THE ATOM: New Bomb?

Nuclear science is on the verge of developing a “third-generation weapon as radically different from the H-bomb as the H-bomb was from the Hiroshima-type A-bomb,” warned Thomas E. Murray, former member of the Atomic Energy Commission and consultant to the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, last week. The Administration’s moratorium on nuclear testing, drawn out to two years by the foot-dragging test-ban talks with the Russians at Geneva, has stopped U.S. progress cold—but “I take it for granted that the Soviet Union is actively developing nuclear technology along this revolutionary line.”

Murray did not say so, but he was apparently referring to the so-called neutron bomb, which is designed for use against military forces, kills by showers of neutron “bullets,” and leaves little or no residual radioactivity. With the U.S. and Russia both armed only with mass-destruction nuclear weapons, said Murray, neither side can use them without “fear of a retaliatory strike that would be too devastatingly costly.” But the new-type bomb would move into this stalemate with great effectiveness, and would be used without provoking all-out nuclear attack in retaliation. Predictably, Murray’s warning set off a shock wave in the group of U.S. nuclear scientists passionately opposed to any resumption of nuclear tests. Cornell University Physicist Hans Bethe, one of the chief developers of the H-bomb, called Murray’s statement an attempt “to divert public opinion from the real issue: to get a treaty that could lead to disarmament.” Columbia’s Physicist Isidor I. Rabi sniffed that Murray was “technically not qualified to discuss such questions.”