Underlining the Point

U.S. officials were still digesting the ominous fact of Soviet nuclear progress when Premier Nikita Khrushchev drove home the point with an atom-rattling, bomb-brandishing speech before a Moscow convention of the Communist-dominated World Federation of Trade Unions.

Charging the West with preparing for war, Khrushchev cried: "We would be slobbering idiots if we did not carry out the nuclear tests." As a result of its test program, said Khrushchev, the Soviet Union had perfected 50-and 100-megaton bombs--and some that were even bigger. What was more, Khrushchev boasted that Russia could readily convert the rockets that orbited its two astronauts to deliver the U.S.S.R.'s thermonuclear superkillers. Said he: "Not a single place on earth can consider itself safe from them."

His voice rising, his face turning beet red, Khrushchev declared that none of the Western powers had built a bomb of even 50 megatons. Shouted he: "The 50-and 100-megaton bombs will always hang over their heads like the sword of Damocles."

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