Peaceable Explosions

Amid the excitement about the U2, Presidential Press Secretary James Hagerty read to newsmen an announcement that, against the background of rumblings in Moscow, sounded deliberately provocative. President Eisenhower, said the announcement, had approved a massive boost, from $10 million to $66 million, in funds for Project Vela, a program of research on detection of underground nuclear tests--and Vela would include, "where necessary, nuclear explosions." Largely because of the awkward timing, the word buzzed far and wide that the President, in reaction to the shooting down of the U-2 and Nikita Khrushchev's tough talk, had decided to resume nuclear tests--suspended in October 1958--as a measure of national preparedness.

But Ike's decision was a logical outgrowth of the East-West negotiations on banning nuclear tests. With U.S. experts disagreeing among themselves about detection of underground nuclear tests, the U.S. had repeatedly made clear that 1) it could not enter into an agreement to ban underground tests without further research on methods of detection, and 2) this research, to be reliable, would have to include actual nuclear explosions, not just conventional explosions.

At the U.S.-British-Russian test-ban conference in Geneva early last week, Soviet Delegate Semyon K. Tsarapkin, on instructions from Moscow, unexpectedly dropped his longtime insistence that any East-West program of research on underground test detection would have to be carried out solely with conventional explosives, agreed to include a "strictly limited number" of nuclear explosions. Viewed in the light of Tsarapkin's concession and the previous history of the test-ban negotiations, Project Vela seemed entirely peaceable.

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