The Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky • Page 11

11 JOE CREASON'S KENTUCKY Ground Zero Plus 20 Thoughts and hopes of the men behind' the bomb that burst over a desert two full decades ago lr J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, Lot Angela Time Wellington Po.1 Service iL' iljB ALL WHO have visited Reelfoot Lake, the fascinating body of water that pokes long fingers across the state line from Southwestern Tennessee into Fulton County, surely have returned with two vivid recollections: 1. The submerged trees that lift skeleton-like arms out of the water as gaunt reminders of the 1811 earthquakes that created Reelfoot. It happened, you know, when a cypress forest sank and was filled with water from the nearby Mississippi River. 2.

The canoe-shaped, flat-bottomed boats equipped with hind-part-before oars that are used for traveling over the lake. The odd-ball boats are necessary because Reelfoot is so heavily booby-trapped with snags and underwater obstructions. Special equipment is necessary for safe navigation by fishermen and water sportsmen. The only place In the nation producing the nique craft is the one-man Calhoun Boat Works at Tiptonvllie, the Tennessee town at the west end of the lake. The Reelfoot oars are called bow-facing oars because the rower not only faces the bow, he also moves the boat in that direction (forward) through the water.

This is, of exactly opposite from a set of conventional oars which move a boat backward. The bow-facing oars have (Editor Nolet J. Robert Oppenheimer teas director of thn Lot Alamos scientific laboratory whose secret work fulminated in the successful test of on atomic bomb on the IS em Mexico deiert July 16, 1945. Three weeks later Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, and the Japanese surrendered Aug. 14.

Here Oppenheimer tells of that test and his hope for the nuclear age.) NEAR dawn on the morning of July 16, 1945, I drove from the control bunker to the base camp of the Alamagordo bombing range with Brig. Gen. Thomas Farrell, deputy to Maj. Gen. Leslie R.

Groves, commanding officer of the Manhattan Project. Gen. Farrell spoke of the times, in the first World War, when, as a young lieutenant, he stood with a foot on the step, waiting to lead his men out of the trench into combat. "That," he said, "was nothing like what we have just been through." He said that the end of the war was now near; perhaps, he added, the end of all such wars. What we had just been through was the explosion of the first atomic bomb.

It had not been a dud. At the base camp, I worked with Gen. Groves on the technical results of the test for his report to Secretary Stimson in Potsdam: for him, for the President, probably for Churchill, perhaps for some talk with Stalin. Hoped For Collaboration Later, Vannevar Bush spoke with me; he knew that Arthur Crompton, Enrico Fermi, Ernest Lawrence and I (the scientific panel to the secretary of war's interim committee on atomic projects) hoped that our government would take up with the Allied governments the future hope of collaboration and indeed the use of the bombs in the Pacific war. Bush told me that this had been decided.

Nothing much like that was to happen; but neither of us then knew it. In the morning air, most of us not add again to this debate, but would make one comment. In Hiroshima in August, 1945, there was a hospital for postal and telegraphic workers. Day by day, Dr. Hachiya, who was in charge of it, kept a diary.

He was himself hurt by the explosion, but managed to get back to his hospital. He wrote of the dying who came there, the burned and the mutiliated, and of the sickness, not at first clear to him, caused by radiation: often the injured recovered, and others, not seemingly hurt at all, sickened and died. There Is no outrage or anger In these pages. But in one entry Dr. Hachiya is angry; he had heard the rumor of an imperial rescript in which the emperor asked the Japanese government to end the war.

It was not only the generals and the Kamikaze who were determined to fight to the death. If we should speak of regret, we should remember that these considerations, looking to the end of the war and toward the future, were not those that led to the initiation of serious work on the bomb. Already in 1939, in this country, Albert Szilard, with help from Eugene Wigner and with the support of Albert Einstein, indicated to our government the possible importance of the uranium project, its possible military use. Tiro Yean Were Lost In England, Rudolf Peierls and 0. R.

Frisch, like their Amerian colleagues refugees from tyranny, addressed similar pleas to the government of the United Kingdom. Peierls work had a clarity and firmness of program at the time unmatched in this country. He thought that he knew how to make a bomb; he was quite sure that it would work. It was not until the autumn of 1941 that serious consideration was given here to making a bomb; it was not until then that the British had seen that our help was needed and that they could not go it alone. Then, just before Pearl Harbor, with El Alamein and Stalingrad still a year complete with oars, in a day and a half.

