Evening star., 1954-04-12
H-Bombs and the u. N.

In keeping with an Anglo French American
request, the deadlocked United Nations Dis
armament Commission has begun meeting
again-after months of inactvity-in an effort
to promote progress toward an agreement on
reducing and controlling armed forces and
arms of every kind, including particularly
atomic and hydrogen weapons. Unhappily,
judging from the bleak record of past Soviet
intransigence in this field, the outlook for such
an agreement is dim in the extreme, but the
problem has become so urgent for the entire
world that any move to solve it deserves to
be welcomed and encouraged.
After all, in the background Of the U. N.
commissions deliberations is an armaments
race without precedent in the history of man
kinda race so deadly that it could end,
theoretically at least, in the total extinction of
life on this planet. Atomic weapons are prefer
natural enough, but far more preternatural
are the thermonuclear or hydrogen devices"
now being developed. Apart from our 1851
and 1882 tests, three of these fearsome things
have been detonated since last March at
our Pacific proving grounds and perhaps three
others will be set off before the current expert
mentation comes to an end To appreciate
the scale of the destructiveness involved in this,
one has only to try to visualize the fact that
each such explosion is In the range of numerous
megatons-e equivalent to 10, 20, 80, 40 or so
million tons of TINT. The truth is, actually,
that the H-bomb has no top limit in that sense
In fact, as President Eisenhower has indi-
Gated, our country already is armed with
H-bombs of such tremendous destructiveness
that the output of bigger" ones would be mill
tarily useless. That is to say, they are "big"
enough right now to destroy the worlds largest
cities, and so their production-wflich is to be
greatly increased" according to Chairman
Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission
will not be aimed at enlarging their fantastic
magnitudes of power, but will involve instead
the development of variety of them tailored
to fit differing types of major targets Of
course, as Mr.. Strauss has declared to a Senate
Appropriations subcommittee, the chief and
only purpose of this stepped-up output and
stockpiling is "to insure that the United States
maintains its superiority over potential aggres-
Sors" However, because of the nature of the
weapon, not very much comfort can be derived
from the fact that we probably will be able to
keep well ahead of the Soviet Union in thus
arming ourselves.
This is so because the Russians also are
producing H-bombs and they can produce
enough OF them to make our quantitative and
qualitative superiority rather academic. For
that is the kind of weapon it is: The crude type
can do pretty much the same damage as the
refined type, and if the Kremlin can build and
deliver 200 or so of the former, what decisive
advantage do we enjoy if we can build and
deliver several times as many of the latter?
Certainly, not much of an advantage except
in deterrent sense. For here is a mass
destruction instrument that seems to favor
neither the aggressor nor the defender On
the contrary, its all-out use in an all-out war
could wipe out world civilization, leaving every
body the loser in universal abomination of
desolation.
Unlike the late Josef Stalin Soviet Premier
Malenkov has himself publicly emphasized that
fact, and maybe he has been sufficiently sobered
by it to make possible some progress toward
true disarmament and effective control of
atomic-hydrogen weapons. In any event, the
U. MS renewed activity to that end is matter
of the utmost Importance to the happiness
and conceivably even the survival, of mankind,
and all of us therefore have reason to hope
and pray that it will bear good fruit.