SAVANTS SEEK INTERNATIONAL ATOM CONTROL

Five hundred and fifteen scientists who were engaged in war research on the atomic bomb at Harvard and M.I.T. released a statement Wednesday to plead for international control of atomic energy and to "alert the American people and government to the terrible consequences of an armament race with atomic weapons."

The report stressed the fact that "international cooperation of an unprecedented kind" is necessary to assure the survival of mankind.

Although the scientists made no attempt to outline a plan for the international control of atomic energy, they said: "If the people of the world are to survive, it is necessary for the United States Government, as first producer of the bomb, to initiate immediately steps to achieve effective world cooperation and the prevention of war."

Supplementary Documents

John H. Van Vleck, chairman of the Physics Department of the University, submitted two supplementary documents describing the futility of defenses against atomic attack. The supplements were prepared by I. A. Getting, division head of the M.I.T. Radiation Laboratory, and N. Ridenour, professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Getting, who worked on nuclear physics at Harvard before the war, stated that "the possibility of making an adequate defense against atomic missiles are so vanishingly small as to be zero in any practical viewpoint."

Ridenour, an expert on guided missiles, declared, "Of two principal important causes of means for using the atomic bomb, the first, and overwhelmingly the most important, is the infernal machine, or mine, which has been located in operating position during peacetime."

Atomic bombs are small enough to be hidden inside "a grand piano, a chest of drawers, of sofa," asserted Ridenour. The spying and intelligence work needed to prevent the erection of such mines in our cities would "render everyday peaceful life all but intolerable.

Getting, who worked on nuclear physics at Harvard before the war, stated that "the possibility of making an adequate defense against atomic missiles are so vanishingly small as to be zero in any practical viewpoint."

Ridenour, an expert on guided missiles, declared, "Of two principal important causes of means for using the atomic bomb, the first, and overwhelmingly the most important, is the infernal machine, or mine, which has been located in operating position during peacetime."

Atomic bombs are small enough to be hidden inside "a grand piano, a chest of drawers, of sofa," asserted Ridenour. The spying and intelligence work needed to prevent the erection of such mines in our cities would "render everyday peaceful life all but intolerable.