New Flame for a Feud

In the bogdown of the U.S.-U.K.-U.S.S.R. disarmament talks at Geneva, the U.S.'s smoldering debate about stopping nuclear tests--more or less tamped down by the President's decision last August to stop tests for one year--fanned into new flame. The Atomic Energy Commission and the Pentagon, convinced that prolonged test suspension would play fast and loose with U.S. military posture, argued for resuming low-fallout tests. And last week the advocates of full test suspension, centered in President Eisenhower's Science Advisory Committee under M.I.T.'s James Rhyne Killian, loosed a bitter counterattack.

"Radicals." A top Science Advisory Committee member, declining to be named, insisted in an interview that the President's stop-the-tests decision was wise "on balance"--and then began blasting away with both barrels at those who disagree. Said he: "These men who don't want a test moratorium are like a kid you are trying to put to bed. First he wants a drink of water and then he wants to go to the bathroom, but what he really wants is not to go to bed."

The scientist hammered hardest at ex-AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss (now Secretary of Commerce) and ex-AEC Consultant Edward Teller. Strauss and Teller, said the Science Advisory Committee spokesman, are "radicals . . . extremists of one viewpoint." He stressed the point that the Science Advisory Committee's now dominant voices, e.g., Killian, Columbia University's Dr. I. I. Rabi, base their stop-the-tests stand on purely technical, nonpolitical grounds. But he went on to say that Science Advisory Committee members feel that test stoppage, all science aside, will bring the "reduction of tensions," and "hope of a world that does not live in fear."

"Call the Bluff." So hardened by the heat of controversy are the opposing scientific views on test suspension that reconciliation or compromise seem almost out of the question. But from the political world last week came a suggestion that demonstrated the possibility of a middle ground. Recently returned from the Geneva talks (TIME, Nov. 24), Tennessee's Democratic Senator Albert Gore, a member of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, urged his ideas on President Eisenhower. Gore's key point: the U.S. could test nuclear weapons underground, underwater or in outer space without danger of fallout and without sacrifice to security interests. At the same time, Gore said, the U.S. should unilaterally suspend tests in the atmosphere, not for one but for three years, as a psychological move in the cold war.

Gore's 15-minute White House appointment stretched into 45 minutes as President Eisenhower shot questions at the Tennessean. The President bridled once when Albert Gore, carried away, said passionately: "I want my President to call [the Russian] bluff." But for the most part Dwight Eisenhower seemed impressed, asked Gore to submit his proposals in a formal memorandum. Gore did, also talked over his ideas with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and new AEC Chairman John McCone. Under close examination, flaws might appear in Albert Gore's plan, but at least it had the merit of suggesting a way out of an otherwise bitter, abrasive impasse on the question of test suspension.

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