Will the H-bomb, if made, add enough to our security to make the effort worth while? We have seen that the required effort may, after all, not be very great. In fact, it may turn out to be a relatively small one, in view of the fact that all the basic ingredients and plants are already at hand and fully paid for. But supposing even that the effort turns out to be much more costly than it now appears? The question we must then ask ourselves is: Can we afford not to make the effort? It is true, of course, as some have pointed out, that ten or even fewer A-bombs could destroy the heart of any metropolitan city, while only one would be quite enough, as we know, for cities the size of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. But that neglects to take into consideration the fact that one H-bomb concentrates within itself the power of thirty A-bombs to destroy by fire and by burns an area of more than 1,200 square miles at one blow. Nor does it take into consideration the military advantage of delivering the power of a combination of ten and thirty A-bombs in one concentrated package, which would make it a tremendous tactical weapon against a huge land army scattered over many miles, or its possible enormous psychological effect against such an army. Most important of all, this view grossly minimizes the apocalyptic potentialities of the H-bomb for poisoning large areas with deadly clouds of radioactive particles. It is a monstrous fact that an H-bomb incorporating one ton of deuterium, encased in a shell of cobalt, would liberate 250 pounds of neutrons, which would create 15,000 pounds of highly radioactive cobalt, equivalent in their deadliness to 4,800,000 pounds of radium. Such bombs, according to Professor Harrison Brown, University of Chicago nuclear chemist, could be set on a north-south line in the Pacific approximately a thousand miles west of California. “The radioactive dust would reach California in about a day, and New York in four or five days, killing most life as it traverses the continent.” “Similarly,” Professor Brown stated in the _American Scholar_, “the Western powers could explode H-bombs on a north-south line about the longitude of Prague which would destroy all life within a strip 1,500 miles wide, extending from Leningrad to Odessa, and 3,000 miles deep, from Prague to the Ural Mountains. Such an attack would produce a ‘scorched earth’ of an extent unprecedented in history.” Professor Szilard, one of the principal architects of the A-bomb, has estimated, as already stated, that four hundred one-ton deuterium bombs would release enough radioactivity to extinguish all life on earth. Professor Einstein, as we have seen, has publicly stated that the H-bomb, if successful, will bring the annihilation of all life on earth within the range of technical possibilities. The question we must therefore ask ourselves is: Can we allow Russia to be the sole possessor of such a weapon?