This is NBC, the National Broadcasting Company.

People were getting home from their morning errands or getting home from church.

Lots of people were just sitting down at their kitchen tables to have Sunday lunch. And that day on the radio, there was a national broadcast that managed to scare the begesis out of nearly everyone who listened to it.

Over NBC's Coast to Coast network of independent affiliated stations,

the University of Chicago Roundtable.

A Roundtable conversation aired nationwide on the radio by NBC. The topic of this roundtable was admittedly a little

bit dark for a Sunday afternoon. Today the roundtable discusses the facts about

the hydrogen bomb. This important

roundtable series is being presented in response to the great public concern

over the decision to build the hydrogen bomb. The decision to build a hydrogen bomb. The decision to build a hydrogen bomb. The United States and the world

had just seen in 1945 the devastating effects of nuclear warfare when the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan.

But what they were talking about on the radio this Sunday afternoon, four and a half years

after the war was over.

Was something new, something bigger?

There have been many statements in the press

concerning this possible new instrument of destruction. How much of that discussion has been correct and

how much of it has been incorrect? What does the hydrogen bomb mean? To answer these

questions one must first understand what the hydrogen bomb really is.

The discussion that day on the radio was among four scientists who knew of what they spoke.

All of them had been part of the Manhattan Project, led by Robert Oppenheimer,

which of course secretly developed and then built America's atomic bombs.

What these Manhattan Project scientists were now trying to tell the public, on the radio that

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