High Price of Suspension

THE ATOM High Price of Suspension For 13 months President Eisenhower's Administration has imposed a voluntary ban on nuclear testing while negotiating with the Russians at Geneva on how to set up international controls--and the ban has been extended to Dec. 31. In U.S. atomic weapons laboratories and in the Pentagon last week, there were no doubts at all that the U.S. should get on with its testing program as soon as possible. Reason: the nuclear-test moratorium is now damaging the nation's nuclear-deterrent power.

The U.S.'s second generation of solid-fuel missiles, designed for mass production and mass deployment through the mid-1960s, must have smaller, higher-yield thermonuclear warheads to fit their smaller nose cones. The Navy's Polaris engineers managed to test their bird's initial warhead just before the moratorium, but could not test its higher-yield follow-up warhead; the Air Force's Minuteman (see SCIENCE) and the Army's Pershing are being developed at a cost of millions to fit warheads that have not been tested, and, under the moratorium, may not be. All these tests could be made underground without fallout. "Without further tests the development of our next generation of weapons is stopped cold," said a two-star general. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the top civilian bosses of the Pentagon all agree that testing should be resumed.

They have another prime reason: after ten years of secret planning, the U.S. is on the verge of developing a true "clean bomb," with enormous implications for both brush-fire war and big-war tactics. It is the neutron bomb, triggered by a fission process, topped off by a small hydrogen (fusion) explosion, designed to bombard enemy troops in a specific area with millions of fatal, invisible neutron "bullets." The neutron bomb does not damage property, scatters virtually no radioactive fallout, cannot be detected. Friendly troops could enter the area shortly after the bomb had been used. And although the Soviets, to judge from published Russian scientific papers, have the capability for the neutron bomb, the U.S. cannot proceed from theoretical to test stage on the neutron bomb because of the test moratorium.

Since there is no known way to identify nuclear explosions of small yield underground, the U.S. cannot know if the Russians have really stopped tests. The Russians have tested several high-energy shots this year, one in excess of Hiroshima size, and the U.S. has only the U.S.S.R.'s word that the shots were nonnuclear. Moreover, with their big-thrust rocket engines, the Russians have the capability of testing nuclear warheads without detection in outer space, getting telemetered results much as they did from their moon shots. "We haven't quite lost this fight yet." said one knowledgeable nuclear scientist. "But we're in the position of having tied one hand behind our back and handed the other guy a ball bat."

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