A grim 75th anniversary

 Portside - February 26th is 75th anniversary of the first disclosure – on NBC radio and then on the front page of the New York Times – of a terrifying secret: the United States government was starting down a road that had the potential to lead to the production of a “doomsday machine,” a single bomb capable of releasing enough radioactive fallout to kill every living thing on Earth. The Times’ page-1 headline was short and to the point: “Ending of All Life By Hydrogen Bomb Held a Possibility”.

The federal government’s Atomic Energy Commission, which was in 1950 directing the design of the first-ever hydrogen bomb – it was first tested in November 1952 – did its best to suppress the news. The AEC even went so far as to seize, and then incinerate, the entire print-run of a forthcoming issue of Scientific American because it contained what the AEC said (incorrectly, as it turned out) was top-secret information about the hydrogen bomb.

Fourteen years later a “doomsday machine” exactly like what had been described on NBC and in the New York Times was the focus of the award-winning film, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” but thanks to the previous official censorship hardly anyone who saw the film in 1964 remembered that such a device could actually be built, not as a glitch, but as a feature.

Of course, to this day the secrecy surrounding atomic weapons makes it impossible for the public to know whether any nation has built a doomsday machine, but there can be no question that it is technically possible to do so. Much more information of the subject is available here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb