"The Voice of Fear"

In his glowing determination to walk "the extra mile" toward peace, has President Eisenhower walked too far for U.S. security's sake? Yes, said two knowledgeable liberal Democrats last week. He did so when he ordered U.S. nuclear tests stopped for one year without the U.S.'s twelve-year-old precondition of foolproof inspection (TIME, Sept. 1), did so again when he endorsed a test inspection system prepared by his scientific advisers which admitted that relatively small Russian underground blasts (less than five kilotons) could probably not be detected.

Just back from the fruitless U.S.-U.K.-U.S.S.R. nuclear test-ban talks in Geneva, Tennessee's Senator Albert Gore, member of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, formally recommended to the President that the U.S. continue tests of small-yield nuclear weapons underground and of nuclear weapons in outer space, e.g., antiaircraft or future antimissile-missile warheads to defend U.S. cities. The Communists, said Gore, are "insincere." And the U.S., if it keeps up its present line at Geneva, is in danger of getting "mousetrapped."

A sterner warning came from longtime (1950-57) Atomic Energy Commissioner Thomas Murray. The real danger to the U.S. today, said Murray, is not all-out war, for which the U.S. already has big hydrogen weapons "beyond rational bounds," but a series of Red-started limited wars in which the Communists might inflict "a kind of piecemeal defeat." In such wars, said Murray, the U.S. would need "great numbers of tactical nuclear weapons of low-kiloton yield. Our security vitally depends on continued progress in perfecting the technology of small weapons, and this progress cannot be assured without tests." Beyond that, Murray attacked the whole basis of a nuclear policy pitched to world opinion in a tough cold war. "Public opinion both in America and abroad," said he, "remains in the grip of unreasoning and undiscriminating fear of all kinds of nuclear tests. The voice of this fear seems to have carried the day against the voice of reason and fact. Our Government seems to believe that it has a popular mandate to stop nuclear tests. The present muddle of public opinion was caused by bad leadership, or confused leadership, or no leadership at all."

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