World: Two Kinds of Test

As fallout from Russia’s 30-megaton bomb drifted eastward from Novaya Zemlya last week, few governments acted so elaborately unconcerned as the satellite regimes. But Eastern Europe’s people showed their alarm by buying up prodigious quantities of table salt in the widespread (and erroneous) belief that a salt rub is the best protection against radioactivity.

On the Iron Curtain’s other side, nations close to the test site, or in the path of fallout, took other precautions. The Finns laid off reindeer meat for fear arctic herds had been contaminated. Swedes were engaged in a wild goose chase to make sure migrating flocks had not been affected. In West Germany and Britain, the governments announced plans to distribute powdered milk for children if dairy supplies showed dangerous radioactivity. Japan reported record levels of radioactivity in rainwater, took extensive precautions to ensure that polluted fall rains would not endanger food or water supplies.

The heaviest fallout was emotional. Indignation, fear and an undercurrent of hysteria roiled the world from Milan, where pregnant peasant women were convinced they would bear monsters, to Kyoto, where Nobel Laureate Physicist Hideki Yukawa wailed that “humanity is now doomed with this cancer called the nuclear weapon.”

In another kind of test, Khrushchev’s superbomb prompted many of those who respect or merely fear Russia to re-examine their consciences. In the U.N. a number of small nations that are normally reluctant to offend Moscow pluckily backed an emergency appeal to Khrushchev expressing “deep concern” over his scheduled 50-megaton explosion —though other small nations and neutrals eventually emasculated it. Britain’s most influential Ban-the-Bomber, Philosopher Bertrand Russell, who has been quicker to censure the U.S. than the U.S.S.R. for possessing nuclear arms, stormed out of an hour-long protest meeting with Russian embassy officials. He explained he could take its tea and caviar but could no longer “swallow comments, about the innocence of the Soviet Union; never had there been such innocence in the history of mankind.”