THE ATOM: Loose in the World

The world got a piece of bad news: a scientist—a West German scientist—has devised a small, cheap machine that may make it possible soon for practically any country to make its own nuclear bomb (see SCIENCE).

The disclosure catches a bemused man kind, 15 years after Hiroshima, still without any sort of international control on manufacture of atomic weapons. Unable to agree on anything else, the U.S., Russia, Britain and France have been content to rest their atomic monopoly on the prohibitive cost and inordinate difficulty of building the monster gaseous-diffusion plants and plutonium-yielding reactors in which they carry out large-scale production of fissionable materials. Now the West German scientific breakthrough appears to have smashed that barrier and opened the way to atoms for anybody with the technologists competent to handle them.

Last week the U.S. asked West Germany (which is forbidden by treaty to allow manufacture of atomic bombs) to classify the newest design as secret. But scientists say that the secret is already out. The Brazilian atomic energy commission already owns three early models of the West German machine, and an Amsterdam professor is designing others “for commercial purposes.” When the U.N. Political Committee takes up the subject of disarmament this week, there should be a new urgency about the Big Four at last reaching agreement on controlling the atom.