Word: leete
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...hard to avoid a melodramatic tone in recounting this story. Professor L. Don Leet thinks that the great detection dispute which separated American and Soviet negotiators in January, 1949 (and has kept them apart since), was based on scientifically invalid information. The man who has been in charge of the University seismograph station since 1931 is convinced that the Berkner panel report which insisted that the U.S. raise its inspection demands just when treaty plans had been settled, was simply dead wrong...
...They had data so insufficient that they shouldn't have made any claims," Leet said the other day in reference to the fourteen man advisory committee, "but they swore by their findings. The Russians took one look at the stuff, and laughed. And by God they were right. Any good seismologist would have laughed." So at that turning point in 1958, it was the scientists, not the diplomats, who were irreconcilable...
...crux of Leet's complaint is that the Berkner panel, formed to study the problems of test detection, excluded professional seismologists. They only members of the panel who had any seismological experience were what Leet calls, not derisively but not respectfully, "doodlebuggers,." This is a popular term for seismic prospect seismologists, electronic engineers who use a fraction of the know-how of earthquake seismology. Leet himself is an earthquake station seismologist. His application to work for AFTAC, a unit that presently constitutes the Air Force Vela Uniform test detection project, was turned down on the grounds that Harvard...
...using earthquake station seismologists on a project like this," he explains, "is like revising our measurement system without consulting the Bureau of Standards." Others on the committee included representatives of instrument companies, and one man who, according to Leet, "never took the equivalent of Nat. Sci. 10." Berkner himself is a fairly well-known scientific administrator; he and nuclear physicist Hans Bethe were the only members of the panel not associated with those who were awarded grants by the panel itself (for "further research...
...diplomats in Geneva are not equipped with full knowledge," Leet declared. "I am trying desperately to let people in authority know that the seismological information given them is scientifically unsound...