Bomb Away

After three years of scientific experiment (at a cost of some $200 million) and a storm of politico-moral argument that had risen to a shrill crescendo over the past fortnight, Britain last week dropped its first H-bomb off Christmas Island. 1,160 miles south of Hawaii.

The full force of detonation, estimated to be that of a million tons of TNT. was considerably muffled in the terse announcement by the Ministry of Supply, which said little more than that "the first explosion of a nuclear device in the present series took place yesterday in the Central Pacific at a high altitude." But there was still a shock wave of protest in its wake.

The Japanese government ordered its ambassador in London to file an expression of "strong regret" with the British, not forgetting to mention that Tokyo reserved full right to claim damages for any Japanese fishermen who may have been near by. Actually, the British testing area is twice as far from Japan as Bikini, but this did not stop thousands of Japanese students from rioting outside the British embassy in Tokyo.

In London's House of Commons the Laborite Opposition did its best to protest what it could not prevent. "Does the Prime Minister feel," asked one Labor M.P. in chilling irony, "that when, like the Russians, we have had our tests, we shall, again like the Russians, be in a position to assume the moral leadership of the world and propose that they be the last tests?" Prime Minister Macmillan was not to be jostled. "I am bound to say," he answered with a straight face, "that in discussing the matter of nuclear disarmament, we shall now be in a very much better bargaining position."

Beyond the facts released by the Air Ministry--that the bomb was dropped from a four-engined Vickers Valiant painted gleaming white--Macmillan would add only that "first indications are that the local fallout [of dangerous radioactive substances] was almost negligible."

Two days after the bomb dropped, Harold Steele, the bewildered, bespectacled Quaker chicken farmer from the west of England who volunteered to face radioactive death in the area as a protest, arrived unheralded in Tokyo to learn from reporters that the blast had already gone-off. "I'm greatly disappointed," he said. "This trip has cost me my entire life savings."

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