Two Kinds of Tests? (Contd.)

On the eve of the crucial U.S. nuclear-weapons tests at Eniwetok Proving Grounds--tests of such basic defenses as the first nuclear-tipped ground-to-air antiaircraft missile, the first deep-water anti-submarine nuclear depth charge and the low-radioactivity "clean" bomb--the uproar over the tests and their fallout got both more shrill in its public aspects and more sensible in its scientific debate.

In Honolulu, the pacifists who had threatened to sail their ketch Golden Rule into the Eniwetok blast area were jailed for defying a court ordering them back. From French Equatorial Africa, Dr. Albert Schweitzer renewed his stop-the-tests plea, with trimmings of benign neutralist disengagement.

In Washington, New Mexico's Democratic Senator Clinton Anderson, prestigious vice chairman of Congress' Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, accused the Administration on Meet the Press of talking about clean bombs while stockpiling dirty bombs--even "inserted something that makes them dirtier." The Defense Department denied it. Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss resented it. President Eisenhower said at his news conference: "We have looked constantly to cleaner bombs so that you could have a more local and advantageous use of the nuclear weapon rather than just a shotgun method."

Carbon 14. As that uproar quieted, Nobel Prizewinning Chemist Linus Pauling, 57, head of the chemical labs at the California Institute of Technology, made headlines with his newest point: the most dangerous element of nuclear-test fallout over a period of five to 10,000 years is not strontium 90 but carbon 14, a low-radioactivity but long-lived (half-life: 5,568 years) isotope that from tests already held will, said Pauling, cause 5,000,000 defective children in the next 300 generations. Atomic Energy Commissioner Willard Libby, one of the world's top authorities on carbon 14, replied that bomb tests had not produced enough carbon 14 to cause more than "very minute" danger. He added: "Why should we continue nuclear-weapons tests? The answer in its simplest form is, in my opinion, that they are necessary for defense."

Three senior scientists at Columbia's Lament Geological Observatory wrote that most of carbon 14 is soaked up by the ocean, that Pauling's estimate of the increase of carbon 14 in the atmosphere was 50 times too high. Pauling's figure: 10%; the Columbia figure: .2%. And the remaining radiation "would be considerably less than that received from the luminous-dial wristwatch worn for about two hours a year." Added they: "Exaggerated statements by respected scientists only add to the public's confusion."

Political Reasons. Indiana University's famed Nobel Prizewinning Geneticist Dr. Hermann Muller, who had signed Pauling's stop-the-tests petition of 9,235 scientists (2,749 from Communist Rumania), staked out his view that while the scientific perils of fallout have been exaggerated, tests ought to be stopped for political reasons--"desirable for the easing of tensions."

At week's end, H-bomb Pioneer Dr. Edward Teller, longtime staunch defender of all-out continued nuclear tests as an essential element of peace-through-deterrent-power, raised his colleagues' eyebrows by retreating to a new position. Teller's position, similar to that taken three weeks ago by New Jersey's Republican Senator Clifford Case, was that 1) dirty bomb tests ought henceforth to be "completely contained or conducted underground," 2) cleaner bomb tests "should be permitted to continue."

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