Politics and the Atom Bomb
HOOK, MEDFORD EVANS, SIDNEY
Politics and the Atom Bomb The Substance of Controversy A DEBATE: MEDFORD EVANS & SIDNEY HOOK By Medford Evans "It is possible that U-235 and plutonium, the "nuclear components' of the atomic...
...The Kremlin plays it safe and waits until it has what appears to be a sure thing...
...Politics and the Atom Bomb The Substance of Controversy A DEBATE: MEDFORD EVANS & SIDNEY HOOK By Medford Evans "It is possible that U-235 and plutonium, the "nuclear components' of the atomic bomb, have been systematically diverted from Oak Ridge, Hanford and Los Alamos in sufficient quantities to charge perhaps twenty atomic bombs...
...Robert F. Bacher made his celebrated inventory in December 1946, he said that he was "very deeply shocked to find how few atomic weapons we had at that time," adding, "This came as a rather considerable surprise to me...
...It is shocking and surprising that he was shocked and surprised...
...We are not talking about all theoretically non-accountable material from all plants...
...Following Mr...
...For if the quotations cited from Drs...
...To divert this would indeed require the contrivance of security officers, for alert guarding can prevent the hauling away of significant quantities, which must be absolutely quite large even if they represent a small percentage of total production...
...Before the news broke, it was known in some scientific quarters that Oppenheimer's case was once more under investigation, as it had been on other occasions...
...Let us, however, grant that what Mr...
...In addition, the stockpiling by Soviet agent9 of fissionable material in any quantity together with a bomb mechanism would, if discovered, be incontrovertible evidence of Soviet preparations for war against the United States...
...Now take a look at Oak Ridge...
...Evans's conviction that it could have happened...
...However, the possibility remains, as Mr...
...Professor Hook observes that I "unfortunately cannot be dismissed as a man wholly without credentials," but he simply ignores Dr...
...In the minds of the Kremlin dictators, such a discovery would be regarded as a sufficient provocation to the United States to take retaliatory action against the Soviet Union...
...Physical guarding cannot stop this...
...In The New Leader of March 8, Sidney Hook published an article entitled "The Techniques of Controversy," in which he devoted considerable space to criticism of a book, The Secret War for the A-Bomb, written by Medford Evans and published last year by the Henry Regnery Company...
...What is significant is that citizens throughout the interior of the country—not just customs inspectors at the borders—should have been alerted to detect illegal movement or storage of bomb parts of whatever origin...
...My arguments, he says, "are the mark of a bad book...
...Even in the utterly improbable event of an adverse judgment, the harm done would have been far less than the harm already done to the United States and to Oppenheimer himself by spreading the details of his life and political naivet...
...As stated in Scientific Information Transmitted to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission by the United States Representative: "Small amounts of material accumulated over a long period of time might build up to a real military advantage...
...For all these reasons, it seems to me overwhelmingly improbable that any fissionable material stolen by Communist agents is at present stored in quantity in the United States...
...They were not afraid the material had been lost or stolen so much as they were afraid they would never know whether or not it had been lost or stolen...
...Felbeck, whose credentials are unique...
...His criticism at this point, it seems to me, is a mark of superficial attention to the problem...
...When Dr...
...Three-and-a-half years later still, the AEC office at Los Alamos reported to Washington, as a feature of "management improvement," that procedures for inventory control formally prescribed by AEC Headquarters in 1948 were beginning to be installed in July 1950...
...So the TNT needed to equal the Hiroshima bomb would load five freight trains, each about a mile long...
...But this presupposes a very large number of spies working daily and with a system whose continuous operation could only escape detection with the contrivance of security officers...
...No one except the neutralists and Communists gained by it...
...However, no matter what disposition is made of his case, the damage already done by the publicity given it has been tremendous and irreparable...
...It is possible, even desirable, to criticize the political thinking or lack of it of some scientists...
...The FBI, in a memorandum published March 23, said, "In order that citizens of the United States may intelligently assist in the defense of our country, they should have sufficient information regarding atomic weapons to enable them to recognize bombs or parts of bombs which might be smuggled into the United States by enemy agents...
...What still seems to me unlikely is that the filching of 90 pounds of such material in the course of a year—over and above the quantities not accountable for because of technical reasons—would remain undetected by the microbalances of the accounting officers, all of whom are severely controlled by FBI security checks...
...I do not know the critical mass of a bomb, but there is no doubt you could do a lot of damage with 450 pounds of plutonium or U-235 if you knew how to handle it...
