Good & Bad Atoms

Two atom men last week took hard, scientific looks at the future. One envisioned happier times ahead; the other, from. where he sat, could see doomsday.

The Wheels Whir. In Manhattan, Dr. J. A. Hutcheson, associate director of Westinghouse Research Laboratories, pondered the question that fascinates power engineers. "We can get power out of uranium," said Dr. Hutcheson, "but we don't know how to reduce it to usable, practical form."

The only schemes proposed thus far have substituted a chain-reacting pile for the furnace of an ordinary powerhouse. The pile's heat will generate steam to run a turbine. But this, thinks Dr. Hutcheson, may be only a better-than-nothing solution, carrying coal-era thinking into the atomic age.

It would be far better (and cheaper) to get electricity direct. How? Piles give their energy in a snarl of assorted forms: zig-zagging neutrons, high-speed beta particles, heat, light, gamma rays. Confined within the pile's thick shield, they all simmer down to heat, the most "degraded" form of energy. It takes the costly boiler-turbine-generator combination to "elevate" the heat into usable electricity.

This detour into pre-atomic technology may not always be necessary. Beta rays (streams of electrons) are nothing but high-voltage, direct current electricity. If a pile could be designed to give chiefly beta rays, it would be comparatively easy to coax them into wires.

Dr. Hutcheson anticipates no such, simple solution. "What we need," he says, "is some new idea, which we cannot imagine now. Some time in the future an atomic powerhouse may be nothing but a black box with electric terminals on it."

Such "black boxes," gushing city-size floods of electricity, would mark the real beginning of a peacetime atomic age, with unlimited power everywhere at extremely low cost.

The Cities Perish. While Dr. Hutcheson speculated on the atomic Dr. Jekyll, other experts worried about the atomic Mr. Hyde. In the current issue of the Pulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a calmly horrifying article by Ansley Coale: "Reducing Vulnerability to Atomic Attack."* Prepared with the advice of a distinguished scientific committee (including farmed Physicists I. I. Rabi and Henry DeWolf Smyth), the article arrives at a dismal conclusion: there isn't really much hope for anyone--once the atom bombs start falling.

Mr. Coale considers all the possibilities. If war starts after a spell of international atomic control, there will be a period when few bombs are available. Each nation will frantically start producing more. At the same time, each nation will scatter its population, bury its factories underground, conceal its command centers, stockpile materials and equipment against the day when no more can be produced. The process will not protect the people, but it may allow the nation to preserve some of its strength while under atomic attack, and scrape together enough bombs to wipe out its enemy.

If there is no international control, the end will come much more quickly. Each great power will have accumulated a large stockpile of bombs. Its population will be (or should be) already dispersed, its industries underground. "But . . ." says Coale, "it is difficult to outline measures which would reduce deaths below seven or eight figures if x thousand bombs were delivered on the most densely populated areas of the United States." There should be deep, underground shelters, specially designed buildings, protected food stocks. Eventually, the "concentrated spatial pattern of industrial nations" should be readjusted. But that is only another delay: "... Any readjustment may well be overcome by increases in the number and effectiveness of the atomic bombs in the arsenals of the world."

* Soon to be published as a book by the Princeton University Press.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.