Science: Sharing the Atom ...

• Share

Despite the bombast and hostility that have characterized relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the past decade, a remarkably friendly and fruitful exchange has been quietly going on between scientists of the two nations. Glenn Seaborg, the retiring chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, has now revealed how the scientists have not only grown to trust each other, but have also shared detailed information about their countries nuclear capacity-almost to the last atom.

Physicist Seaborg is just back from Russia, where he headed a delegation of ten visiting U.S. scientists. The group, in checking out eleven key Soviet installations,*covered 6,000 miles -all in Premier Aleksei Kosygin's private TU-134 jet. The scientists often stayed up until dawn talking shop with their Soviet counterparts, with Seaborg, as he has throughout his reign as AEC chief, pushing hard for the pooling of information.

During Seaborg's journey, his hosts demonstrated the surprising versatility of the Soviet nuclear program for peaceful purposes. Russian scientists, for example, used one detonation to create a reservoir in a dry riverbed to catch the torrential spring runoff; the crater walls produced by the same blast served as a restraining dam. Soviet oilmen triggered another nuclear blast to revive the oil flow from a field previously believed to have run dry. Most surprising to Seaborg was a Russian technique of subduing runaway oil-and gasfield fires by atomic explosions. On two occasions 30-kiloton bombs deep beneath the surface succeeded in sealing fissures that fed the flames by carrying natural gas to the surface.

Future Soviet nuclear projects, Seaborg says, are even more ambitious. The Russians are considering blasting a deep channel that would divert water from the Pechora River to the nearby Kama River, which flows into the Caspian Sea. That linkup, engineers anticipate, would increase the amount of water supplied to the Caspian Sea, which has dropped nearly ten feet in the past 35 years, affecting docking facilities, caviar-producing sturgeon and even the local climate.

Dammed Strait. By far the most controversial atomic scheme proposed by Soviet planners is the damming of the Bering Strait, the 55-mile-wide stretch of water between Alaska and Siberia. "This would be highly beneficial for Siberia," according to Seaborg, "because the cold Arctic waters bathing the eastern coast would be replaced by warmer Pacific water. Eastern Siberia might then be opened up to agriculture." Prospects for a Bering dam are dim, however, because it would span international waters and require the approval of other nations. That approval, especially by the U.S., is unlikely; the cold water would have to go somewhere, and Western scientists fear that the southerly flow of frigid water to the eastern U.S. would increase, possibly producing a drastic drop in temperature throughout the Atlantic States.