...They do not refer to the situation to which Mr...
...But that is ninety pounds a year, or 450 pounds in five years...
...Evans fears could have happened...
...At that rate, 500 cars would be required for 20,000 tons...
...Given the presence of Communist agents, I agree with Mr...
...Professor Hook seems to fail to take into account the most essential characteristic of atomic explosives, their unprecedented compression...
...Professor Hook, of course, is Chairman of the Graduate Department of Philosophy at NYU...
...Further, in 1946 Gouzenko had already told his story...
...With respect to the first charge, even if everything asserted by Mr...
...In such a situation, the "contrivance of security officers" is not required...
...The quotations from Drs...
...Had the review board discreetly reheard and quietly disposed of the matter, the damage would have been at a minimum...
...he apparently has not thought much about the very high rate of pay-off, or he would not have been so quickly impressed by his own a priori assumptions of the necessity of a large number of spies and the contrivance of security officers...
...The blunder was so colossal that it leaves one baffled to explain how anyone with any regard for the welfare of either the country or Oppenheimer as a person could have advised the publication of the charges and the reply...
...Evans's argument clearly indicates that he believes his estimate to be no wild conjecture but a well-founded probability...
...I agree with Professor Hook that "in ordinary affairs, possibilities must be evaluated as probabilities if they are to be a guide to conduct...
...If the public is to give the FBI assistance, there is needed hot only specific information about possible kinds of suitcase A-bombs, but also a general discussion of the nature and history of the internal-security problem in the atomic-energy project, to provide a background against which the specific FBI warning now issued will have not only reality but some appearance of reality...
...In contrast with Professor Hook's comfortable assurance that my argument presupposes "a system whose continuous operation could only escape detection with the contrivance of security officers," I quote Dr...
...They knew that the penalty for the possession of fissionable material might be death...
...It is not, however, to be considered by itself...
...If we wish to be sure that no uran-ium-235 is being diverted from uranium-isotope separation plants, we had better not build such plants in the first place...
...You could carry it in your watch pocket...
...Although it is not directly related to the issues raised by Mr...
...Incidentally, when I say that it is possible that enough material has been diverted "to charge perhaps twenty atomic bombs," in effect I settle for a working figure nearer the lower than the upper limit...
...This material, together with a complement of 'non-nuclear components,' may be stored here in the United States, waiting the signal for clandestine assembly in a Chicago warehouse or a New York apartment building, the resulting ready-for-detonation A-bombs to be used in whatever manner the conspirators might regard as most 'truly revolutionary.' " I wrote that and the rest of The Secret War for the A-Bomb partly to tell some portion of the truth as I saw it, and partly to encourage others to add their own observations and deductions, by way of either corroboration or rebuttal...
...For I have been reminded by the Editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, from which Mr...
...Manson Benedict, chief designer of K-25, the first of the series of gaseous-diffusion plants operated by Dr...
...The probability of whether it did happen, in the absence of other evidence, must be judged in the light of certain psychological and political considerations...
...McCarthy and his staff had combed this ground over in the past but had kept silent...
...Professor Hook says: "Mr...
...I do not think he had any unethical intention of quoting me out of context: I think he simply failed to realize the extraordinary importance of such a guess when it is reported by Manson Benedict...
...All this is from Dr...
...But the prime responsibility rests with his advisers, whoever they are...
...In line with our standing policy of encouraging public debate, we have allotted space to Mr...
...This was a year and a half after the first A-bomb in history was exploded near Alamogordo, New Mexico...
...Consequently, the accounting control of inventories assumes the greatest importance...
...Bacher's testimony before the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy during its investigation in 1949 of Senator Hickenlooper's charges of "incredible mismanagement" against then AEC Chairman David Lilienthal...
...he was also at this time an AEC Commissioner and, as such, was familiar with what Oak Ridge and Hanford were doing and with what, roughly, they were shipping to Los Alamos in the way of purified U-235 and plutonium...
...The Canadian authorities were in touch with American security officers, and the wind was up among Soviet agents...
...The use of the phrase "smuggled into the United States" is not necessarily significant in the context...
...A Reply By Sidney Hook In his book, Mr...
...That Oppenheimer's political education is still incomplete is apparent from the fact that he permitted himself to be persuaded...
...on the front pages of every important newspaper in the world...
...There was some warrant, therefore, for my assuming that Mr...
...Unless they were prepared for war, they would not have risked it, particularly before they exploded their own bomb...
...The reopening of the case was attributed to bureaucratic red tape...
