Word: bomb
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Newspapers reported a revealing conversation last week when a high government official called to check a statement with the Atomic Energy Commission. Instructed by President Eisenhower to clear all remarks on defense with the Commission, the official asked for the authorized answer to "How powerful a hydrogen bomb can Russia drop...
...with reports that Russia has the secret of hydrogen power, we must re-examine our entire philosophy of defense. Scientists are already working on a superhydrogen bomb, yet by now it should be clear that bombs of any size can never serve as a lone defense...
...technological possibility of radar warning systems and guided missile destruction of attacking enemy bombers. These facets of defense cannot be set up in the vacuum of a laboratory. They depend on public support for instigation and effectiveness. Such support can only come from public realization that the biggest bomb is not in itself the best answer to defense problems. Entertainment media were used with great effect in the past war; now, with the addition of television, the defense situation could be made more lucid and vital to the American people than ever before...
...dummy bomb should cause the evacuation of the city, with casualties from panic and a long-lasting tie-up, the enemy would have won an extremely cheap victory. If he intended to invade the city, his paratroopers would find it undamaged, nonradioactive, and empty of both defenders and burdensome noncombatants. Enemy troops could move right in and help themselves to provisions in the abandoned stores...
...Ment, raising the problem for military engineers to consider, gives no solution. Even experts would have a hard time distinguishing a delayed-action bomb from a dud or a harmless fake, especially if the object had been seen to sink to the bottom of the harbor. Civil defense authorities would have to decide promptly whether to evacuate the city, and a wrong decision either way would prove costly. In any case, the threatening object would have to be investigated, and this would not be a job for the poor in spirit. "An atomic-bomb disposal unit," says De Ment conservatively...