Bombs in Gilead?

By John Skow

THE CURVE OF BINDING ENERGY by JOHN MCPHEE 232 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

$7.95.

Practically on the day this chilling book reached the public, someone with religious or political convictions detonated four car bombs in Dublin and a town to the north, killing 28 people. The event gave special interest to Author McPhee's thesis, which is that right now one fairly skilled technician, using easily obtainable equipment and information, and easily stolen uranium 235 or plutonium 239, could make a nuclear fission bomb. The bomb certainly would be small enough to fit into a Volkswagen, and perhaps into a golf bag.

Like a number of people now concerned with the problem (TIME, May 13), McPhee assumes that sooner or later someone will do it and will hold a city, or cities, at ransom. The motive might be idealism or simple criminality. Whatever his (or their) reasons, McPhee notes, the bomb makers would have to establish credibility and so presumably would make two bombs. The first would be set off as a free sample, and the second would be offered at a price.

McPhee is not a physicist but a journalist, one of the very best now writing, who specializes in the long, reportorial essay. He has written books about such things as oranges, tennis, ecology, an unlikely tract of New Jersey outback called the Pine Barrens and a group of men who tried to reinvent the zeppelin. Like all journalists dealing with science, McPhee is tethered by limitations in his readers' knowledge and imagination.

Writing about nuclear physics and the creative process of a bomb maker for an audience that does not understand mathematics, moreover, is a bit like writing music criticism for the deaf. McPhee manages very well, using the life and thought of Theoretical Physicist Ted Taylor as a way into the subject. The reader, balancing his head carefully so that the neutrons won't spill out, is led an enormous distance, to the point where a good many of Taylor's calculations seem understandable.

Taylor was a shy, gangly graduate student, brilliantly inventive but a rarefied soul, who flunked out of his doctoral program at Berkeley only to be salvaged by a sympathetic adviser and then sent to New Mexico to work in a Government program there. He was 24. The year was 1949. Taylor discovered that his new job at Los Alamos was to make atomic bombs. He loved it. Thereafter his bomb-making genius confounded the elders in the temple.

Much later we see Taylor middleaged, a figure of high reputation among his colleagues, now disaffected with bomb making and no longer at work as a nuclear physicist. He directs an ecological-research firm. He and McPhee travel about the country. He shows the author unguarded trucks rumbling down rural highways, loaded with weapons-grade uranium. They see manufacturing plants where enough fissionable material to blow up Manhattan could be stolen by one armed and determined man, or carried off bit by bit, undetected, by one unarmed employee.

Some authorities agree that such conditions are terribly dangerous and that as more nuclear fuel is produced, things will become much worse. Others say that, yes, one man could make a fis sion bomb, but that man would have to be a Ted Taylor. On the other hand, Taylor insists this is not so. Just about all that is required is an ability to read and to use tools.

As a result of work by Taylor and others, a recent Atomic Energy Com mission study urges that a new federal nuclear protection and transportation service be set up. It is hard to read the book without hoping that the AEC and private manufacturers will indeed tight en what seems to be unbelievably sloppy security. Locations and (in some cases) floor plans of atomic installations can be had from the U.S. Government Printing Office. So, according to Tay lor, can enough declassified hints on bomb making to smooth the way for any halfway-intelligent home hobbyist.

McPhee notes that one of these Government pamphlets, detailing problems that arose during the making of the first A-bombs, carries a thoughtful dis claimer: "Neither the United States, nor the [Atomic Energy] Commission . . . assumes any liabilities with respect to the use of, or for damages resulting from the use of, any information, ap paratus, method, or process disclosed in this report."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.