New York, March 25

President Eisenhower was characteristically prudent yesterday in answering a newsman’s question about the radioactive burns of the 23 Japanese fishermen. But his remarks that the Bikini test “surpassed the expectations” of the Atomic Energy Commission is the first official acknowledgment that American defence policy is in for a revolutionary turn.

The commission appears to have been almost as stunned by the result as the Congressmen who were allowed to watch it. Representative Chet Holifield (Democrat, California) said that the explosion “was so far beyond what was predicted that you might say it was out of control.” The Civil Defence administrator, Mr Val Petersen, summed up the moral for civilians by predicting that “the cities are finished,” meaning that the only practicable defence in a country where people are so heavily concentrated in industrial cities is to get everybody out before the bombers arrive.

In an interview with the Alsop brothers Mr Petersen said that after a survey of the likely effects of nuclear bombing on the 67 largest American cities, he had concluded that nine million people would be instantly killed and another 22,000,000 would be seriously wounded. There are not enough hospital beds in this hemisphere to handle such a disaster, and Mr Petersen bitterly wondered “How are you going to bury nine million corpses?”

This survey was done on the calculation that the worst would happen. But the worst, as Mr Petersen’s researchers conceived it, was nothing like so bad as the explosion at Bikini which is now judged to be between six hundred and eight hundred times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. The New York Herald Tribune said yesterday that “March 1, 1954, may well go down as a turning point in history ... on that day a thermo-nuclear bomb was exploded ... of an order of magnitude which seems to raise wholly new questions of policy.”

Under-estimation

So thinks the Pentagon, which has either deduced or learned from the Atomic Energy Commission that the explosion was about three times as powerful as the scientists had anticipated. This miscalculation would be reason enough for the Commission to withhold all public information about the test. And if it had not been for the grim, and as it now appears freakish, accident to the Japanese fishermen, nobody outside the Commission and the Chiefs of Staff would have been aware that we had reached the point when the first act of aggression against any modern industrial State could be the final act of extermination.

The Air Force has assured Mr Petersen that in less than two years the continental radar network will be able to give a two-hour alert to most American cities. But this is very scant consolation for all but the most hidebound Army brass.

Anyway, there is responsible talk that the coming tests at Eniwetok will be far more devastating. The first effect has been to set the Japanese agitating for an end to American experiments in the Pacific which threaten the livelihood and the food supply of a densely populated island of fishermen. Once these have been temporarily pacified by compensation, medical care, and a promise to extend the danger zone, the United States and, indeed, all the Western allies will then have to face the question which cannot be avoided much longer: Can the strategy of warfare absorb, within the limits of tolerable human agony, the knowledge and use of the hydrogen bomb or does the bomb itself make warfare itself an act of human suicide? No conceivable American foreign policy and no American precedent in sight would deliver the first bomb.

There is a group in the Pentagon which is convinced that the progressive struggle between the Soviet Union and the West to match horrifying weapons has already passed beyond the point when it is feasible to think of using those weapons at all; and these people are now working on what might be called a deterrent strategy. And President Eisenhower, a disillusioned general if ever there was one, is beginning to think of “instant retaliation” as only a stage in the search for a modern conception of foreign policy as the crowning achievement of preventive medicine.