The Loaded Question

Like a patient sitting in a doctor's anteroom while the specialists discuss his case, the U.S. public last week sat outside while the President, his military, scientific and diplomatic advisers debated whether to construct the hydrogen bomb, the most powerful explosive weapon the world has yet dreamed of.

The President's military counselors argued that the U.S. could be easily, quickly crippled by an enemy which could hurl H-bombs without risk of retaliation in kind, that furthermore the H-bomb in the hands of the U.S. would be the best possible insurance against war. They added that the cost of an H-bomb project to the U.S. would run closer to $300 million than the first guess of $2 billion to $4 billion.

There were indications that the President had all but decided to signal a go-ahead to the scientists. If they were successful--as they believed they might be--the H-bomb would draw on the sun's method of transforming hydrogen into helium (TIME, Jan. 16) to produce an explosion dwarfing the atomic bomb blasts loosed at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini, Eniwetok. One such H-bomb might spread destruction over a radius of ten miles.

At least one man in the high councils argued against prompt action on the new weapon. David Lilienthal, whose views are highly respected by Harry Truman, had stayed beyond his appointed date of resignation as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission primarily to debate the subject, and last week was even at loggerheads with at least one of his own fellow commissioners. The peace posture of the U.S. would sag shamefully before the world, he argued, if the U.S. started the H-bomb without first making a new and genuine attempt in the U.N. to get international control of atomic energy.

Nobody who cherished survival doubted the deep wisdom of exploring every U.N. byway or even, if there were the slightest chance that it would do any good, of discussing the subject with Stalin (the President denied that he was planning a direct approach to the Russians). But since the principle of the hydrogen bomb was also known to the Russians, temporizing was risky and might be fatal. The simple fact, unpleasant though it might be, was that if the Russians are likely to build an H-bomb, the U.S. will have to build it, too.

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