The Atom: Decision to Test

Despite the signs of thaw, one of the coldest of cold war decisions could not be held off much longer. Last week, discussing the possibility of a nuclear test agreement with the Soviet Union, President Kennedy left the door open—but just barely. He urged that the two great cold war adversaries make a final try for a test-ban treaty at an 18-nation disarmament conference in Geneva next month; he insisted at his press conference that the U.S. would not only demand monitors to detect Russian tests, but would require an inspection system against any Soviet test preparations. At the same time, he promised to announce within a month his decision about whether the U.S. will resume atmospheric testing. The all-but-certain answer: yes, probably in April.

Powerfully Clear. Behind that decision lay months of hesitation and debate in the highest councils of U.S. Government. In the last analysis, the decision had to be guided by the chilling scientific estimate of Soviet atomic advances in the U.S.S.R.’s series of some 50 tests that began last September. From a report submitted by a panel headed by Cornell Physicist Hans Bethe, it was clear that the Soviet Union was catching up in many of the deadly arts of the atom, and had passed the U.S. in some phases.

The biggest Soviet blast produced nearly 60 megatons-and it could easily have gone well over 100 megatons if the Russians had not muffled the explosion by encasing the bomb in lead instead of raw uranium. More important, they made vast improvements in the vital weight-yield ratios of their nuclear weapons. The tests opened the way for the Russians to develop nuclear warheads for their missiles that will be much more powerful than the warhead on the Titan II, the biggest U.S. missile, which has a punch of less than 10 megatons. The Russians also developed fission triggers for their H-bombs superior to American models, and worked on an anti-missile rocket.

Christmas Island. It was in the light of those somber findings that President Kennedy moved toward his decision that the U.S. should resume its tests in the atmosphere. He was in no rush to announce his decision until the complex test facilities were fully prepared, for that would only lengthen the U.S. exposure to vitriolic attack from ban-the-bomb opinion around the world.

While a faint chance remained that some turn in the diplomatic situation would justify postponement, the test planning went forward. One sticky problem was to find a location that was politically and physically safe for a new series of blasts: Eniwetok and Bikini, the Pacific sites of former tests, are too small and too close to inhabited islands. Last week the British solved the problem by giving the U.S. permission to fire off a nuclear series on Christmas Island, a sand-covered coral atoll isolated in the central Pacific.