Standard length is 15! feet; the width varies from 22 to 28 inches. The framework is oak and the hull cypress or mahogany, covered with brown domestic backed with paint to make it a layer of 30-gauge metal for further protection. Peculiar boats for use on a peculiar lake. Written, Spoken Slips BEING one who has plowed the ground in both areas many times, I know full well slips of word andor mouth can happen with the greatest of ease. A recent example of each: "Go Fifth As Pilgrims" read the headline over a newspaper commencement story.

Ironically, the commencement was at the College of the Bible in Lexington. And a Louisville radio announcer ad libbed a beer commercial with this result: "On these warm afternoons, have your wife bring you a cold beer every half hour on the hour." Huh? World's Oldest Columnist? AS ONE who has been in the column business only two years, I stand in awe of Mrs. Ida Holsclaw of Bullitt County who's been writing one of the monsters for a cool 75 years. Mrs. Holsclaw, who started writing the "Hebron News" for the Salt River Tiger (now The Pioneer News) in the mid-1880s, no doubt is the world's oldest newspaper columnist, what with having celebrated her 105th birthday last week.

Now, the weekly columns are dictated by Mrs. Holsclaw to her daughter, who does the actual writing. It adds up to at least 3,700 columns over the years. He Heard Every Word FEW POLITICIANS have been more critically honest of their stints in office than Charles E. Whittle, who left the post as head of Ogden College, where he had been the youngest college president in the United States, to be elected Edmonson County attorney in 1925.

"My tenure wasn't particularly eventful and I was as happy to be out of the office when my term ended as a large segment of the population must have been to be rid of me," says Whittle, now a Brownsville lawyer. "One of the memorable things I recall was a compliment I received after arguing a case before the jury. After it was over, Roy Webb, our circuit court clerk, came up to me. 'That was the best damn speech I ever he said. The thing that made that memorable is the fact Roy had been totally deaf since childhood." away and the defeat of the Axis far from assured, we did get to work.

I think it a valid ground for regret that those two years were lost, two years of slaughter, degradation and despair. The last two decades have been shadowed by danger, ever changing, never really receding. Looking to the future, I see again no ground for confidence; but I do see hope. The mood of hope is not as bright today as two years ago. Then, after the crisis in Cuba, President Kennedy spoke at American University and Pope John XXIII wrote his "Pacem In Terris," giving the noblest and most rounded expression of what we vaguely thought 20 years earlier in the desert.

But it is not the mood of hope, but hope itself, that is part of our life, and thus part of our duty. We are engaged in this great enterprise of our time, testing whether men can both preserve and enlarge life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and live without war as the great arbiter of history. This we knew early in the morning of July 16, 20 years ago. J. Robert Oppenheimer At the Alamorgordo test site shared, clearly with no grounds for confidence, the two hopes of which Gen.

Farrell spoke. For a year, with the imminent defeat of the Axis in Europe and the growing weakness of the Japanese in the Pacific, more and more we had thought of the peril and the hope that our work would bring to human history: the peril of these weapons and their almost inevitable vast increase; and the hope of limiting and avoiding war, and of new patterns and institutions of international cooperation, insight and understanding. There was no such simple sense three weeks later, with the use of the bombs in Japan and the end of the war, marked by this final cruel slaughter. Much has been written on the wisdom of those actions, and on imagined alternatives. I would 1 sj' 4 A Flame Is Out, And The U.N.

Mourns Dale Calhoun in forward-rowing boat a double-jointed upper handle that reverses the bite in the water so the oarsman faces the direction in which he is moving and thus can move around obstructions. The flat bottom of the boat enables it to glide over submerged logs without tipping over. Dale Calhoun, the one-man work crew at the boat works, can turn out a boat, By WILLIAM R. FRYE, United Nations Correspondent dent Johnson care to move which knew him best in his final years, is terribly sorry to see the candle go oat. Copyrlifit, mi Jr 1 'LU against a man with Stevenson's following.

On at least one other point, Stevenson differed with elements of the Johnson administration. This was on Russia's dues arrears. The United States delegate foresaw that it would be politically impossible to force Moscow to pay under the circumstances prevailing when the crisis arose. Whether a stronger American stand could, in fact, have altered the outcome, his predictions have proved accurate, and every sign is that the administration now is preparing to retreat as gracefully as possible. vr 'fix ril Jt rj UNITED NATIONS, N.

Y. U.N. diplomats agree that in the death of Adlai E. Stevenson the United States has lost a major national asset More than a spokesman for this country, Stevenson was in the eyes of many U.N. people a symbol of the best in America its combination of talent and humility, of strength with flexibility, of compassion and a willingness to see another's point of view.

