Premier Malenkov's announcement that Russia has the hydrogen bomb was aimed at the U.S., and as a verbal bombshell it was something of a dud. In Washington there was none of the ashen-faced confusion that followed the discovery, in 1949, that the Russians had exploded an atomic bomb. President Eisenhower heard the news and an hour later took off for Denver and vacation without comment.
Was there really a Russian H-bomb? High-flying U.S. airplanes continually monitor the upper air to collect telltale evidence of atomic explosions. They had reported no evidence, as yet, of a Soviet hydrogen explosion. But the...
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