The Nuclear Heat

Harold Steele, a retired poultry farmer of 63 who lives in the lovely Malvern Hills of western England, last week kissed his wife and three children goodbye and set off, full of zealot's fire, ready to risk his life.

His plan: to get aboard the "peace fleet" that the Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs proposes to send into the danger area when Britain explodes its first hydrogen bomb at Christmas Island this summer. "I willingly sacrifice myself to prove to the world the horror of this devilish thing," he declared to reporters. Warned that the peace fleet may not sail for lack of funds, Steele replied: "Then I will sail alone into the Christmas Island area. Or perhaps I could get some vessel to drop me on an atoll in the area, where I could sit out the tests and if necessary die in them." Said his wife: "I feel the same as a soldier's wife when the soldier goes away. It has got to be done."

Doubt for Posterity? Last week the British government was belabored by increasingly shrill protests against its bomb tests. Twenty-three women dressed in mourning "for the thousands of people already affected by H-bomb explosions and for the thousands that will be in the future," called at 10 Downing Street to hand a protest to Prime Minister Macmillan, then trudged off to the House of Commons to buttonhole members. In the House of Lords, Laborite peers cited the estimate of Nobel Prize Chemist Linus Pauling of California's Institute of Technology that 1 ,000 people would die of leukemia as a result of the fallout of the Christmas Island explosion. Earl Attlee, Labor's former Prime Minister now in the House of Lords, said, "Some scientists think we are going to poison the upper atmosphere and destroy future generations, and some do not. I would like to give the benefit of doubt to posterity. I do not think it is so urgent that we should have the bomb in the next few months."

In answer, crusty Viscount Cherwell, famed physicist and Churchill's chief scientific adviser during World War II, scathingly denounced the protesters as "hysterical people." Said Cherwell: "This sort of thing has become particularly obnoxious since universally respected figures such as the Pope and Dr. Schweitzer have been persuaded to intervene. How they can allow themselves to be taken in by the inaccurate propaganda of the friends of Russia is hard to understand." The facts are, said Cherwell, that "the number of gamma rays we get from the radioactive materials in the walls of our houses is 50 times greater than the amount to which we are exposed by the nuclear tests. If the protagonists of stopping the tests had any logic in their being, they ought to tell us all to go and live in tents."

As if on cue, both Houses of the Soviet Parliament voted (1,347 to 0) to ask the U.S. Congress and the British Parliament to set up a joint committee to seek ways to ban all nuclear tests immediately.

Duty & Danger. The Communists were doing all they could to prod, but the concern was not all of Communist contriving and reflected a deeper worry by conscientious people. In a front-page editorial, the Vatican's L'Osservatore Romano declared stiffly that the Pope "speaks in the name of God the Maker, whose vital gift his creatures must not squander, not even to diminish the danger of global war." When science is in doubt, "it is the duty of philanthropists or simply of humanitarians to recommend abstention." Under heavy pressure of an impending national election and a vociferous opposition which is stirring up the nuclear issue, West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer himself proposed and got the Bundestag to pass last week a resolution calling on the world's atomic powers to halt tests "for a limited time."

Even if it came with ill grace from the Russians to talk against nuclear tests while the dust was still settling from five explosions of their own, the whole uproar was plainly embarrassing to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's government. The British have spent millions of pounds developing their first hydrogen weapon, and are determined to set off at least one. At week's end they got support when Pauling was countered by another U.S. Nobel Prizewinner, the University of California's Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence, who has been acting as scientific consultant to the U.S. disarmament negotiators in London. Branding the fears "a lot of nonsense,"

Lawrence declared flatly: "No one is going to be hurt by the tests being carried out by Britain and the U.S.; the radiation is so infinitesimal afterward that there can't possibly be any ill effects,"

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