Any American diplomat commands an audience here; his words carry weight because they represent power and influence. Stevenson's words had an added dimension of impact because of the grace and originality in his turn of phrase, and because of widespread respect for the man who spoke them. He was virtually incapable of a cliche or an irrelevancy. The U.N. never forgot that Stevenson was the man millions of Americans wanted as president, but who had the misfortune to run at the wrong time, against an unbeatable opponent.

The U.N. would have elected him overwhelmingly. Some of his impact in U.N. circles Was diluted when he was obviously not taken fully into the White House's confidence, as during the Bay of Pigs invasion and in the early stages of the Dominican crisis. Restraint Hit Forte Except from the Russians, however, these embarrassments gave rise to more sympathy than scorn.

Until recently, even the Russians seemed hesitant to attack him personally; he operated in a kind of Steven-sonian privileged sanctuary. Sharpening of Soviet-American relations since the bombing of North Viet Nam ended his immunity. But Stevenson then took Soviet abuse with considerable aplomb, winning much of the rest of the U.N. by refusing to strike back in kind. The flavor of restraint and even on occasion self-abnegation which Stevenson contributed to American diplomacy here was not universally popular with all Americans, some of whom preferred Henry Cabot Lodge's style the im mediate, hard-hitting come back.

But it won respect in the U.N., and strengthened American influence at a time when that influence was being subjected to serious erosion by other factors. The U.N. considered Stevenson's rapier thrusts at the Soviets far more effective than a bludgeon would have been, and in addition these tactics better served an over-all purpose of American and U.N. policy: to restore the Soviet-American detente of 1963. The U.N.

knew, or thought it knew, that Stevenson privately agreed with its reservations about President Johnson's use of force in the Dominican Republic and Viet Nam. They would not have been surprised to see him resign in protest, or be eased out by the White House. Differed On Duet At several points, he came close to putting certain reservations, especially about the Dominican Republic, on the public record. But he never quite did so, nor did Presi Mm i mi 44mAH Stevenson took much abuse from the right wing of American politics, which found both him and the U.N. distasteful.

His reaction was much like the one which, in one of his many eloquent moments, he attributed to the late Eleanor Roosevelt: "She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness." In a sense, this attitude epitomized his career. The U.N., fMMm RMBIP TO YOUR GOOD HEALTH: Plastic Surgery Is A Useful Device By JOSEPH G. MOLNER, M. D. Dear Doctor: What is meant by plastic surgery? Mrs.

A.C.M. SURGERY means treatment of disease by operation with instruments, by which we ordinarily mean cutting, but surgery means more than that. Electrical or radio-frequency instruments are used for special purposes, and there is experimentation and some practical use now of laser beams, highly concentrated "plastic surgeons," it is plastic surgery. This is only a sample of what plastic surgery means. DEAR DR.

MOLNER: A few years ago my son had one eye removed. Now the other one is hemorrhaging. Is this bad, and is there anything he can do? MRS. C.T.Z. UNDOUBTEDLY it is bad, but without knowing a great deal more about the case, I can't say anything further.

Your son shouldmust see an eye specialist without delay. Copyrltht, ms By George Clark The Neighbors Country Parson light rays. Orthopedic surgeons use braces, casts, splints and other devices to bring bones into proper position. So surgery means a great deal more than a scalpel (or knife). And of course it should The fundamental purpose is to help people get well by any method possible.

The word "plastic" means the molding or shaping of something. In this case, it is shaping by surgery. Doubtless the general impression of plastic surgery is that it changes the shape of a face or perhaps some feature. This is for cosmetic purposesmaking a person look better. Plastic surgeons have made a fine art of doing incisions and then suturing them together so that the resulting scar, if any, is virtually invisible.

However, plastic surgery encompasses more than cosmetic surgery. When a child is born with a cleft palate or "hare lip," the plastic surgeon repairs it. Plastic surgeons have been part of the "team" when a heart valve has had to be altered in shape to work properly. In the war (and in accident cases) when a face or some other part of the body has been mangled, the plastic surgeon reconstructs it. Amazing work has been done in reconstructing crushed and torn hands, and although the surgeons doing this do not usually regard themselves as Dividend Checks moving In the best directions among the urban set.

Here, three-piece Dacroncotton costume, Si Bonne lined. Cap sleeved overblouse is demi-fitted. Crisply checked in brownwhite, greywhite, bluecream. Misses' sizes 70.00 french salon, second floor if) iL r'JJsM wlUl '6. i man "Unhappiness seems to be what we get most of when our yearnings keep ahead of our earnings." i gUuLfJii "'timiMjfiniu n'liiiiiiini' iriiiwmilftrwi7iiMlT "Just a few goats won't make a lot of money, but four, five hundred and your troubles are over." i.