BOMBS AT BIKINI 



water. They thought cracks might be made in the 

 earth's crust, allowing sea water to rush into the white- 

 hot interior and form catastrophic quantities of steam. 

 They feared antagonizing other countries. Some per- 

 sons suspected that the target ships would be spaced 

 too far apart, so that the tests would be ineffectual. 



A few technical men said that the tests were un- 

 necessary. They said that the atomic bomb had already 

 been tested successfully at Alamogordo, New^ Mexico, 

 at Hiroshima, and at Nagasaki. They had been told 

 of the elaborate preparations made for the Alamogordo 

 Test, of observers and scientific instruments that moni- 

 tored the explosions over Japan. They knew of the 

 careful inspections later made of the ruined Japanese 

 cities and of the extensive studies of injuries suffered 

 by the Japanese people. Some technical men said, in ef- 

 fect : " If we assemble the data already available, make 

 additional small-scale tests required, call in our best 

 theoretical physicists, then merely by computation we 

 can arrive at the results we need; we don't need any 

 further atomic bomb tests." 



Technical men closest to the practical problems 

 knew that no such makeshift would work. They knew 

 that the Alamogordo test, although entirely successful 

 as a demonstration, did not produce all the technical 

 and scientific data needed. To be sure, the story ob- 

 tained as to gamma radiation and neutron radiation 

 was a good one. On the other hand the optical radia- 

 tion data and pressure data were not as extensive as 



