THE ATOM: Loose in the World

The world got a piece of bad news: a scientist—a West German scientist—has devised a small, cheap machine that may make it possible soon for practically any country to make its own nuclear bomb (see SCIENCE).

The disclosure catches a bemused man kind, 15 years after Hiroshima, still without any sort of international control on manufacture of atomic weapons. Unable to agree on anything else, the U.S., Russia, Britain and France have been content to rest their atomic monopoly on the prohibitive cost and inordinate difficulty of building the monster gaseous-diffusion plants and plutonium-yielding reactors in which they carry out...

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