Word: hydrogenic
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Last week AEC decided that one press enterprise had overstepped the danger line. It ordered the monthly Scientific American (circ. 78,878) to delete four technical paragraphs in a 5,000-word article on the hydrogen bomb by Dr. Hans A. Bethe, Cornell physicist and wartime chief of theoretical physics at the Los Alamos laboratory. Although the April issue containing the article had already gone to press, AEC summarily "requested" the presses stopped-the first time it had taken such a drastic step. It burned 3,000 copies already run off, melted down the type and impounded every galley proof...
...Christian to manufacture the hydrogen bomb? The Vatican's official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, indicating that no other course is practicable, has endorsed President Truman's decision to develop the bomb. But the Protestants cannot agree. Last week the Executive Committee of the Federal Council of Churches wrestled with the problem, finally worked out a statement which showed the same cleavage on the subject of war as was evident at the 1948 Amsterdam conference...
...Some of us," said the statement, "feel deeply that the hydrogen bomb does not present a new and different moral issue but sheds vivid light on the wickedness of war itself. Some of us oppose the construction of hydrogen bombs, which could be used only for the mass destruction of populations. Some of us, on the other hand, believing that our people and the other free societies should not be left without the means of defense through the threat of retaliation, support the attempt to construct the new weapon. All of us unite in the prayer that it may never...
...reaction discussed by the author uses deuterium (heavy hydrogen) packed into a layer around the uranium detonator. Deuterium atoms, which are given the comparatively low energy of 100,000 electron volts, says the article, will react with each other on collision, turning into helium 3 and a single free neutron. The products fly apart, with a speed equivalent to 3.3 million electron volts...
...enough deuterium atoms would collide squarely. The reaction would probably die out before much of the material had a chance to react, and thus the bomb would not be very destructive. It might be much better, says the author, to surround the uranium detonator with lithium hydride. When hydrogen and lithium atoms in this common chemical compound are given sufficient energy, they react with one another, forming two atoms of helium 4. It takes only 100,000 electron volts, says the article, to start the reaction. Each atomic collision yields an enormous amount of energy: 17.3 million electron volts. Thus...