Word: russianizing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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From Berlin to Bari, from Malaga to Manchester, the news of the Russian bomb (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) struck with vastly varying impact. In some places, it cut deep along taut nerves; in others, it slid smoothly off the backs of nations long numbed by constant danger. Nowhere did it provoke the apocalyptic shudders which had attended the world's first atomic explosions; in the Atomic Year V, men still dreaded the unchained atom, but they had gotten used to the idea that they must live with it. The question was, how? How would the Other Bomb affect the great...
Russia stood to gain from her atom bomb if it scared Europe's people into clamoring for appeasement of Communism, but the West itself stood to gain more: a new clarity of common purpose. The atom bomb in Russian hands was something so ominously specific that it was almost certain to impel a brand of Western unity which otherwise might be years in the forging. Plain common peril might be translated into plain common courage. Moscow's atom-smashing made obsolete no major part of a political strategy that embraced the Atlantic pact, U.S. military aid to Europe...
There was only one thing new on the Russian merry-go-round as it wheeled around to the same old tune: it had one rider less than before. The old East-West split of 53-to-6 had now become 54-10-5. The vagrant vote came from the grinning, youthful-looking Yugoslav delegates who sat in the row behind Vishinsky, seeming to rejoice in their freshly asserted break from Mother Russia...
Well Enough. Probably the Russians are using one or both of these processes, which have the advantage of working well enough even when they don't work too well. In the diffusion process, for instance, the U-235 has only to be pure enough to be "fissionable." If the Russian apparatus is inferior, their U-235 is just as explosive as if it came from the great precision plants at Oak Ridge, Tenn...
...scientist is inclined to minimize the Russian scientific achievement. It is possible that the Russians have built by persistence and enormous effort a single rather poor bomb. But they have world-renowned physicists, such as Peter Kapitza, and probably many other first-rate men. So it is also quite possible that they have large, fairly efficient plants capable of producing many excellent bombs...