HOMEMADE A-BOMBS

...The two books consider the consequences of that possibility...

...The quote about Yonkers comes from McPhee's book...

...Jones was a little 72-year-old lady, a bonnet on her snow-white hair and attired in a black silk basque with a lavender vest and lace around the neck, was enough to ensure her life as a challenge to future historians and biographers...

...I will tell you this: Just to make a crude bomb with an unpredictable yieldmbut with a better than even chance of knocking this building down--all that is needed is about a dozen kilos of plutonium-oxide powder, high explosives (I don't want to say how much), and a few things that anyone could buy in a hardware store...

...Indeed, she may he one of the more remarkable American women which the republic has allowed to alter its course, yet few have known her history...

...But if Haley wanted to make this a history lesson in the Golden Age of Musicals, he might have given equal billing to these films' directors and songwriters...

...Their study, which is published by the Ford Foundation's Energy Policy Project, describes in some detail the nature of nuclear power, the steps in the nuclear fuel cycle where theft is easiest, and the safeguards, risks and costs involved in present and future operations of the U.S...

...Curtis "An important additir erature on the proble= reform...

...Each makes fascinating and compelling reading, and taken together they provide the psycholog28 June 1974:362 ical setting and the factual basis for a layman's understanding of a complicated but critical topic...

...Her specialty was agitation, and in style Mother Jones emerged as a toilers' Joan of Arc--if a grandmotherly one--who led armies of the angry and the abused...

...Even Christians...

...To appreciate how good Astaire and Powell really are, and how clunky the Esther Williams number is, you have to see a whole film of each...

...And millions would call her Mother...

...As the authors conclude: "None of man's previous discoveries compares with nuclear energy in terms of the demands placed on him to use it wisely...

...Mary Harris Jones told a wretched group of striking West Virginia miners, "and fight like hell for the living...

...Again, though, the ultimate result is rather disappointing, like a smorgasbord where you get a bite of everything and come away still feeling you haven't had a meal...

...Carl Sandburg would write in Memoir o] a Proud Boy that "He had no mother but Mother Jones...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...Add to that statement the premise that it's much easier to make a crude atomic bomb than most people think...

...And Mary Jones earned her niche in history "from countless cold nights in miners' hovels, sleeping on a bare floor with her handbag for a pillow...

...That a woman should utter such an admonition in the year 1902 was an assault on the transparent American tradition of gentility, but given that Mrs...

...Arms Control and Disarmament Agency...

...Indeed, the widespread use of nuclear energy requires the rapid development of near-perfect social and political institutions...

...While the two books deal with many of the same facts, and share many assumptions about the possibility of nuclear terror they differ fundamentally in style and approach...

...If Mother had not left her native Ireland, a fellow labor agitator 28 lune 1974:364...

...To their face, an antiunion federal judge was "a scab" and a corporation president "a high class burglar...

...Yet Mother Jones did not fit into neat historical compartments: she was -Catholic yet outrageously irreverent...

...A way to make a bomb...

...llH (]IUIlCH A Reporter's Case for the Christian's Right to Know by Richard N. Ost!ing Time Religion Correspondent Richard Ostling challenges for the first tim~ thA nArvn~ivA secrecy in church pol Supported by facts, o tion, and personal exl tests the credibility ol "Jam packed with his viewpoints...

...a rhetorical radical yet in many ways conservative in politics...

...She quoted from Lincoln's speeches which she heard him make, and yet in her last days of activity was to use the telephone, the radio and the automobile...

...She was left with little more than her husband's fervent belief in trade unionism...

...But most important of all, they attempt to work out some practical strategies that might minimize or prevent that grim possibility from becoming a reality...

...Mary Jones was human, and a very human portrait emerges in his book...

...Well, perhaps something that was more a movie on its own terms could be...

...For "Mother" Jones has been legend in the four decades since she has been dead and in fact was a living legend for as many years of her life...

