Disarmament: Concession to Obsession

In Geneva, city of lost and unreal causes, an air of unreality surrounds the 17-nation disarmament conference. Both the U.S. and Russia have large, competent and patient delegations on hand, ostensibly to work out an East-West disarmament agreement, including a nuclear test ban. There is very little hope that such an agreement will be reached; sometimes the main idea seems to be to put the blame for failure on the other side. The U.S. insists on international inspection for any test ban agreement, while the Russians charge such inspection is just another form of espionage. Secretary of State Dean Rusk calls the Russian attitude "an obsession, which locks the door to disarmament." Last week, harassed U.S. Delegate Arthur Dean hastily left Geneva for Washington. Reason: the U.S. was considering a new test ban policy, based on more reassuring scientific studies and designed to place less emphasis on the size of the inspection system.

New Arguments. The test ban treaty proposal by the West calls for a worldwide network of 180 control posts—19 of them in Russia and 16 on U.S. territory—manned by international teams. In addition, flying squads of international inspectors would have the right to make at least twelve on-the-spot checks (known in disarmament jargon as "on-site"inspections) in Russia each year to investigate suspicious explosions. For instance, they would find out whether a given blast was a nuclear bang or a natural earthquake.

The Russians reply that inspection may be carried out only by each country's own nationals. This of course would mean no effective inspection at all. But they also argue—and some Western scientists agree—that human inspection is beside the point anyway: nuclear blasts can be detected by instruments placed beyond each nation's borders. That argument gained force last month when the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency reported new seismic detection techniques (TIME, July 20), which make it a lot easier than expected to distinguish a nuclear blast from an earthquake. Last week President Kennedy called an all-star White House conference of 16 officials, including the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense and 13 others, to consider changing the U.S. program. From his rocking chair, the President asked a set of skeptical questions.

Control Preserved. Three choices faced the policymakers. One plan would replace the internationally staffed listening posts with control stations operated by each country's own technicians (as the Russians demand). But the local posts would be subject to inspection by an international commission to keep them honest. Another plan would do away with posts on Russian soil entirely, using only long-range detection instruments and on-site international inspections of suspicious blasts. This modification of the previous U.S. stand is reportedly favored by Presidential Scientific Adviser Jerome Wiesner, who found some support for his position in the disclosure last week that the U.S. had clearly detected an underground nuclear test by France on May 1 in the Hoggar Mountains of the southeastern Sahara, more than 5,000 miles away.