...Bradbury, and other representatives of the various departments at Los Alamos...
...Felbeck and Benedict do not seem to me to reinforce, as strongly as he believes, Mr...
...The total impact of his book is to impugn, outrage, discourage and drive from Government service a group of men who are no less patriotic than other groups and far more necessary to our survival...
...Such a charge must be either supported by evidence or withdrawn...
...So far, the persons who know the subject best have said nothing directly...
...But I think it is...
...The facts and allegations against Oppenheimer were a matter of public record...
...It would not require a large number of spies to average among them one such object a day...
...With this kind of cultural lag in the procedures of inventory control, it would have been, during a five-year interval, relatively easy at Los Alamos for a skilled and trusted worker to make off with an occasional metal object...
...President Eisenhower on December 15 (according to the New York Times of the next day) requested that possible violations of the Atomic Energy Act, "such as the illegal possession or transportation of fissionable material," be reported promptly to the FBI...
...He says: "If all theoretically non-accountable material had systematically been pilfered from all plants during 1945-8, when security measures were not rigorous, according to Evans's reasoning, 'we have a not completely uninformed guess,' etc...
...The Hiroshima bomb was carried in a B-29, most of the space clearly having been taken up with triggering mechanism, not fissionable material...
...To imagine that the systematic diversion of significant quantities of fissionable material from the American atomic-energy project requires "a very large number of spies" and "the contrivance of security officers" is somewhat like supposing that significant defalcation from a large financial institution requires a gang of robbers and the contrivance of the cop on the beat...
...Consider that a piece of U-235 or plutonium weighing a quarter of a pound is about the size of a pat of butter...
...If and when the Soviet Union is prepared to wage war against the United States, it is far more likely to attempt to smuggle atomic bombs into the United States and hold itself in readiness for immediate action in the event of detection than to rely on stockpiling by its agents...
...Consider that the Hiroshima bomb, of which it is now fashionable to be somewhat scornful, was said to be the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT...
...And who is going to miss a quarter of a pound a day if the top officials do not know how many bombs there are...
...Despite Mr...
...And although this would not deter them from trying to steal it, it would deter them from storing it here instead of sending it out of the country...
...Professor Hook, who is an authority on Communism, must know the intensity of desire very well...
...Evans was for several years "high security official with the Atomic Energy Commission...
...Felbeck and Benedict are read with an eye on their actual context, their estimate of the number of bombs which could be built from non-accountable material is based upon the supposition that the attempt to divert material improperly is organized from above...
...The presumption here is that the management and the operating force (or an important element of them) conspire, presumably under instructions of their national government, to defraud the international inspectors...
...It must be considered in conjunction with the degree of intensity with which someone might desire to exploit such a possibility, however slight, and in conjunction with the rate of pay-off on individual instances of success...
...But it also seems to me extremely likely that in those years, before the Soviet Union exploded its own bomb, if Communist agents had succeeded in filching fissionable material it would have been sent to Russia and not stored in the United States...
...Evans studiously refrains from discussing my strictures on his insinuations about treachery among scientists, despite the fact that I regarded this charge as the graver of the two...
...Now Dr...
...Evans, I wish to comment here on one aspect of the Oppenheimer case...
...Professor Hook has no adequate reason to construct any such presuppositions...
...But this was also true of our statesmen and politicians, our literary men and social scientists...
...Judging by the consternation which appeared on some of the faces around there, I concluded that this must have been about the first detailed physical inventory that had been made...
...It was based second on the frankly arbitrary but not unreasonable assumption that the rest of the atomic-energy project (including Los Alamos) would yield a comparable harvest...
...He also, in paraphrasing the omitted protasis, changes, and by changing makes less probable, the conditions 1 assumed...
...Diversion of material could be concealed by an unreported improvement in the process also by very minor falsifications of isotope analyses used in calculating material balances...
...Forty tons is a good load for a box car...
...But what is the evidence that it actually did happen...
...But imagine the task of a guard when a man can carry in the palm of his hand the equivalent of fifty truckloads of TNT...
...Thus, the mere possibility that fissionable material can be stolen is of itself not highly significant...
...But, as reference to the italicized portion of my original sentence will show, my calculation was not based on assuming that all non-accountable material was diverted from all plants...
...George T. Felbeck, vice president in charge of the atomic-energy division of the Union Carbide Corporation: "Due to the size and complexity of the present plant [1946—the size is now far greater], the withdrawal of material by the operating agency could be done with extreme ease from any number of places by any number of methods with little risk of immediate detection by any inspection agency...
