Word: thermonuclear
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...implication was plain: continued delay in formation of the six-nation European Army (including twelve West German divisions) might mean withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Continent. His warning and his urgency reflect the U.S. conviction that Russian progress in atomic and thermonuclear weapons has increased, as Dulles said, in "the quality of the danger...
Informed opinion is shifting more and more to the view that U.S. strategic planning lags dangerously behind atomic-thermonuclear development. Last week, speaking to a Tulsa business group, American Airlines' President Cyrus Rowlett Smith, an Army Air Forces major general in World War II, put the case for a radical change in defense policy. "Is it not sensible," asked Smith, "to question that adequate security can best be provided merely by numbers of men? Has the time not come to re-examine the old criterion-divisions, divisions, divisions-in light of the effectiveness of new weapons...
Smith gave a striking illustration of the atomic-thermonuclear revolution in firepower. If a one-inch cube were considered the equivalent of one ton of TNT. the average bomber load in World War II would stand four inches high; the Nagasaki-Hiroshima atomic bomb would be a 1,666-ft. column, more than three times the height of the Washington monument; the "conventional" atomic bomb of today would tower 4,998 ft. high; and the power of the thermonuclear superbomb, similarly expressed, would be represented by a column soaring 63 miles into...
Speaking in Buffalo, Dr. Ralph E. Lapp, director of the Nuclear Science Service, blasted the deterrent theory as a doctrine of "peace through mutual terror." Instead of assuring peace, said Lapp, possession of retaliatory atomic-thermonuclear weapons by both sides will create an "utterly unstable" situation in which one side or the other might attempt to strike a devastating first blow. Therefore, the nation needs both "sword and shield." An effective defense system against atomic-thermonuclear attack is possible, Lapp insisted, "if we really give our scientists their heads." But would the U.S. public be willing...
Both to help deter aggression and to help avert defeat, Seitz calls for "a defensive net." But he warns that the nation must also be ready to strike with "the most fearsome of our weapons." In discussing the morality of employing atomic or thermonuclear weapons, Seitz indulges in none of the hand-wringing that scientists often display in the pages of the Bulletin. It would be immoral, he says, "not to restrain Soviet aggression by any means which will be effective...