Word: test-ban
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Talk-Weary. In the talk-weary halls of Geneva, Soviet maneuvers were just as devious. The nuclear test-ban talks sessions had gotten down to discussing about how many on-site inspections a year would be permitted. The U.S. and Great Britain wanted about 20; fortnight ago Russia consented to three. Though U.S. Delegate James J. Wadsworth rejected the Russian offer as "ludicrous and completely unacceptable," he added hopefully: "At least we now know the range of bargaining." But Russia last week rejected out of hand another U.S. proposal: to pool obsolete U.S., British and Russian atomic devices in developing...
...ban conference in Geneva early last week, Soviet Delegate Semyon K. Tsarapkin, on instructions from Moscow, unexpectedly dropped his longtime insistence that any East-West program of research on underground test detection would have to be carried out solely with conventional explosives, agreed to include a "strictly limited number" of nuclear explosions. Viewed in the light of Tsarapkin's concession and the previous history of the test-ban negotiations, Project Vela seemed entirely peaceable...
After nearly 18 months of negotiations at Geneva, the U.S.-British-Soviet delegations seemed close to a nuclear test-ban agreement: an unequivocal pledge to outlaw easily detectable above-ground or underwater explosions and a voluntary moratorium on underground tests-provided the Russians join in an earnest effort to perfect devices for detecting small underground bombs (TIME, April 11). Last week, the nation's top scientific authorities on nuclear detection were called before two subcommittees of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, unanimously made it plain that the black art of concealing small nuclear explosions was fast outstripping...
Cornell's Hans Bethe. a former presidential adviser on disarmament and longtime crusader for the test-ban agreement, set out to describe the kind of detection network that would adequately police a ban on underground explosions. In describing a system that would require 600 seismograph stations spread across the U.S.S.R. alone, Bethe only convinced his congressional listeners that the feat of detection was just as impossible as Teller said...
Against evident possibilities for Russian evasion of an underground test ban, Nuclear Chemist Harold Urey pointed out that Russia already has an all but infallible detection system in the U.S.: the energetic reporters of a free press. Urey hopefully predicted that there soon may be other means of detection available to those who would enforce a test ban. But last week, as testimony piled up, the argument that the probability of detection would deter the Russians from violating a test-ban treaty seemed increasingly fanciful. And the Joint Committee seemed less likely than ever to look with favor...