...So do several surprisingly dramatic explanations of atomic physics--the making of electric power, the splitting of an atom, the creation of plutonium, and the dynamics of a nuclear explosion...

...Mother Jones: The Miners' Awe...

...For it is only in that context that the atom's power can ever be controlled...

...The film's final sequence, the all-talkingallsinging-all-dancing finale, is the ballet sequence from An American in Paris, which is introduced as the greatest movie musical number ever...

...Biographer Dale Fetherling, a native West Virginian where Mother Jones remains an active legend, has written a personal portrait which should remedy the 50-year-old lament of George West, who wrote in The Nation in 1922 that her life "is an epic and it is the shame of American writers that it has never been told...

...Hooey...

...MGM is where the real musical headliners were too...

...Or, the incredible journeys to reach such places, or the jails, in some of which she claimed she had to fight off rats with a broken beer bottle...

...It is so simple that I just don't want to describe it...

...She entered the world of men and bested them in verbal confrontations and the art of persuasion and propaganda...

...DALE FETHERLING Southern Illinois Press, $11.85 RUSSELL W. GIBBONS "Pray for the dead," Mrs...

...This is the unprecedented challenge before us...

...nuclear industry...

...Richard P. J 1~ $6.95 at bookstores Harper Row lO E. 53~d St., New Yock 10022 1817 Commonweal: 363 and inventive combination of physical certainties (the periodic table of elements, radiation levels of various isotopes) with political and psychological unknowns (the susceptibility of certain governments to blackmail, the limits of credibility and likelihood of successful hoaxes, the motivation of dissident individuals and groups...

...The other problem with anthology films like this is that they are great levelers...

...That's Entertainment certainly is---entertainment, that is...

...High position did not impress her, for she had no betters...

...It is McPhee's genius to be able to combine large amounts of technical background information with the'intense spirit of Taylor's imagination, giving us an insightful and fascinating blend of practical and personal detail...

...an individualist who defied virtually every convention of her day, yet gregarious in fully exploiting the mass meetings and rallies of an evolving union movement, and finally an ascetic who knew little of the comforts she sought for the working people of her crusade...

...Having Gene Kelly make a spectacle of himself, as if he were Esther Williams too, is not exactly MGM's greatest accomplishment...

...In the end That's Entertainment is perhaps not such a bad history lesson after all, for it is itself limited by the same MGM philosophy to which the original musicals had to conform...

...Consider that clandestine A-bomb makers need less than 10 pounds of plutonium or 25 pounds of enriched uranium to make a kiloton-range explosive...

...These simple assumptions lead to the grim possibility that terrorists might be using home-made nuclear devices within the next decade or two...

...She thrived in the era of social discontent and economic upheaval which produced a labor movement born of secret groups of hunted men...

...He has had the gall to bill himself as a "director" without giving credit to any of the directors, writers and musicians who made these musicals in the first place...

...McPhee's book, which is a profile of the nuclear physicist Theodore B. Taylor (it appeared originally in The New Yorker last year) looks at the possibility of nuclear terror through the eyes of a man who had worked at Los Alamos miniaturizing atomic bombs for the Defense Department...

...Taylor himself becomes the author of the second book, with Mason Willrich, a lawyer who has worked on arms control and nuclear safeguards for the U.S...

...At the age of 37 she was left a childless widow when a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis took her husband and four young children in one week...

...Then look at the nuclear-power industry's estimates of the hundreds of tons of plutonium and enriched uranium that will be in use and produced as scrap during the next quarter century...

...When asked where she lived, she would reply: "Well, wherever there is a fight...

...BOOKS HOMEMADE A-BOMBS WILLIAM LANOUETgE The Curve of Binding Energy JOHN McPHEE Farrar, Strau$, $7.95 Nuclear Theft: Risks and Safeguards MASON WILLRICH & THEODORE B. TAYLOR Ballinger, $13.50...

...Born in 1830, seven years before Queen Victoria ascended the throne and less than 50 years after the end of the American revolution, she died at the threshold of the New Deal and the CIO...

