[en] The technical, strategic, and human aspects of the great debate begun in late 1969 which led to the decision to build the first hydrogen bomb are reviewed. Chapters are included on the atomic bomb programs in the US and USSR to 1949; discussions which led to President Truman's approval of the superbomb project; the H-bomb programs; a review of the advice of the General Advisory Committee of the USAEC and of its chairman J. Robert Oppenheimer; and the major consequences of the decision to develop the superbomb

No abstract available

[en] The memoirs of the author traces his life from his first-year graduate studies in physics at the University of Rochester in 1942 to his present position as Director of the University of California's Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. The part of his life involved in making weapons extends from 1942 to 1961. During this period, he worked with E.O. Lawrence on the Manhattan Project and served as director of Livermore after it became the Atomic Energy Commission's second nuclear weapons laboratory. He also served on many government advisory boards and commissions dealing with nuclear and other weapons. In 1961, the combination of a heart attack and changes in administration in Washington led York too return to the University of California for the talking peace portion of his life. He has since become a public exponent of arms control and disarmament and the futility of seeking increased security through more and better nuclear weapons. York's explanation of his move from making weapons to talking peace leaves the reader with a puzzle

[en] The background of the 1949 debate among US scientists on the AEC's General Advisory Committee over the advisability of developing the hydrogen bomb is reviewed, the consequences of the US government rejecting the recommendations of that committee are discussed, and the chronology of subsequent H bomb development in the US and USSR is presented. (LCL)

[en] In publishing the series of research papers United Nations Institute for Disarmament research (UNIDIR) wishes to make available to the international diplomatic as well as scientific community analyses prepared by the staff of the Institute or persons working within its framework. This paper proposes combining prohibition on further proliferation with the prohibitions on threat and on use. The principle merit of the proposal is that all of these prohibitions are desirable and very logically connected and the means of enforcing them is in general the same. In the proposed scheme only the Security Council would have the right to threaten the use of nuclear weapons or if the threat alone was not sufficient to authorize their actual use by one or more of its members on its behalf

[en] For forty years politically active nuclear scientists have been trying to invent and to promote policies and schemes which would on the one hand make the benefits of nuclear energy available to all mankind, and on the other hand inhibit or prevent the manufacture and use of nuclear weapons. So far, the record of these attempts is poor; it now threatens to get worse fast