The Nuclear-Tests Debate

The Eisenhower Administration's sharpest behind-the-scenes split on cold-war strategy broke unmistakably into public view last week. The issue: whether the U.S. ought to suspend its nuclear-weapons tests if there should be a U.S.-U.S.S.R. agreement on inspection. The battleground: Democrat Hubert Humphrey's Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Disarmament. The principal contenders: on one side. H-bomb Pioneer Edward Teller and Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss; on the other, Columbia University Physicist Jay Orear and the President's new disarmament adviser, Hans Bethe.

The Administration had long held fast to the Teller-Strauss fundamental that nuclear tests are necessary to preserve and improve the U.S.'s peace-by-deterrent power. Limit of U.S. concession-making to date: President Eisenhower's "package plan" of last summer offering the U.S.S.R. an inspected two-year stoppage of tests in return for inspected stoppage of nuclear-weapons production. The U.S.S.R., behind on nuclear production, rejected it.

Recently, the President's new science adviser, James Rhyne Killian Jr. of M.I.T., appointed Hans Bethe, Cornell physicist, to head up a new presidential study on disarmament. Bethe and Teller had clashed in 1949 and early 1950 on the feasibility of making a hydrogen bomb--Teller for, Bethe against. They had clashed over the security suspension of Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer when Teller testified for the AEC and Bethe for Oppenheimer. Now Teller and Bethe were the poles of groups contending for the President's ear on an issue that might make a cold-war turning point.

"Extremely Dangerous." Teller was the first big-name witness. Nuclear tests, especially small ones, would be very hard to detect, said he, and the only way to be sure of detection would be to get a complete "opening up of Russia." Nuclear production would be even harder to inspect because of the great possibilities for cheating, e.g., by faking plant accidents and "shutting down" inspected plants while sneak war production went on.

Teller argued beyond that that the U.S.'s massive retaliation strategy is getting "more and more unrealistic." Hence the U.S. needs new, small, clean nuclear weapons for limited wars. It needs them even more for defensive anti-missile missiles. All these weapons have to be tested to be proved. And stopping the tests, whether inspected or not, would be "an extremely dangerous thing . . . We can stay ahead only by running ahead."

The high point came when Missouri's Democratic Senator Stuart Symington asked Teller whether perhaps, in his eagerness to make new weapons, he might have got his judgment on disarmament distorted. This was a fair way of giving Teller a chance to answer in public the charges that some scientists make in private that he has lost all sense of proportion. The crowded committee room was silent. Teller began to reply: "I chose the profession of a scientist," he said, "and I am in love with science; and I would not do willingly or eagerly anything else but pure science because it is beautiful and my interest is there. I don't like weapons. I would like to have peace. But for peace we need weapons, and I do not think my views are distorted. I believe I am contributing to a peaceful world."

Seismographic Evidence. Columbia's boyish-looking Jay Orear, 32, who has almost completed a major Columbia survey on inspection for disarmament, challenged Teller on the technicalities. "A nuclear-weapons-test ban is one of the easiest to inspect," he said, and seismographic evidence proved it. Inspecting nuclear production "is most difficult.'' Yet the U.S.'s package plan tied the one to the other and made "the last step" the prerequisite for "the first step." Orear quoted widespread opinion that the whole package plan might be "a gimmick to prevent agreement." A wholly workable international inspection system, he said, could be set up "tomorrow."

AEC's Chairman Strauss was still for the package plan, the U.S.'s disarmament position "to date." But Strauss's testimony was overshadowed when, during questions, Missouri's Symington revealed the gist of Presidential Adviser Bethe's 2 1/2 hours of testimony behind closed doors. Bethe's conclusion: 1) inspection of a ban on tests is wholly feasible, 2) agreement between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. on stopping tests is therefore feasible--and desirable. Symington paraphrased Bethe's conclusion: "He personally feels that we should go ahead with a test suspension without tying it to production."

Iceberg Peak. At week's end Hubert Humphrey, himself an advocate of inspected stop-the-tests, summed up: "We get conflicting testimony from equally competent witnesses on both sides and even within the Administration." And best evidence was that last week's testimony was only the visible iceberg peak of a classic inner-Administration argument as the Administration attempted to set a new cold-war balance between what Secretary of State Dulles and his advisers call "ponderables," i.e., military necessities, and "imponderables," i.e., propaganda to placate "world opinion."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.