Biggest Yet

A U.S. Air Force 8-36 droned through the sky 35,000 ft. above Yucca Flat, Nev. just before dawn one morning last week, and slowly opened its barn-sized bomb-bay doors. Forty-two seconds later, at 4:15 a.m., the desert below exploded into noonday brilliance. For five miles around, acres of Joshua trees, cactus and sagebrush burst into flame. A sturdy frame house ten miles from the explosion collapsed. In San Francisco, 600 miles to the west, people saw the incandescent flash; in Pasadena, 250 miles southwest, they heard the explosion as a rumble in the distance.

The first of the day's two great demonstrations of atomic progress (the second: announcement of a breeder reactor--see SCIENCE), the explosion at Yucca Flat was caused by the most powerful A-bomb ever set off in the U.S. With an estimated explosive force of 40,000 tons of T.N.T., the bomb produced an initial flash of unusual length (more than five seconds), which suggested that U.S. scientists had either changed the fissionable materials used or had discovered a new and probably more efficient method of detonation.

In budget testimony released last week, Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Gordon Dean disclosed that the Savannah River, S.C. plant for large-scale production of H-bomb materials had begun partial operations. Already making atomic weapons so fast that it is running out of storage space, the A.E.C. plans to up production of both weapons and fissionable materials more than 25% in fiscal 1954.

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