Into the Hydrogen Age

At dusk on a drowsy Sunday, reporters filed hurriedly past the guards at the Atomic Energy Commission building in Washington for a special announcement. The announcement was muffled in the AEC's usual cautious language, but its import was still overwhelming: the U.S. has succeeded in a test explosion of a hydrogen weapon in mid-Pacific.

The AEC's report amounted to official verification of a story told much better in scores of letters mailed home by members of the H-bomb task force (TIME, Nov. 17). The bomb (as the letter writers flatly called it) was loaded aboard a Navy ship at San Francisco under heavy guard. It was placed in a special compartment, the door was welded shut, and heavy chains were welded across the door.

The bomb was unloaded at a small island, about 35 miles from Eniwetok. Ships of the task force ringed the island at a radius of about 30 miles on the morning of the explosion. Zero hour was 7:15 a.m., Nov. i. The men put on dark glasses, turned their backs and covered their eyes. Then the bomb exploded with the light of "at least ten suns," as a ship's navigator reported.

The letters from the task force were uncensored, and excited wives and parents passed many of them along to local newspapers. AEC Chairman Gordon Dean said that the letter-writing would be investigated, promising "possible disciplinary action or prosecution." But such talk sounded like bureaucratic door-locking after the story was out. The place to begin censorship was in the ships' mail rooms, and no such censorship was set up.

Mastery of the H-bomb meant that the U.S., in its search for ever more powerful weapons, had caught something of the secret of the sun's own power. It was the kind of event to date the beginning of a new era. But the men who watched the test--including a sailor who drew a diagram of the explosion in his letter (see NEWS IN PICTURES)--caught the meaning better than any of the headlines. They simply called the explosion "Lulu."

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