Word: atomic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Despite repeated warnings from Washington that Russia has enough atom bombs to ravage the U.S., few cities have put much heart in developing adequate civil-defense precautions. Last week Pollster George Gallup found out why. He asked a cross section of adults whether they really believed the Russians can atom-bomb the U.S.. learned that only 17% think they can, while a sanguine 72% still figure it can't happen here...
Readers of Manhattan's Communist Daily Worker, which steadfastly treated the execution of atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as a capitalist frame-up, were startled last week when the Worker labeled the Rosenbergs "atom spies." The red-faced editors explained they had lifted the story verbatim from a "capitalist press clipping." Apologized the Worker: "We are deeply sorry that slipshod copy-editing permitted this vile attack on the martyred Rosenbergs to appear in our paper...
These recommendations have already brought rumblings of opposition on the ground that such a plan would be a "giant giveaway" of all the secrets of the atom. Actually it would be nothing of the sort, since the available information on commercial applications of the atom is extremely limited. In fact, a liberalization of the Atomic Energy Act would be a "give away" only of corporate funds; it would merely give the corporations an opportunity to gamble hundreds of millions in a field where there is still no guarantee of any return...
...payoff in nuclear energy comes when a mass of fissionable material "goes critical," i.e., when it begins to support a nuclear chain reaction. In the early days of the Los Alamos atom-bomb laboratory, critical points were determined by hand, by physicists who felt a little jumpy. The start of a chain reaction cannot be predicted dependably. Even a human hand moving near a mass that is barely subcritical can reflect enough neutrons into it to start the reaction and loose a cold and silent flood of death-dealing radiation...
...Park Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. and touched on the mission of politics: "The politics of any situation we get into is only the means by which we should seek to achieve the religious ends for which we are put here on this earth ... A nation which can breed atom bombs surely can breed atomic ideals. I say we must...