The Press: Interesting, with Reservations

If true, it was the biggest news in the world. Anthropologist Raphael E. G. Armattoe, interviewed in Londonderry last week, said that Russia had developed, tested and could mass produce an atom bomb that “rendered the Anglo-American one almost obsolete.” It was no bigger than a tennis ball, had a horizontal pulverization range of 53 miles and a vertical lift of more than 6.2 miles, generated a temperature “in the neighborhood of several million degrees centigrade.”

The New York Times buried the story under a small head on page five. It also buried Dr. Armattoe in a real bit of down-the-nose, deadpan journalism. At the end of its story the Times said: “Dr. Armattoe, in his capacity as an anthropologist, was quoted in a London dispatch last April 29 as having said that brunettes ‘in the main have more brains’ than blondes.”