Science: The Greenglass Mechanism

Some atom-bomb secrets came out—or partly out—last week. During the Manhattan spy trial (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), confessed spy David Greenglass, who worked as a machine-shop foreman at Los Alamos, described sketchily the mechanism of the A-bomb used at Nagasaki. His testimony was not transcribed. But it was not suppressed entirely. The spies on trial could not be convicted without proof that they had given real and vital secrets to the Russians.

Greenglass is no scientist (at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute he flunked eight courses out of eight), and some of his testimony made little...

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