Science: Hydrogen Hysteria

Not long ago many scientists feared that the public was forgetting the menace of the atom bomb. What many responsible scientists fear now is public hysteria caused by exaggeration of the destructiveness of the hydrogen bomb.

Last week, on a radio round table sponsored by the University of Chicago, Associate Professor Harrison Brown sprang a chiller to top all chillers. The blast effects of hydrogen bombing, Brown told his nationwide audience, will be only the beginning; the radioactive aftereffects will be far worse. Hydrogen explosions, he said, will fill the air with fiercely radiating isotopes. They will drift with the wind, he believes, like a swarm of invisible locusts, killing people, animals, insects, plants.

Take a Continent. Warming to his subject, he told just how the U.S. might attack the U.S.S.R. All that is necessary, he said, is to explode large hydrogen bombs on a line extending north & south across Europe. The radioactivity "would be carried eastward by the winds, destroying all life within a strip 1,500 miles wide, extending from Leningrad to Odessa, and 3,000 miles deep, extending from Prague to the Ural Mountains."

Brown also described how the U.S.S.R. might attack the U.S. The bombs could be exploded in the Pacific, 1,000 miles west of California. Their radioactivity, drifting eastward, would lawnmower the whole U.S., reaching and sterilizing New York in about five days.

Tons of Neutrons. This week, on a similar broadcast, Brown repeated his shocker. Physicist Leo Szilard of Chicago added that 50 tons of neutrons released by hydrogen fusion could ring the earth with a radioactive dust layer capable of killing the earth's entire population. Physicists Frederick Seitz of the University of Illinois and Hans Bethe of Cornell, appearing on the same program, were more moderate, but they went along generally with their emphatic colleagues.

To this sort of talk, other equally informed physicists react with astonishment or distaste. They point out that no one knows accurately how much continued radiation is needed to kill a man. There may be preventives or cures. No one knows how H-bombs will work or how soon they can be made to work. Kindly critics say that Brown, Szilard et al. have been led by emotion to confuse the worst possibilities of the future with the sufficiently alarming present. Some, not so kindly, charge that the alarmists, however well-intentioned they may be, are helping to frighten the U.S. public into forcing dangerous concessions to Russia.*

No scientist pooh-poohs the hydrogen bomb. The uranium bomb itself is a fearful weapon, capable of cutting the guts out of a great city. Hydrogen bombs, if they work as well as expected, will be many times more fearsome than uranium bombs. But there is an enormous difference between a bomb that will disrupt a city and kill its people and one that will wipe all life off the face of a continent or the earth.

Both uranium and hydrogen bombs will leave some radioactive residues. If a uranium bomb is exploded near the ground (as the first one at Alamogordo), the "fission products" make a small area radioactive for a long time. But most of the fission products rise high in the atmosphere. When the bomb is exploded 1,80b ft. above the ground (as at Hiroshima), virtually all the fission products are carried up, where they do no damage.