Enormous Increase In Power of Atom Bombs Envisaged by American Scientists

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26350, 3 January 1947, Page 5

Enormous Increase In Power of Atom Bombs Envisaged by American Scientists

(Rec. 0.30 a.m) WASHINGTON, Jan. 2. In an article in the Infantry Journal, on the day when control of atomic energy was handed over from a military to a civlian board, the former Assistant Secretary for War, Mr John McCloy, said the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a very crude affair. u lt was the crudest bomb of all. We will not use it any more,” he said. “It is not efficient enough. It only laid waste one city and only killed 80,000 people.” Mr McCloy added that the Nagasaki bomb was an improvement on the first. It was the type used in the Bikini tests. Mechanical refinements in the assembly of the atom bomb would increase ten-fold the power of present atomic explosives,” he said. “ If we could move to the other end of the periodic tables,” Mr McCloy went on, “ and use hydrogen in the generation of energy, we would have a bomb somewhere around 1000 times as powerful as the Nagasaki bomb. “ I have been told by scientists, who are not mere theorists but who actually planned and made thtfe bomb which was exploded in New Mexico,” he continued, “ that, given the same intensive effort which was employed during the war toward the production of that bomb, we were within two years at the close of the war of producing of a bomb of the hydrogen-helium type, a bomb axxproximately a thousand-fold more powerful than the present ones.”