...There is a level of simplicity," Taylor says as he stands on an unfinished floor of the Center, "that we have not talked about, because it goes over my threshold to do so...

...The man who put the film together, Jack Haley, Jr., has chosen a very didactic format in which some appropriate MGM star like Sinatra or Astaire, or Jimmy Stewart (Jimmy Stewart...

...The film is an anthology of song and dance numbers from over twenty-five years' worth of MGM musicals...

...Though Haley may have preserved this illusion from the original musicals to make his own film feel more like a musical, it seems very narrow and presumptuous of him...

...cially on questions about who might want to steal nuclear materials, how this might be done, and what industry and government might do now to prevent a number of possible nuclear terror scenarios...

...They make five minutes from one of those Esther Williams water ballets seem as entertaining as five non-stop minutes of tap-dancing by Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell...

...Willrich and Taylor focus espe...

...Nothing could be further from the truth, of course...

...They were the days of "the martyrs and the saints...

...For the next 60 years she would know no real home or family, but instead would adopt America's toilers...

...They allow us to see the atom in terms that are essential to the debate and definition of public policy...

...In all, she was a benevolent fanatic, a Celtic blend of sentiment and fire, of sweetness and fight, who captured the imagination of the American worker as no other woman--perhaps no other leader-ever has...

...She was a delight to those who saw and heard her, and today remains even more so to those who would fashion hero figures of those who urged on seemingly hopeless causes...

...It can become quite easy, and fascinating, to speculate about possible techniques for nuclear terror...

...But, if implemented, there are a few safeguards that can reduce those risks to "a very low level...

...Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Powell, Anne Miller, Debbie Reynolds, Howard Keel, Mario Lanza, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Donald O'Connor: they all appear in this film in sequences from their best musicals...

...But if these books inspire you to such speculation, they may also have you wondering about how to devise your own safeguards...

...She would rally thousands of cheering men and tell them they were worthless," Fetherling says, "She would hobnob with United States Presidents and revolutionaries and be castigated and praised from one end of the country to the other...

...When I want pure James, I can always read James...

...Although her mere 100 pounds and genteel appearance suggested the opposite, Mother Jones was not reluctant to urge violence when violence had been done to "her boys...

...introduces each sequence...

...Taylor knows how to make a small A-bomb (as small as a cantelope, in fact), and to convince the general public that the task isn't terribly difficult he describes some of the steps that an individual, or a small group of educated conspirators, would follow to make a nuke...

...a kind of mental puzzle that requires the skillful All citizens have the right t.o know...

...Thinking like this is what has now gotten MGM out of the movie business, and into running a Las Vegas hotel...

...With Taylor as his guide, McPhee takes us on a stroll through the World Trade Center to consider what a terrorist would need to do if he were intent on toppling that monstrosity...

...Paper $4.95 For all its technical complexity, there are a few facts about nuclear power that are quite simple...

...Movies I go to for movie art...

...It is probably the greatest achievement of these two books, and their authors, that they allow the inquisitive reader to consider nuclear energy not as a technological mystery, but as a force that is just as prone to personal and political influences as it is to the laws of nature and science...

...Since he hasn't done so, you often get the feeling that the films came about because the stars in them just burst spontaneously into song and dance one day, much as the characters the stars play are supposed to be doing...

...But it's typical of MGM to think otherwise...

...And from that view it becomes intriguing to wonder what your elected representatives and your nation's bureaucrats are devising...

...Here's one: "To produce enough electricity to keep Yonkers going for a year, a . . . nuclear reactor would make, as a by-product, just about enough plutonium to obliterate Yonkers...

...A California newspaperman, Fetherling has not produced a work for nostalgia buffs, or for ideological types seeking a barricades romantic school version of her life...

...they present in simple and logical progression the factual context that supports such a possibility...

...Without effective safeguards to prevent nuclear theft," they write, "the development of nuclear power Will create substantial risks...