HYDROGEN BOMB

Press, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 26030, 6 February 1950, Page 7

HYDROGEN BOMB

U.S. URGED NOT TO BE FIRST USER

PLEA BY LEADING ATOM SCIENTISTS

(Rec. 10 p.m.) NEW YORK. Feb. 4. Twelve leading Americah Scientists to-day urged the United States to declare that it would not be the first user of a hydrogen bomb. The group was headed by Dr., Hans Bethe, who was one of the leading experts at the Los Alamos laboratories in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was assembled and tested.

The group said: “We believe that ho nation has* the right to use the hydrogen bomb, no matter how righteous is its cause. This bomb is no longer a weapon of war, but a means of extermination of whole populations. We shall not have a monopoly of the bomb; the Russians will be able to make one too. They will probably need a shorter time."

Dr. Bethe said it would be difficult to create stocks of filled with hydrogen, but with manufacturing facilities geared for immediate action, bombs could soon be made ready. Dr. Bethe explained that the creating of stocks of completed bombs would be difficult because liquid hydrogen at a temperature of 450 degrees Fahrenheit below zero would have to be used.

The scientists agreed that the United States should make the hydrogen bomb because of President Truman’s directive, but they added: “The only circumstances that might force us to use it would be if we and our allies were attacked by this bomb.” The scientists said there would be time enough for the United States, after it was attacked, to use its stock of hydrogen bombs, because such bombs could not destroy enough military objectives to win a war in the first attack.

Cause of Hospital Fire.— A coroner’s jury at Davenport, Indiana, to-day returned a verdict that Mrs Elnora Epperly, aged 22. started the fire in a Davenport mental hospital, which killed 41 women there, on January 7, but that she was Of unsound mind at the time. Evidence was given that Mrs Epperly. who was a patient in the hospital when the fire broke out. had readily confessed that she started the fire with a cigarette lighter. The Sanity Commission later adjudged Mrs Epperly insane, and committed her to the East. Moline (Illinois) State Hospital.—New York, February 3.