THE ATOM: Tumult & Fallout

The fallout from massive Russian nuclear tests was still clicking the Geiger counters last March when the Russian propaganda machines began grinding out a high-priority party line. The message: the peace-loving Soviets had voluntarily suspended nuclear tests, called on the U.S. to do the same. Under heavy attack from such fervent ban-the-bomb groups as SANE (National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy), U.S. officials doggedly went ahead with the U.S.’s own long-scheduled test series in mid-Pacific, but the President finally agreed to a year’s test suspension beginning Oct. 31 provided the

Russians would sit down at a conference in Geneva and start working toward a plan for monitoring bomb blasts.

Last week the Geiger counters clicked furiously again as Western spotters counted four separate Russian nuclear explosions “north of the Arctic Circle.” After the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission announced the tests, Moscow radio said the Russians had been “forced to resume.” The U.S. ban-the-bomb groups were strangely silent. Knowing that it takes 18 months for the U.S. to prepare for a full-scale test, U.S. atomic experts were certain that the Russians began planning for the new test series even before they finished the last. “More and more,” wrote the Christian Science Monitor’s U.N. Correspondent William R. Frye, “students of Soviet diplomacy are leaning toward the theory that Moscow never wanted to stop testing, that it proclaimed a unilateral halt last March without the slightest intention of making the cessation permanent, and that the whole objective of Soviet diplomacy in this area is to avoid a test ban without assuming the onus for so doing.”