Russians on Tour

Two impressive groups of Russian scientists were making a pilgrimage last week to U.S. scientific centers and getting as friendly a reception as U.S. scientists received this summer in Russia.

Four top Soviet spacemen visited the Iowa City laboratory of Professor James A. Van Allen, discoverer of Van Allen radiation. Addressing an audience of scientists and Iowa students, Academician Leonid I. Sedov gave a detailed report on the trajectories of Soviet moon shots. In response to questioning, he said that the Russians also had rocket failures. He denied rumors that they have put a man in space and said that they will not even try until three conditions exist: that the man will be safe in space, will return to earth safely, and will be able to do tasks beyond the capability of instruments.

Word from the Moon. The Russians seemed eager to be cooperative and, except when military matters were touched on, surprisingly willing to describe Soviet discoveries in space rocketry. At a Washington meeting of the American Rocket Society, Academician Anatoly A. Blagonravov told in precise scientific terms how Lunik III was oriented by small gas jets to take its famous pictures of the far side of the moon (TIME, Nov. 9). Physicist Valerian I. Krasovsky gave a summary of scientific information that Soviet space shots have gathered so far. The Russians also showed a 25-minute movie of the behavior of animals sent aloft in rockets. Most fascinating shot, taken inside a nose cone: a rat, in a condition of weightlessness, performing a frantic dance.

All four Russian spacemen, like most U.S. spacemen, are believed to be deep in military missile work. Sedov, a versatile scientist with important accomplishments in both mathematics and physics, has been head of the Soviet Academy's astronautics committee since 1955, is generally considered the No. 1 Russian spaceman. Blagonravov, 65, once an artillery officer in the Czar's army, is an expert on all sorts of weapons, from machine guns to rockets. He served in 1945-46 as Deputy Minister of Higher Education, is believed largely responsible for Soviet emphasis on scientific training.

Better Football. Crisscrossing the route of the spacemen, an equally eminent group of nine Russian atomic scientists was also touring the U.S. Led by Professor Vasily S. Emelyanov, chief of the Soviet Administration for Peaceful Utilization of Atomic Energy, they visited laboratories from California to Long Island, uranium mines, nuclear-power reactors and the nuclear merchant ship Savannah, now under construction at Camden, N.J. The prime matter on Emelyanov's mind seemed to be peaceful atomic cooperation between Russia and the U.S. The two nations are now engaged, he said, in a "football game" of senseless competition, but they would get ahead faster if they built only one example of each expensive piece of apparatus (e.g., cyclotrons) and used it jointly. Last week Emelyanov signed an agreement with AEC Chairman John A. McCone which provided for exchange of scientists and information, and a cooperative effort in research on controlled thermonuclear energy.

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