The New Threat

Into the boiling debate over nuclear testing stepped an internationally known nuclear physicist and mathematician, Freeman John Dyson, 36, British-born, Cambridge-educated professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Dyson insisted that the U.S. must spurn an uncheckable test ban and resume testing. His key reasons:

P: The big powers are on the brink of developing radically new generations of cheaper, cleaner, lighter, militarily more important nuclear weapons. P: Testing of weapons of less than megaton size (equivalent to 1,000,000 tons of TNT) could easily escape long-range detection.

P: The choice before the U.S. is to press forward and perfect such weapons first, or to accept a poorly policed test ban and the accompanying risk that the Soviets --or some other power--will develop such weapons first.

"Until now," Dyson says, "we have had two essentially different types of nuclear weapons, the fission bomb and the hydrogen bomb," which requires a fission bomb to ignite it. Clearly needed: a third-generation H-bomb that could be detonated by cheap TNT instead of costly fission. The Soviets have been experimenting with such fission-free H-bombs since as far back as 1952, Lenin-Prize-winning Soviet Physicist L. S. Artsimo-vich wrote in a Soviet scientific journal in 1958. If the Soviets perfect the process (or have done so already), they could afford to mass-produce nuclear warheads that would be cheaper, cleaner, lighter, more easily maneuverable than current-generation nuclear weapons.

It is quite possible for the Soviets to perfect such superior weapons--and many others--under the loose control terms under discussion at Geneva, says Dyson. U.S. scientists have proved beyond doubt that there can be a "high degree of cofi-cealment" of nuclear tests. "If we sign an agreement to cease testing on the basis of a long-range detection system, we are trusting to the good faith of all the signatory powers. Somewhere, some time, some government would yield to temptation and resume testing in secret.

"The only wise policy for the U.S. at present is to continue the exploration of nuclear weapons technology, including the testing of weapons, until a reliable international control is established . . . The moral dilemma facing the designers of weapons today is not essentially different from that which faced the builders of the fission bomb in 1943 and the builders of the hydrogen bomb in 1951. You discover that a new and horrible kind of weapon can be made. Either you make it yourself, or you leave it to chance to decide who makes it. It would be wrong for us to leave the future development of nuclear weapons to chance. Our development and possession of these weapons will help maintain the stability of the world until, in the fullness of time, we can hand over all such devilish inventions to an international authority powerful enough to prevent their abuse."

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