The Road from Los Alamos.

" . . . [H]ow long it will take for another nation to obtain the knowledge necessary to make atomic bombs . . .
 . . . [A]ny one of several determined foreign nations could duplicate our work in a period of about five years."^1a

"Let us assume an H-bomb releasing 1,000 times as much energy as the Hiroshima bomb. The radius of destruction by blast from a bomb increases as the cube root of the increase in the bomb’s power. At Hiroshima the radius of severe destruction was one mile. So an H-bomb would cause almost complete destruction of buildings up to a radius of 10 miles. By the blast effect alone a single bomb could obliterate almost all of Greater New York or Moscow or London . . .
"About 30 percent of the casualties in Hiroshima were caused by flash burns . . . the H-bomb . . . would burn people to death over a radius of up to 20 miles or more."^1b

"I believe that in a war fought with hydrogen bombs we would lose not only many lives but all our liberties and human values as well."^1c

"I was one of the scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which developed the atomic bomb during World War II. We thought at the time that the United States might deploy a few dozen nuclear weapons. Not in our worst nightmares did we imagine that someday there would be about 10,000 strategic nuclear weapons in the United States and a similar number in the Soviet Union. These large numbers make no sense . . ."^1d

   
Intermediate Quantum Mechanics.

   
In the Shadow of the Bomb.
By Silvan S. Schweber.

• Hans A. Bethe, Cornell University; b. 1906, Strasbourg, then Germany. The Nobel Prize in Physics 1967, "for his contributions to the theory of nuclear reactions, especially his discoveries concerning the energy production in stars" http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1967/

* Italics in the original.

¹ Hans A. Bethe. The Road from Los Alamos. The American Institute of Physics, 1991. New York, NY: Touchstone, Simon and Schuster Inc., 1991.
^a The Bomb. How Close Is the Danger? With Frederic Seitz, at 3 and 10.
^b The Bomb. The Hydrogen Bomb, at 15.
^c Ibid., at 16.
^d The Freeze. Debate: Bethe vs. Teller, Response by Edward Teller, at 164.

MK-BOOKs-BETHE-20040917