-18ten square miles to take out 1h From the context in which that statement appears it is apparent that Dr. Oppenheimer is speaking of an area of total destruction, _ The city of New York is listed in the World Almanac as having an area of 365 square miles. But it obviouslywould not require the pulverization of every block of it to make the whole area one of complete chaos and horror. Ten well- placed bombs of the Nagasaki type would eliminate that city as a contributor to the national economy, whether for peace or war, and convert it instead into a catastrophe area in dire need of relief from outside, If the figure of ten bombs be challenged, it need only be said that it would make very Little. difference militarily if twice that number of bombs were required. Similarly, it would be a matter of relative indifference if the power of the bomb were so increased as to require only five to do the job. Increase of power in the indi- vidual bomb is of especially little moment to cities;pf smali or medium size, 2 “ ow which would be wiped out by one bomb each whethe that bomb were of the Nagasaki type or of fifty times as much power. No reNtcares the power of the atomic bomb could compare in importance with the disparity in power between atomic and previous types of explosives. The condition at this writing of numerous cities in Europe and Japan sufficiently underlines the fact that it does not require atomic bombs to enable man to destroy great cities. INT and incendiary bombs when dropped in sufficient quantities are able to do a quite thorough job of it. For that matter, it should be pointed out that a single bomb which contains in itself the concentrated energy of 20,000 tons of TNT is by no means equal in destructive effect to that number of tons of TNT distributed among bombs of one or two tons each, The destructive radius of any one bomb increases only with the cube root of the lh. "Atomic Weapons and the Crisis in Science," Saturday Review of Literature, November 24, 1945, p. 10. ne?