NOT CIVIL WORK

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 70, Issue 28, 12 November 1949, Page 6

NOT CIVIL WORK

U.S.S.R. ATOMIC ENERGY CLAIMS RIDICULED (N.Z.P. A..—Copyright). (Ree. 11.55 a m.) LONDON, Nov. 11. Russia was not using atomic energy for civil engineering l purposes, said the Minister of Defence', Mr A. V. Alexander, speaking to-night at Sheffield. Propau ganda reports to this effect were 11 false, he added.

“The Western democratic Powers are anxious to safeguard the race by banning the bomb,” he stated. “It does not. seem too much for us to say, in the United Nations Assembly, that the ban must he accompanied by enough supervision to enable each nation to satisfy itself that the others are not, behind' the bars, making the atom bomb.”

In the United States to-day, a claim by the Soviet Foreign Minister, Mr Vyshinsky, that Russia was using atomic energy to raze mountains, was rejected by Mr William Laurence, America’s foremost lay writer on atomic matters. Mr Laurence noted that Mr Vyshinsky’s statement repeated, - practically, verbatim, the report on November 5, in the Russian-licensed German newspaper “Naclit Express.” The report said the Russians had used atomic energy to blow up mountains and reverse .the direction of two Siberian Rivers. The blast was said to have opened the way for a 'man-made river “bigger than the English Channel.” idr Laurence said that, to blow up a mountain of any size, would take hundreds of. atomic bombs. It was plainly impossible that Russia had time to produce . more . than a handful, at the most: It would require#plants with a capacity hundredfold these of the United States to make sufficient atomic bombs to raze a mountain. Furthermore, such plants would require quantities of uranium of staggering, dimensions that would take years to con-C6ntr3-t6. Mr Laurence added: “To explode an atomic bomb is. play, as compared with the .harnessing of its vast energy for the. running of industrial plants. The distance between the two processes is analgous to the distance that separated the first Wright Brothers plane from the commercial air transport of to-day.”