Word: ridenour
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Morrison's picture may not disturb the "just another weapon" school of thought which relaxes securely in its belief that defenses will fix everything. But Louis N. Ridenour shows the impotency of anything under one hundred percent defense, and the physical impossibility of anything over ninety percent defense. It is the huge destructive power of the bomb that makes even ten percent efficiency economical from an attacker's viewpoint. For, per square mile destroyed, an atomic bomb of the Hiroshima class is six times cheaper than other explosives, according to General Arnold, and possibly up to one hundred times cheaper...
...Defense. None of the contributors to One World or None believes that there can be an effective defense against airborne or rocket-borne atomic bombs. In a blackly pessimistic chapter, Physicist Louis N. Ridenour, radar expert, explains how even the most elaborate precautions cannot keep a good proportion of the bombs from hitting their targets. And just a few bombs, he feels, will be enough Before the start of World War III writes Physicist Edward U. Condon of the National Bureau of Standards, atomic saboteurs may sow the U.S. with hidden volcanoes waiting to erupt on a chosen Pearl Harbor...
...Boston, a scientist foresaw someone sitting down to play a piano and destroying a city. Dr. Louis N. Ridenour of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology thought an atomic machine might easily be made to resemble a grand piano. And he warned: "Science has devised no means for detecting atomic explosions before they are detonated...
...Ridenour, an expert on guided missiles, declared, "Of two principal important causes of means for using the atomic bomb, the first, and overwhelmingly the most important, is the infernal machine, or mine, which has been located in operating position during peacetime...
Atomic bombs are small enough to be hidden inside "a grand piano, a chest of drawers, of sofa," asserted Ridenour. The spying and intelligence work needed to prevent the erection of such mines in our cities would "render everyday peaceful life all but intolerable...