Nation: Getting Ready

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Even as President Kennedy made his test-resumption announcement, U.S. scientists and military men worked day and night to get ready for the U.S. series of shots. In the Government's nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos, N. Mex., and Livermore, Calif., scientists were turning mock-up models of weapons into hardware that could be exploded. In Washington, a shabby grey building named Barton Hall, tucked away near the Lincoln Memorial, suddenly became one of the most important structures in town. There Joint Task Force 8—the nucleus of the U.S. testing effort—was preparing for the huge job of transporting the scientists' devices to the far islands of the Pacific, firing them off under complex testing conditions and recording the results.

The size of the blasts will probably range from about 1 kiloton to 15 megatons—about the size of the largest weapon ever detonated by the U.S. For the present, the U.S. has no plans to explode a superbomb such as the 58-megaton device detonated by the Russians last fall. But U.S. scientists will have plenty to keep them busy. They have been itching for months not only to try out experiments suggested by the Russian tests, but to move forward along the lines of progress already laid down by the last U.S. tests, and to experiment with a host of new weapons and techniques that have been developed in the labs since then but never tested in the atmosphere.

During the two or three months of testing, the Task Force 8 team hopes to:

>"Proof-test" weapons already in the U.S. atomic arsenal—something the Pentagon is particularly anxious to do. The series will include the first full tests of the Minuteman and Polaris missile warheads, and operational tests for ASROC (antisubmarine rocket), an ingenious, nuclear-tipped weapon that seeks out its target under water.

>Conduct "effects tests" to discover how well the Minuteman can ride out a nuclear attack in its "hardened," underground silo. Other tests will seek to determine how well the hulls of submarines—including the subs that carry the Polaris missile—will stand up to nuclear attack. Nuclear weapons will be detonated at high altitudes to check the effect on ground communications and radar. In previous tests, ionization caused by nuclear explosions wreaked havoc with electronics gear, raised the possibility that an enemy might try to knock out the electronic network of U.S. defenses by exploding warheads at high altitudes.

>Try to develop "clean" hydrogen bombs with little or no radioactive fall out by improving the efficiency of the fission "trigger" that produces most of the fallout in nuclear explosions.

> Improve the vital weight-yield ratio-a bigger punch in a smaller package—that determines how many bombs an aircraft can carry or how great a destructive force a missile can pack. U.S. experts fear that the Russians have made great strides in this area.

> Experiment with anti-missile devices and techniques, particularly by testing the warhead of the anti-ICBM Nike-Zeus.