CARD DIVISION

SECOND SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATION BILL, 1952

HEARINGS

BEFORE A

SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE

COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS.
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

EIGHTY-SECOND CONGRESS

COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS

CLARENCE CANNON, Missouri, Chairman

GEORGE Y. HARVEY, Clerk
(II)

GORDON DEAN, CHAIRMAN

DR. HENRY D. SMYTH, COMMISSIONER

THOMAS E. MURRAY, COMMISSIONER

M. W. BOYER, GENERAL MANAGER

WALTER J. WILLIAMS, DEPUTY GENERAL MANAGER

MAJ. GEN. THOMAS F. FARRELL, ASSISTANT GENERAL MANAGER

EVERETT L. HOLLIS, GENERAL COUNSEL

RICHARD W. COOK, DIRECTOR, DIVISION OF PRODUCTION

FRANK J. ARROTTA, DIVISION OF PRODUCTION

CURTIS A. NELSON, MANAGER, SAVANNAH RIVER OPERATIONS
OFFICE

WILLIAM H. SLATON, SAVANNAH RIVER OPERATIONS OFFICE
J. DONALD MCBRIDE, SAVANNAH RIVER OPERATIONS OFFICE
CAPT. ANDREW MCB. JACKSON, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, DIVISION OF
MILITARY APPLICATION

RODNEY L. SOUTHWICK, DIVISION OF INFORMATION SERVICES
OSCAR S. SMITH, DIVISION OF ORGANIZATION AND PERSONNEL
LINDSLEY H. NOBLE, CONTROLLER

F. J. MCCARTHY, JR., DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR BUDGETS

Mr. GORE. The committee will come to order.

The committee is pleased to have before it Mr. Gordon Dean, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission; Commissioners Henry D. Smyth and Thomas E. Murray; also Mr. M. W. Boyer, General Manager; Walter J. Williams, Deputy General Manager; Maj Gen. Thomas F. Farrell, Assistant General Manager; Everett L. Hollis, General Counsel; Richard W. Cook, Director, Division of Production; Frank J. Arrotta, Division of Production; Curtis A. Nelson, Manager, Savannah River Operations Office; William Slaton, Savannah River Operations Office; J. Donald McBride, Savannah River Operations Office; Capt. Andrew McB. Jackson, Deputy Director, Division of Military Application; Rodney L. Southwick, Division of Information Services; Oscar S. Smith, Division of Organization and Personnel;

(1)

87

Lindsley H. Noble, Controller; and F. J. McCarthy, Jr., Deputy Director for Budgets.

You are appearing in connection with a supplemental estimate for $484,240,000, which is contained in House Document No. 238.

Mr. Dean, did you arrive this morning by way of atomic air force, or submarine?

Mr. DEAN. We did not come up in any fantastic new weapon of the future.

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN ATOMIC ENERGY

Mr. GORE. Well, this committee is charged with the very menial task, unglamorous task, of deciding how many of the taxpayers' dollars shall be spent upon this program. We have been reading a very great deal of information recently which is not quite commensurate with the information which this committee has heretofore received. Would you like to put the committee in focus on such related and unrelated matters?

Mr. DEAN. So many things have appeared in the papers in the course of the last 2 or 3 weeks that I think we would have to take them piece by piece.

Mr. GORE. We will be glad to have that.

Mr. DEAN. A good many of these stories you have read-for example, the fact that the Army has a guided missile of great interest to them, and pictures of that appeared in the paper-that is an Army release, of course and the Air Force have a similar one which came out about 2 days later, and about 3 days later, I think it was, the Navy release came along which said they had one in the making or on the drawing board which was better than both the Army and Air Force missiles of course, none of those stories came out of our Commission. They have had to do with the development of guided missiles and rockets by the three services.

Mr. GORE. It would indicate that, instead of unification, we still have a lot of interservice competition for publicity as well as appropriation of funds. I do not expect you to comment on that.

Mr. DEAN. I will say for the guided missile program, that it has had considerable coordination during the course of the last year under the guidance of K. T. Keller, who was brought in by the Secretary of Defense to assign priorities to the various rockets that are on the drawing boards, of which there are many, and guided missiles. I think that is in better shape than it was, certainly, a year ago. In other words, certain of them look promising, and they are concentrating on those. Others have been wiped out. So I think they have. made some real progress in that field.

HYDROGEN BOMB DEVELOPMENT

Mr. GORE. How near are you to making a hydrogen bomb?
Dr. DEAN. I guess this had better be off the record.

Mr. GORE. It is quite all right for it to be off the record, but all of this mystic gazing into the crystal ball leaves the public under an erroneous impression.

Mr. DEAN. It certainly does. And we are not comfortable about that, either. One of the difficulties is that every time you correct what

seems to be an erroneous impression the public has, in order to do it adequately and put the thing in balance, you give away very sensitive information. This is the difficulty that faces us all the time.

I would be happy to tell you, but I think this really should be off the record.

Mr. GORE. Go off the record.

(Discussion off the record.)

Mr. GORE. It is not correct, then, nor has it ever been correct to describe the Savannah plant, for which you seek supplemental appropriations here, as a hydrogen bomb plant?

Mr. DEAN. That is not a correct name for the Savannah River plant. It should be called a reactor facility, which can produce materials for either fission weapons or fusion weapons.

(Discussion off the record.)

TACTICAL USE OF ATOMIC WEAPONS

Mr. ANDREWs. Can an A-bomb be used as a tactical weapon at the battlefront for the purpose of doing damage to our enemies without doing damage to our troops?

Mr. DEAN. Yes, definitely. It would depend, of course, on the deployment of our own troops in relation to those of the enemy. But given the right situation, and a target of opportunity, we could use an atomic bomb today in a tactical way against enemy troops in the field, military concentrations near combat areas and other vital military targets without risk to our own troops. And, as time passes, we are steadily increasing-through our technological and production progress-the number of situations in which atomic weapons can be effectively and to our own troops, safely-employed in battle areas. The main difficulty with the revolution that is now taking place in our atomic weapons program is that most of us have not yet had a similar revolution in our thinking about atomic weapons. We still think of them in terms of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We think of the great mushroom-shaped clouds and the devastation that lay below them. We think of them as weapons to be used against cities or large areas, and we don't think of them for use in a battle zone against troops. But all this is changing. The specter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should not hang over the tactical use of atomic weapons in the field. What we are working toward here is a situation where we will have atomic weapons in almost as complete a variety as we do conventional ones, and a situation where we can use them in the same way. This would include artillery shells, guided missiles, torpedoes, rockets, and bombs for ground-support aircraft among others, and it would include big ones for big situations and little onesand this is important-for little situations.

This is the area we are moving into, and, as we move into it, we are naturally also moving into a period in which atomic weapons are becoming vastly more interesting to the Army, Navy, and tactical Air Force units than they have been previously, while the interest of the strategic air units is remaining at its past level. Today the armed services are faced as never before with the problem of integrating atomic weapons into all military combat operations. The time, in my judgment, is already here when the effect of these new weapons on military planning is of the utmost importance and this is influencing