Publish Date: April 12, 1954
Cover Story: The Road Beyond Elugelab
How TIME Covered the News: The atomic bombs dropped over Japan during World War II were an awesome display of firepower. But it emerged a decade later that the U.S. – in addition to several other countries – was in the process of making hydrogen bombs that were hundreds of times more powerful than what obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was revealed that in 1952, the island of Elugelab in the Marshall Islands was destroyed by an H-bomb and that U.S. tests were continuing:
“The H-bomb’s existence requires the U.S. to put much more strongly the case for international control of atomic weapons. Such control might impair unlimited national sovereignty as the world now knows it. It might imply a measure of world government. But the U.S. need not flinch at this prospect. Its own political history encourages the chance of a constitutional solution of a force so big that it calls for supranational control.”