...I, for one, am convinced that Oppenheimer's experiences have given him an immunity to ideological infection and that today he is better qualified to serve his country than when he began...
...His motives I do not question...
...Benedict's estimate of the possibilities connected with a gaseous-diffusion plant be taken (one to five bombs a year), and if we assume a similar range for the rest of the project, including Los Alamos, then we have a not completely uninformed guess that from eight to forty atomic bombs may be stashed away somewhere waiting The Day...
...Professor Hook, in quoting me at this point, omits the italicized words...
...In any complicated industrial process, it is hard to control material to, say, I per cent, and the diversion of 1 per cent of our national capacity production of either TNT or fissionable material is theoretically a serious matter...
...Purified fissionable materials are not highly radioactive...
...Provided only that the quantity and the geometry are correct, you can carry a piece of U-235 in your pocket...
...Evans's argument presupposed the contrivance of security officers on the home scene...
...Evans not only expressed the belief that enough fissionable materials may have been removed from American plants to fabricate a number of bombs...
...After all," Dr...
...Bacher had not only been a key scientist at Los Alamos a year earlier...
...He also said: "I was accompanied by Colonel Gee, Dr...
...The Kremlin's need for fissionable material was greatest during this period...
...Even if he had rehashed the material hinted at in his reply to Murrow, it would have been discounted as another McCarthy diversion...
...It is simply to misapprehend the situation...
...The reference to 'unreported improvements in the process' clearly refers to this situation...
...When it strikes, it strikes to kill...
...Felbeck's organization...
...In his rejoinder, Mr...
...Evans's remarks, we print Professor Hook's rebuttal, submitted under the title "Probability and Politics...
...He also ignores, more pointedly, Dr...
...Later, I refer to this and say, "The trouble is, if Dr...
...They are responsible for the grossest piece of political stupidity since the time Truman declared the Hiss case a red herring...
...he coupled this with a definite insinuation of treachery on the part of leading atomic scientists...
...In passing, it should be pointed out that it is extremely difficult to prevent the clandestine importation into this country of fissionable materials manufactured abroad and that the first warnings against the danger of atomic sabotage were sounded in 1945 by Szilard, Oppenheimer and others...
...Benedict's statement in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for February 1, 1946: "In the American plant, one guess is that from one to five bombs per year could be produced from non-accountable material if one sought to divert material improperly...
...Evans for a reply to the criticisms made...
...I do not know what the motives were of the lawyers or newspapermen who persuaded him to release the charges against him and his reply...
...Everyone with a democratic interest lost by it...
...It was based first on Benedict's estimate for K-25, which included upper and lower limits of bombs producible from non-accountable material and was thus not tied to a concept of all...
...capacity would be an enormous bulk of material—enough to fill many warehouses...
...Evans applies them—a small group of foreign agents trying to outwit both management and control organs...
...Evans that there was a high degree of intensity in the desire "to exploit the possibility...
...Now, says the FBI, a whole A-bomb can be packed in a suitcase...
...Evans quotes, that the remarks of these scientists "were made in the context of the discussion whether international inspection (as contrasted with international ownership or management) could be sufficient to prevent illegal diversion of fissionable materials...
...Evans be granted, all that we are entitled to conclude is that it could have happened...
...It is not a fact that workers in atomic plants and laboratories have their pockets inspected...
...Benedict's estimates of the amount which could be diverted from American plants refer to this hypothetical situation—management trying to outwit control organs...
...I believe it is true that, in the past, most of them understood the nature of fascism better than they did the nature of Soviet Communism...
...The conjunction of both assertions, although they concerned different matters, increased the seriousness of each...
...Presumably what caused the "consternation" of the Los Alamos officials was their realization in the face of inspection that their system of inventory control was not adequate...
...In the case of TNT, however, 1 per cent of U.S...
...Evans's disclaimer, I still believe that the character of his charges and the way he argues for them represent a disservice to the cause of an intelligent defense of freedom...
...In my book, I quote Dr...
...But such accounting control was rudimentary at Los Alamos during, and beyond, the years in question...
...E. U. Condon has written, "atomic explosives are respectable-looking metals out of which plated cigar lighters, keys, watch cases, or shoe nails can be fabricated...
...Evans insists, that small amounts of fissionable material could systematically be snatched...
...his judgment I do...
...In view of this important development, I am not sure whether further public discussion of my book is desirable...
Vol. 37 • May 1954 • No. 21
