The Atom: Into the Open

The news that buzzed through Washington last week marked another awesome milestone in the onrush of the atomic age. The confirmed facts: in the drab wastes of the Negev desert, tiny, semi-industrialized Israel, with the help of France, is building a 24,000-kw. nuclear reactor with the capacity to produce plutonium, a key ingredient for both a fission and hydrogen bomb. By 1964, estimated some U.S. atom experts, Israel could in theory set off a killingly effective atomic blast.

The news was cause for worry—not that anyone thought that Israel's David Ben-Gurion is less to be trusted with nuclear weapons than Khrushchev. The point is that any nation of any size with brains and money can now set itself up in the atomic business. And it can be done in relative secrecy. Though one of 40 nations with whom the U.S. shares information on the peaceful uses of atomic energy, Israel had not mentioned the reactor to U.S. embassy officials in Tel Aviv, who were led to believe that the Negev construction was for a textile plant. About a month ago U.S. intelligence sources got pictures of the plant—and it was suddenly clear what Israel was up to (the installation was also distantly visible from the Beersheba-Sodom highway). The State Department and the CIA called a special session of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy; Secretary of State Christian Herter summoned Israeli Ambassador Avraham Harman to the State Department for some stern questioning. Last week Israel's Premier Ben-Gurion reluctantly admitted that Israel was indeed building the questionable reactor—for peaceful research purposes only, he said—and would agree to open it to inspection.

The new fact of atomic life is that the world's tiny nuclear club (U.S., Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union) may soon have a host of new entries. Within a few years, estimated Tennessee's Senator Albert Gore, a member of the Joint Congressional Committee, 20 to 25 nations—including Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Holland and Red China—may have the nuclear capability to make an atomic bomb.

Out of the Bag. "The big hurdle for any nation is to get weapons-grade nuclear material," said Gore. "Once that is done, either as the product or byproduct of a nuclear plant, the nation has acquired a nuclear capability and can set off explosions." For the moment, plutonium is expensive and hard to make. But uranium is now a glut on world markets; with the expected development of a new, cheap German method of getting fissionable material by centrifuge (TIME, Oct. 24), the cost of a nuclear blast can be scaled down to the poor nation's level. Says Physicist Herman Kahn: "With the kind of technology that is likely to be available in 1969, it may literally turn out that a Hottentot, an educated and technical Hottentot it is true, would be able to make bombs." Added a U.S. atomic-energy official: "The cat's out of the bag now and I see no way to put it back."