Senator Brien McMahon told Teller that the GAC report “just makes me sick.” McMahon had come to believe that war with the Soviets was “inevitable.” He told a shocked Lilienthal that he thought the United States should “blow them off the face of the earth, quick, before they do the same to us. . . .” Adm. Sidney Souers warned, “It’s either we make it [the H-bomb] or we wait until the Russians drop one on us without warning.” Many other Washington officials had similarly apocalyptic reactions. The debate over the Super had thus crystallized the underlying hysteria of the Cold War and divided
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