The Daily Record

WASHINGTON (UP)-
Highly placed officials said today Russia's H-bomb announcement does not call for any drastic change in U. S. defense plans.
They said the Eisenhower administration is taking the Soviet boast calmly, and has no present intention of undertaking a "crisis program" of building bomb shelters, dispersing cities, moving industry underground or hastily expanding the air and radar defenses of the North American Continent.
Authorities gave two reasons for the government's unruffled reaction to Soviet Premier Georgi M. Malenkov's assertion Saturday that "the United States no longer has the monopoly of the hydrogen bomb"
1. There is a strong suspicion here that Malenkov may have been bluffing. This suspicion is based on the fact that delicate scientific instruments, capable of recording atomic blasts in any part of the world, have detected no test explosions in Russia since October, 1951.
2. Even if Russia has succeeded in making a super-bomb, the basic facts of world atomic power have not changed. Long before Malenkov spoke out Saturday, U. S. officials were warning that the Soviet Union possessed enough ordinary A-bombs and long-range planes to lay waste most of America's cities in a single devastating raid.
The administration's unperturbed attitude was demonstrated by President Eisenhower, who left for a four-week vacation in Colorado soon after news of the Malenkov announcement reached the capital.
Dr. Ralph Lapp, an atomic scientist, promptly urged Mr. Eisenhower to consider calling a special session of Congress to work on new air defense plans "of a totally unprecedented nature."
But Sen. James H. Duff R-Pa. said it would be absurd to call Congress into session on the basis of Malenkov's "propaganda claims."
"We've been blackmailed and blackjacked by these fakers before," he said.