Twelve hundred atomic scientists tucked away their well-filled notebooks, exchanged goodbyes and headed home from Geneva's Palace of Nations. After 13 veil-lifting days of give and take, the first International Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy (TIME, Aug. 22) was over. The talk had shed new light on every facet of peacetime atomics, from prospecting for ore to H-power. The last major debate: the biological hazards involved in nonmilitary use of the atom.
The "producers" of radioactivity (reactor men and weapons makers) maintained that, with proper precautions, there was little to worry about. But from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's huge...