H-BOMB FLASH DEADLY IN 40 MILES CIRCLE

Greymouth Evening Star, 1 April 1950, Page 5

H-BOMB FLASH DEADLY IN 40 MILES CIRCLE

NEW YORK, March 31 (Rec. 9.30 a.m.). —A flash from a hydrogen bomb could kill people within a circle of 40 miles, wide, Dr Hans Bethe said in an article in the magazine Scientific American published today. Dr Bethe, a physicist at Cornell University, was head of the theoretical physics division at the United States Atomic Energy Commission’s laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico. He is credited with discovering how the sun makes hydrogen. The Scientific American said that Dr Bethe’s article was an amended version of one in which deletions had been made at the direction of the Atomic Energy Commission. The presses were stopped and 3000 copies containing the original article were burned.

The magazine’s editors said that they had not considered that any of the deleted material was secret: A London message says that Cambridge University scientists today called on the British Government to condemn United States production of the hydrogen bomb and make a further attempt to obtain international control of atomic energy.