Queueing Up

Deep in the Sahara last week, the French set off a bomb atop a tower and then studied the effects on rows of uniformed manikins lined up in parade formation and on some 1,000 mice, sheep and goats tethered around the site, including a lamb born moments after the blast. It was France's third nuclear test.

With the U.S. and Russia tacitly agreed to conduct no more atomic tests until the other does, the only atomic explosions in the last two years have been French.

Protests predictably poured in from Japan and from nearby African states. Western friends and allies of France maintained a tight-lipped and rather testy silence, but the Soviet Union threatened to resume nuclear testing if "Western powers proceed" with atomic explosions. Red China added its own denunciation, saying that "world opinion condemned" the blast, and will probably protest the French series right up until the day China is ready to explode its own bomb, when Peking can say unctuously that the act was forced upon it by the "aggressive behavior" of others.

The French nuclear program is a small one and designed more to impress its friends than dismay its enemies. So far it has done neither. U.S. specialists are convinced that the Sahara bomb is a crude device and that the French are still a long way from packaging a bomb small enough to be carried by missiles--which France also lacks. But French nuclear persistence has a nuisance value. Clearly, France belongs in the Geneva atomic test-ban talks scheduled for Feb. 7. But as a negotiator, Charles de Gaulle may well be almost as difficult as the Russians.

France's nuclear tests pose a problem for an edgy world: how to deal with other nations intent on elbowing their way into the nuclear club. Some experts estimate that a score of states--ranging from Sweden and Israel to Canada and Red China --have programs that could eventually give them bombs if they decided to invest the enormous sums necessary to turn laboratory knowledge into a deliverable bomb.

In Manhattan last week, speaking to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Britain's Scientist-Novelist Sir Charles Percy Snow warned that time was short and the world faced an "either-or" situation: the "either" is that "we accept a restriction on nuclear armaments. This course involves obvious risks. The 'or' is not a risk but a certainty.

It is this. There is no agreement on tests. The nuclear arms race between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. not only continues but accelerates. Other countries join in. Within at most six years, China and several other states will have a stock of nuclear bombs. Within at most ten years some of the bombs are going off." His conclusion: "I am saying this as responsibly as I can. On the one side we have a finite risk. On the other side we have a certainty of disaster. Between a risk and a certainty, a sane man does not hesitate."

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