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Unlike plutonium bombs, whose fission products are naturally radioactive, a lithium-six deuteride bomb is only a moderate producer of radioactive contamination. Its end product, helium, is not radioactive at all. The detonator yields the normal products of fission, but they are no worse than those of an old-style atom bomb. Side reactions may produce radioactive isotopes, but they can be minimized. Apparently, they were minimized effectively in the H-bomb that exploded in the Marshall Islands on March 1.
Though that explosion was 750 times as violent as a Hiroshima-type A-bomb (TIME, March 22), the radioactive contamination was not in proportion. Its effect at a distance was little, if at all, greater than that of earlier A-bomb tests. The Japanese fishermen who were burned by "death ash" were apparently victims of a local concentration of contaminated pulverized coral. Some of their burns, according to AEC Chairman Strauss, came from the chemical action of the ash. He probably meant that the coral, chiefly-calcium carbonate, had been turned by heat to quicklime, which sears human skin.
There is no reason to believe, however, that the radioactive aftereffect of the hydrogen bomb cannot be increased, if thai is what the designers want to do. First step would be the addition of an ingredient that yields free neutrons (L17 might be a good one). Next step would be to surround the bomb with 3 casing of an element that absorbs neutrons and becomes radioactive. Such a doctored H-bomb might poison a whole country.
Few scientists feel cheerful about the H-bomb. It looks like too ready a tool of destruction. They have only one reassuring opinion. At the present state of the art, they say, there is no chance that even the most monstrous bomb will get out of control, set fire to the ocean's hydrogen and turn the earth into a short-lived star. The H-bomb's ingredients must be pure and carefully selected, but the ocean is a mess of many nonreactive elements. Less than one-ninth of it is hydrogen, and the safe kind of hydrogen at that.