The Case for Continuation Rests on Some Facts of Life

THE fiery debate over whether the U.S. should halt nuclear tests is flaring up as the nation gets ready for this summer's tests at Eniwetok. (Somehow it never seems to flare when the Russians are testing.) Last week, as Washington waited for Russia to strike the propaganda pose of unilaterally halting its own tests, the British Labor Party's Hugh Gaitskell, a likely future Prime Minister, called upon Britain to declare a unilateral test ban of its own. In St. Louis, Washington University's left-leaning Physicist Edward U. Condon predicted that because of radioactive fallout from tests "many thousands of persons in the world will suffer agonizing death from bone cancer and leukemia." In Lausanne, Switzerland, by contrast, a nine-nation scientific-medical conference on bomb-test hazards announced the finding that fallout radioactivity "has no practical importance compared with natural radiation [and does not] constitute a danger to the health of mankind."

This week CBS's Edward R. Murrow devoted an extra-long See It Now, a full 90 minutes, to nuclear-test hazards. Among the scientists crying alarm on the TV screen: Caltech's Nobel Prizewinning Chemist Linus Pauling, who last January presented to the U.N. a stop-the-tests petition signed by 9,235 U.S. and foreign scientists, including three dozen Nobel laureates. Pauling was balanced off against Atomic Energy Commissioner Willard Libby, a distinguished nuclear chemist himself, who declared that "hazards from fallout are limited" and that nuclear tests are needed to lessen the "awful threat" of nuclear war. But the telecast's general tone was one of doom. Intoned Murrow: "There is danger in the continued testing of nuclear weapons. Scientists disagree only as to the degree and depth of the danger."

Within the debate-divided ranks of U.S. scientists, the stoutest advocate of continued testing is the University of California's Hungarian-born Nuclear Physicist Edward Teller, famed as "father of the H-bomb" (TIME, Nov. 18). In a newly published book,* Teller sets forth, as he sees them, the facts about radioactive fallout and the reasons for going on with nuclear tests. "Fear of what we do not know or do not understand has been with us in all ages," he writes. "Against [it] there exist two weapons: understanding and courage. Of the two, courage is more important, but understanding must come first."

A much heard argument against nuclear tests is that since H-bombs are already powerful beyond comprehension, it is useless to go on developing bigger and deadlier specimens. But Teller points out that the U.S.'s purpose in testing nuclear weapons is not to make them bigger, but to make them smaller, more versatile and less dangerous to people outside the target area. Starting with the assumption that the West absolutely needs nuclear weapons to deter or defeat Communist aggression, he holds that it would be "completely inexcusable" to fail to push ahead with development of "clean" nuclear weapons with little or no radioactive fallout.

As,director of the Atomic Energy Commission's laboratory at Livermore, Calif., Teller is directly involved in AEC's clean-bomb project, and he assures his readers that it is "well on the way toward success." Last week President Eisenhower announced at his press conference that the U.S. has invited the United Nations to send scientist observers so that they may "witness at the Pacific proving ground this summer a large nuclear explosion in which radioactive fallout will be drastically reduced."

The stop-the-tests camp sometimes talks as though atomic radiation is a new and unnatural hazard. Not so, says Teller. Radioactivity is a pervasive feature of man's environment. Human beings are exposed to an unending spray of radiation from cosmic rays and natural radioactive substances: radium, uranium, potassium 40, carbon 14, etc. Fallout radiation is no different in biological effects from this natural radiation--and is very much smaller in quantity.

The most notorious health menace in fallout is an isotope not found in nature: strontium 90, which some experts think can cause leukemia and bone cancer. Many radioactive isotopes produced by fission disintegrate rapidly, but strontium 90 has a half life of 28 years. Chemically similar to calcium, it has an affinity for human bones. Children can absorb it in milk from cows that have fed on plants growing in fallout-contaminated soil.

Teller estimates that, at the present rate of testing, the strontium-90 radiation in the bone tissue of American children amounts to an average of .002 roentgens a year. By comparison, the natural background radiation runs to .15 roentgens a year. The radiation from cosmic rays alone is about .035 roentgens a year at sea level, .05 at an altitude of 5,000 ft. The difference in yearly cosmic-ray dosage between children in Denver (alt.: 5,280 ft.) and children in Washington (420 ft.) comes to .015 roentgens, about seven times Teller's estimate of strontium-90 radiation.

Some experts hold that .002 roentgens a year is far below the threshold of damage. Teller estimates that fallout at present levels might increase the number of leukemia and bone-cancer cases by one-fifth of 1%, but he adds that the increase "could be zero."

Fallout undoubtedly has some impact on human heredity, since even the slightest radiation can cause mutations in genes. But percentagewise, the fallout effect is slight. Teller estimates that in the U.S., fallout radiation capable of causing genetic mutations averages out at 1/500 of a roentgen a year, mostly from cesium 137. That is much less radiation than a human being is exposed to from wearing a luminous-dial wrist watch. As Physicist Teller figures it, the overall mutation-rate increase resulting from fallout is something like one-tenth of 1%.

Caltech's Linus Pauling estimates the increase in mutation rates at only 1%. A hazard increase of 1% or less is hardly enough, in Teller's view, to explain the anti-test fervor among thousands of his fellow scientists. "It seems probable," he writes, "that the root of the opposition to further tests is not connected with fallout. The real reason [is the] desire for disarmament and peace."

Edward Teller shares the desire for peace, but he doubts whether halting tests would bring it any nearer. He is convinced that the Russians would evade any no-test or disarmament agreement, unilateral or otherwise, and that absolutely foolproof detection of tests is impossible. On this point he is apparently more skeptical than President Eisenhower's scientific advisers. Said the President at his press conference last week: While there is "a little field for uncertainty," it should be possible, with "proper inspectional facilities," to detect "any sizable test."

Believing that the Russians could and would cheat on any disarmament promises, Physicist Teller feels that U.S. weakness would invite Communist aggression. "If we stay strong," he said recently, "then I believe we can have peace based on force. Peace based on force is not as good as peace based on agreement, but in the terrible world in which we live, it may be the only peace that we can have."

* Our Nuclear Future (Criterion Books; $3.50). Coauthor: Albert L. Latter, theoretical physicist on the staff of Santa Monica's Rand Corp.

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