A Foolproof System Needs A Rogueproof Agreement

NUCLEAR TEST DEBATE

AFTER long and thoughtful deliberation, the five members of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission last week dissented from President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles on a critical point of U.S. foreign policy. The point: the President's decision, effective since midnight Oct. 31, to suspend all U.S. nuclear tests for one year, and to continue suspension if there was a prospect of reaching a workable stop-test agreement with the Russians at Geneva. The AEC's great concern: test stoppage without foolproof safeguards might undermine the U.S. nuclear power that had kept the world's peace since 1945.

The AEC's longstanding doubts about the Eisenhower-Dulles disarmament policy came to a boil last month when a panel of U.S. scientists who had found that detection of nuclear tests was dependable -the scientific underpinning of the Eisenhower-Dulles policy -reversed themselves and admitted that underground blasts even up to Hiroshima size were not detectable (TIME, Jan. 12). Thus the Russians could presumably cheat on any agreement at will. AEC Chairman John McCone, onetime (1950-51) Air Force Under Secretary, decided to submit to Secretary Dulles, through proper channels, an interim plan based on the principle that the U.S. should agree to stop only those tests that could be policed, resume those that could not. Key points: P: Stop atmospheric tests -detectable -which spread fallout and stir up world opinion; police this stoppage by overflights of Russia and the U.S. P: Continue experiments with underground shots to see whether a foolproof detection system can be worked out. P: Meanwhile resume undetectable tests underground -no fallout -of weapons vital to U.S. defense.

Majority Rule. The AEC's dissent punctuated one of the strangest chapters in modern U.S. diplomacy, a chapter that brought important modifications of longstanding U.S. nuclear policy with hardly a word of public debate. It began in 1957-58, when the Russians whipped up a new storm of propaganda against nuclear tests as a hazard to health and wholesome genetics. The Communists got special plaudits from neutralists in Asia and Africa, from U.S. pacifists and idealists, when the U.S.S.R. announced in March 1958 that it was suspending tests. At one point, Ambassador to the U.N. Henry Cabot Lodge warned Secretary Dulles that the U.S. was in danger of losing its majority at the U.N. unless it heeded world fears on the nuclear-test issue.

Meanwhile pressures were brought to bear on the White House from another front. In the tense weeks after Sputnik I, in the late fall of 1957, M.I.T.'s President James Rhyne Killian Jr. was appointed presidential science adviser. In choosing his own panels of advisers, he solicited the help of, among others, such atomic experts as Cornell University's Dr. Hans Bethe and Columbia University's Dr. I.I. Rabi, who had fought beside anti-H-Bomb Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and now wanted to try again for agreement with the U.S.S.R. In April a new presidential science panel, headed by Cornell's Bethe, reported after studying results of just one U.S. test shot in Nevada that test detection was dependable. The finding was forthwith questioned by Physicist Edward Teller as too optimistic. In May the President, at Killian's suggestion, got Khrushchev to agree to "nonpolitical" talks between American and Russian scientists at Geneva. In August these scientists did agree that test detection was dependable enough to be worth the risk of test stoppage -and the U.S. scientists so advised Washington.

Thus the issue came to decision point in the White House. The key man: Secretary of State Dulles. Dulles, in the midst of his successful stands at Lebanon and Quemoy, needed no reminder about the dangers of stopping tests. He knew the Pentagon case that test suspension, if prolonged, could mean that the U.S. would 1) bog down on developing low-fallout lightweight nuclear warheads needed for anti-aircraft and anti-missile missiles; 2) risk setting a trend toward banning nuclear weapons while leaving the Russians vastly superior in conventional arms. But Dulles, beyond his worries about world opinion, discerned a secondary objective. All the U.S.'s postwar attempts to negotiate meaningful disarmament had foundered on the U.S.S.R's refusal to accept foolproof international inspection. The new opportunity: to feel out once more whether the Kremlin might at last let foreign observers onto U.S.S.R. and Red China soil to check atomic explosions.

In the end, Dulles approved the new initiative. The President ordered U.S. tests stopped for one year and the Russians were invited to a round of formal talks at Geneva. But almost at once the new policy came unstuck. The Russians announced that they would resume nuclear tests until they had caught up with the U.S.; they fired at least two shots in the Arctic, to which the U.S. made no reply.

As the Geneva talks wore on, the Russians made no concession, drummed the propaganda theme that the U.S. was backpedaling simply because the U.S. refused to ban the bomb forever. Then came the final blow. The Killian scientists, after seismograph-checking four shots of the U.S.'s series in Nevada in October, admitted their error in their first test-detection findings -a 400% error. Their first findings: underground tests could be detected down to five-kiloton force. Revised findings: tests could not be reliably detected below 20 kilotons.

A Way Out. Officially last week the U.S. was still plowing doggedly on at Geneva, determined to reach agreement. U.S. Delegate James J. Wadsworth, whose United Nations background has made him sensitive to the world-opinion problem, had said after the new findings that he had no doubts about entering the talks -"None at all. It is to our advantage both militarily and politically." The Killian scientists, though admitting their mistakes, passed the word that they could soon work out improvements in underground test-detection, were worried that publishing the new findings might look like bad faith with the Kremlin.

But the evidence was nonetheless piling up that U.S. policymakers, along with the AEC, were beginning to pause for second sober thought. Most members of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy have turned against the idea of stopping all nuclear tests until foolproof inspection can be guaranteed. The likelihood increased that the Senate would probably refuse to ratify a nuclear treaty without such safeguards. Thus at week's end the McCone plan of agreeing to stop the atmosphere tests only -while continuing to seek methods of detecting underground tests -seemed to make good sense. If the Russians were sincere in wanting to stop underground tests, too, the scientists could once again put their heads together to work out a system of detection that both sides could trust and live with.

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