic science in peaceful development . . . and you want to make certain that you are getting the best out of this new science for the peaceful uses of mankind, these tests must go on. So you realize when you are making these agreements to stop [the tests] that you are not doing something that may not have an adverse effect, finally, on what we hope to get out of this."

Breakthrough's Edge. In the wake of the President's statement, some critics, e.g., New York Herald Tribune Columnist Stewart Alsop, assumed that the "hard line" staffers who doubt the value of Russian promises on disarmament had won some sort of "battle for the President's mind." The Alsop story was that Strauss brought Scientists Teller, Lawrence and Mills to see the President to clinch the arguments for keeping the tests. Actually the scientists came to see Ike in his capacity of chief of state. And they came under the auspices not only of the AEC's Strauss, but of two leading members of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, New York's Republican Congressman W. Sterling Cole and Washington's Democratic Senator Henry ("Scoop") Jackson, who had cottoned on to what the scientists were up to while visiting the Livermore plant.

The new scientific fact, overhanging and overshadowing the disarmament talks in London (see FOREIGN NEWS) and the disarmament debate in Washington, was that the U.S. was on the verge of a major breakthrough in atomic-power development that might well shape days to come. To achieve the breakthrough, as the President put it, "these tests must go on."

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