Atomic Information

Report Outline
Rising Pressure Against Wall of Secrecy
Military Security Vs. Public Understanding
Control of Technical Information
International Exchange of Atomic Information
Special Focus

Rising Pressure Against Wall of Secrecy

Effect of Soviet H-Bomb Test Disclosude

Recent atomic developments, here and in foreign countries, have given added urgency to public debate over what can and should be said officially by the government—to the American people, to science and industry, to close allies of the United States—about superweapons and the processes of nuclear fission and fusion.

Since confirmation in August of the Soviet announcement that Russia had set off a hydrogen explosion, there has been growing concern expressed over a wide range of questions raised by the “time scale” of atomic developments. Leading nuclear scientists contend that the rapidly changing time scale has rendered obsolete many of the basic assumptions which have governed American defense policies.

The original monopoly of the United States in atomic weapons came to an end in September 1949, a little more than four years after the first A-bomb explosion at Hiroshima. Less than six years after Hiroshima, the United States carried out its first hydrogen tests at Eniwetok. The first Russian hydrogen test came less than four years after the initial A-bomb explosion in the Soviet Union. Overt evidence of the rapidly accelerating rate of technological advance has destroyed any illusion that American superiority in weapons production affords a lasting guarantee of national security.