Fallout from the Pole

Soviet propaganda has tried with some success over the years to tar the U.S. as a villain for carrying out nuclear tests and to whitewash the Soviet Union as a do-gooder for demanding a nuclear test ban. In a speech last week, Atomic Energy Commissioner Willard F. Libby demolished the Soviet we're-on-the-side-of-the-angels pose. He pointed out that in October--six months after the Soviets had won the plaudits of the world's neutralists for piously suspending nuclear tests, and just after the U.S. announced its decision to suspend tests for one year--the Russians had carried out at their Arctic test site a series of nuclear explosions so "dirty" that they increased the concentration of radioactive strontium 90 in the stratosphere by about 50%. They were by far the dirtiest nuclear tests since the much blamed U.S. tests in the Pacific in 1954.

Physicist Libby, who is planning to retire from the AEC in June after 4 1/2 years of service, noted a new theory, put forward by Physicist E. A. Martell of the Air Force's Cambridge, Mass. research center, that radioactive debris from nuclear explosions near the poles drifts down to the earth much faster than fallout from explosions near the equator. If the theory is correct, strontium 90 and other harmful isotopes from Soviet tests in October will sprinkle the earth heavily during the next several months.

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