CIVIL DEFENSES OUTMODED BY NEW H-BOMBS

Physicist RALPH E. LAPP, in the BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS :

THE first A-bomb which shattered Hiroshima struck out at its victims over about 7 square miles. Compared with the TNT blockbuster, this primitive nuclear weapon constituted a "quantum jump" in the instruments of war. On November 1, 1952, a much more powerful bomb spread its blast-heat punch over 300 square miles. This was Quantum Jump No. 2. The world did not have long to wait for No. 3. It came on March 1, 1954, with the fallout of radioactive particles over thousands of square miles of the Pacific. Quantum Jump No. 3--the lethal radioactive fallout--is still too recent to fully appreciate. A single superbomb, exploded close to the ground, can contaminate a state the size of Maryland with lethal radioactivity. A "small-scale" attack [on the U.S.] with 28 bombs restricted to the industrial heart of America could produce an inverted L-shaped pattern over the northeastern states and an irregular fallout bracketing much of Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania. The "atomized" area would be occupied by 50 million Americans. Over two-thirds of the U.S. industrial production centers in the same areas.

Moreover, the time factor--the persistence of radioactivity--adds a new dimension to warfare. It adds a denial factor, for many homes are denied the dispossessed. Many factories, even though intact, would be "out of commission." That the U.S. industrial colossus could be so paralyzed is incredible but, unfortunately, true. Confronted with the overwhelming magnitude of the fallout hazard, the Federal Civil Defense Administration must feel that it has been admitted to the Anteroom to Hell. Thus it is a good time for a thorough housecleaning in the civil defense establishment. An inventory should be made to see what measures are in the hopeless or useless category.

A.D.A. SHOULD DROP HUMPHREY

Columnist MURRAY KEMPTON, in the Fair-Dealing NEW YORK POST:

AMERICANS for Democratic Action would be a vastly improved organization if it would do two things. The first would be to unfrock the Hon. Hubert Humphrey [U.S. Senator from Minnesota] as its vice chairman. The second would be to give its annual award this spring to the Hon. Harry P. Cain, former U.S. Senator from Washington. Humphrey continues to offend the sensitive by defending the disgraceful bill he introduced into the Senate last summer which would have saved us from Communism by sending every pitiable old woman in the open party to prison for five years as a conspirator. You would think it was something a man would prefer to forget, but Humphrey glories in it. His conduct is a rather extreme [example] of what has become a habit pattern for most of our liberal paladins. None get better, some get worse, and the best of them earn what credit they deserve by standing still. That is why Harry Cain deserves an award of some sort. Harry Cain has gotten better. As a Senator, Harry Cain was one of Joe McCarthy's best friends. When he was cut down by the voters of Washington in 1952, Cain settled down as a member of the Subversive Activities Control Board.

The other day [he made a] speech in which [he] warned that our security system was making "cowards and mental robots out of free men and women" [TIME, Feb. 14]. Harry Cain hopes the White House will think about these things. If it doesn't, he says he can quit. I wish he would and I wish he'd try again for the Senate. Okay, so Cain may go back and be the landlords' Senator again and vote for the Dixon-Yates contract. He can vote for Taft-Hartley; and, if I lived in Washington, I'd vote for him against any sitting liberal. To hell with liberals. What good's a man if he votes unlimited funds to build school gymnasiums and shuts his mouth when teachers are bullied and debased? Liberals and conservative politicians alike have spent the last five years in a vast conspiracy to turn the security risk into a faceless man so as to dodge their responsibility to him as a human being. If Harry Cain has learned to see the faces on people, then we need him back in the Senate whatever he thinks about 100 per cent farm parity.

SEGREGATED CHURCHES MUST BE ELIMINATED

COMMANDER H. H. LIPPINCOTT, retired Methodist Navy chaplain, in the Protestant weekly CHRISTIAN CENTURY:

THE decision of the United States Supreme Court banning racial segregation in the public schools may prove one of the most historic triumphs of justice in our century. But do the crusaders for an end to segregation themselves truly grasp the obligations the court's decision has laid on them? Today the spirit of justice asks us if we really mean what we say. With prophetic zeal our clergymen have beaten the drum against "so great an evil." The cries of our religious leaders against jimcrowism in transportation, in employment, in universities, in public schools are now being answered by a demand that there shall be no more jimcrow churches. There must be no more jimcrow churches! We must see to that, or drop in guilty silence from the scene. If discrimination in education distorts the mind, what must be the burden carried by those who are spiritually segregated, who are compelled, Sunday after Sunday, to serve as worshiping examples of unmitigated discrimination before the very altars of God?

It is ironic that jimcrowism should persist in those realms where the spirit of men lies open-windowed. Yet this is the case. Practically every city, town and village in America still has its jimcrow churches. What is worse, there are few signs that anything is being done to remedy a fault that should have been corrected long before clergymen used their pulpits to inveigh against the sin of segregation they saw in other areas of life. The issue is not an easy one, but it presents a challenge that cannot be ignored. We must not permit ourselves to default on so obvious a moral and spiritual obligation. We must at last practice what we enjoin on others.

POSTSCRIPT ON THE REVOLT OF THE ADMIRALS

HANSON BALDWIN, military analyst of the NEW YORK TIMES :

THE giant ten-engined B-36 bomber, once described by the Navy as a "billion-dollar blunder," has justified the faith of the Air Force. It has progressed from its unsatisfactory performance of three to four years ago to a reliable, and in some ways, highly spectacular instrument of strategic air warfare. Convair's B-36 is admittedly an interim aircraft. It is to be replaced or supplemented in the next two years by the Boeing all-jet B-52 Stratofortress, the first production model of which was recently completed. But for the next two years or longer, the B-36 with its six propellers and four jets will be a plane under constant modification. These modifications and improvements have given the world's biggest bomber better performance and combat characteristics. The B-36 has increased its altitude, speed and load-carrying capabilities at some slight sacrifice of its range. It can now climb to altitudes approximately equal to those that can be attained by its more modern jet sisters, altitudes at which fighters perform sluggishly, wallow, lose control and fall off. The electronics problems that once plagued this aerial giant have been largely overcome. These improvements and others have made this 215-ton plane a stable and highly accurate bombing platform at altitudes considerably above 40,000 feet.

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