The Press SATURDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1960. Cheap Atom Bombs?

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29342, 22 October 1960, Page 12

The Press SATURDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1960. Cheap Atom Bombs?

The possibility that some day any industrial nation could produce atom bombs cheaply has been a nightmare for the great Powers. Now they have reason to fear the reality in a few years; and this must give new urgency to the nuclear disarmament negotiations among the United States, Britain, and Russia. They have long known that France, using the old, expensive methods, will soon qualify for admission to the nuclear club, and that China’s development of nuclear weapons will probably take only a year or two longer. This was bad enough without the recent discovery that an industrial process developed in. Western Germany the production of nuclear weapons is banned) and in the Netherlands may be capable of adaptation to warlike purposes at low cost. Though the real value of the new process is not yet publicly known, it is apparent that the great Powers may have little time to get a control system working before the difficulties of reaching an international agreement are multiplied. The new process, like the standard method of separating the lighter and explosive U 235 from the inert U 238, requires the gasification of the uranium. The present method then separates the two forms by pumping the gas through filters. The German and Dutch process is based on the centrifuge process of the cream separator. Published accounts differ as to whether the centrifuge will be cheaper in capital or running costs or both; but it does seem to have the advantage of requiring less electricity. The present limiting factor on the production of fissionable uranium is the cost. The three United States plants, for instance, cost £lOOO million to build, and each of them uses as much electricity as New York city. The United

States Government has taken the possibility of cheap production by the centrifuge sufficiently seriously to ask the West German and Netherlands Governments to keep the process secret. Although the Germans and Dutch are said to be co-opera-tive, there is little likelihood that the secret can be kept for long. Already the German firm, Degussa, of Frankfurt, has sold two centrifuges to Brazil, and theoretical details of the process were given to the second international atomic conference at Geneva. Also, Western Germany and the Netherlands are bound under Euratom to share their secrets with their partners. The only real hope that the process will not put atom bombs at the disposal of 20 or more nations is that production will prove less economical than is now supposed. No-one can be very confident that all the possible new nuclear Powers would be as circumspect as Russia, Britain, and the United States have been. What would happen in the Middle East if Egypt had nuclear weapons is much easier to contemplate' than, for instance, the use Dr. Castro might make of them. The danger facing the whole world has now become so stark that the big Powers have a great responsibility to humanity: first to take control of themselves and then to provide for the extension of that control to others. A minor, but not unimportant, gain is that the German discovery deprives General de Gaulle of his atomic monopoly in Continental Western Europe, and thus of his chief instrument for turning the other countries into French satellites. Commercial and political negotiations should now proceed more rationally. In the long run, of course, cheap uranium could be of immense civil value—but only if it had not first been used for bombs.