FIREWORKS BEFORE BEDTIME
THE most encouraging diplomatic week for the West in years, with agreements at the UN and at Geneva, has been followed by depressing news from the East : news of the rain of shells on Quemoy and of fall-out on Christmas Island, where British scientists are exploding nuclear de- vices like children hurrying to let off the last fireworks before bedtime. For Britain to start this new series of tests on the very day of the publi- cation of the Anglo-US offer to stop tests on October 31 was regrettable, considering how the Government reacted to the Russians' proposal for a cessation of tests after they had completed their own series a few months ago. if the Russians were being hypocritical then, so are we now. No doubt the choice of October 31 was made not by us but by the Americans : but we, with these tests, have incurred the odium. And it is not as if they are of any value : everybody, not least the Russians, knows that the West's weakness lies not in its nuclear weapons but in its means of conveying them to their destination in the event of war.
However, a strong chance remains that the offer will be grudgingly Accepted. None of the three Great Powers, and certainly not Russia, can easily afford the propaganda disgrace which would attach to a flat refusal to ban tests. In Russia's case this would involve starting all over again the tests which she stopped unconditionally in April; and since then there has been the vague but imposing UN report on the dangers of radia- tion and the unexpected agreement of the experts at Geneva that a control system is practicable. The whirl of abuse from Moscow about the present Western tests has also strengthened Russia's corricnitment to accepting a ban of some kind.
It is possible, though, that Russia will swing round to the newly abandoned position of her opponents and demand 'package' discussions, .to include the whole subject of nuclear disarmament and the destruction of stocks. The West is at present offering disarmament as the first item of a 'summit' conference which it is fairly certain Russia no longer wants; and Russia may play to regain the initiative by arguing that the mere end- ing of tests cannot be discussed by itself.
Certainly the reality of inspection will be hard for Russia to swallow. The book of essays on inspection for disarmament which has just been published by the University of Columbia con- firms the opinion of the Geneva experts that con- trol is perfectly possible granted the establishment of control posts in the right places. Three main methods of test-detection are in use : detection Of acoustic waves, detection of seismic waves and detection of electro-magnetic radiation. With their help, the conclusion is, every point of an inspected territory can be covered provided it is within 300 miles of a detection post.- Here, Russian geography makes for awkward- ness: the Soviet Union would require about twenty-five such posts to fulfil this condition and the United States only seven. In addition, there would have to Pe a range of seismic stations in Kamschatka to record volcanic and earth move- ment. Normally the wave patterns of an earth tremor and of a deep explosion are very distinct, but the seismic stations could prevent the trick of small bombs being exploded simultaneously with the onset of an 'earthquake so that the bomb's wave pattern is concealed. Another possi- bility referred to for evading detection is -the exploding of a bomb within a gigantic steel sphere on pillars, to absorb shock waves which might be transmitted to the earth or the air; but in order not to burst, such a sphere should weigh over a hundred thousand tons. All the labour of Siberia, the conclusion is, would hardly avail to make this worth trying. Small bombs, again, could be secretly exploded in a huge trench-shaped lake of foaming water; but none exists.
So it seem that Mr. Gromyko was right when he said • in April : 'All contentions about the alleged impossibility. of detecting nuclear tests are in reality solely aimed at continuing the nuclear arms race and are fully disproved by practice and expert opinion. . . .' And it was Valerian Zorin, Russian delegate to the UN Disarmament Sub- committee, who first proposed that control posts should be set up. But in spite of all this bright logic on the part of her representatives, it is quite clear that Russia would be put to infinitely more inconvenience by nuclear inspection than either Britain or America. The Soviet security police must already be aghast at the suggestion that they admit several hundred unscreened and probably unsocialist scientists as semi-permanent residents in the most private districts of Siberia. Prevarica- tion may be expected. One form may well be the loading of the meeting's agenda until it becomes a rival 'summit' conference: another, potentially more useful, may be to distract attention by con- centrating on the problem of new owners of the bomb—in particular, France.
France, more resolved on 'nuclear club mem- bership' than ever since de Gaulle's accession, is hurrying on with preparations to explode her hydrogen bomb near Colomb-Bechar, and to spray the upper atmosphere with radioactive Sahara sand, with the ludicrous justification that it was.only her, lack of a hydrogen bomb which allowed Khrushchev to threaten her out of Port Said. China, too, has to be considered. Being de- pendent on Russian material, she could pre- sumably be drawn into an agreement. So could West Germany and Sweden. General agreement of this type must be sought, because otherwise an ancient evasion could be practised. Just as the Heinkels and Dorniers were invited to practise war in the skies of Spain, and as the German clandestine re-armers had their bombers built and tested in Sweden, their submarines in Holland and their artillery in Russia, so the world might sud- denly discover that Panama or Albania is testing hydrogen bombs for an unspecified client. The ban on testing nuclear weapons must be univer- sal; only then can the next step, nuclear dis- armament, begin even to be considered.
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