Test Quest

While the U.S. almost certainly will resume nuclear testing in the atmosphere as soon as it can get ready, one ticklish problem has remained unresolved in the two months since President Kennedy ordered the preparations to proceed: with the blasts growing bigger and the world more worried, where can the tests be held?

The old shooting grounds, Bikini and Eniwetok in the Pacific's Marshall Islands, are physically too tiny and politically too touchy for modern megatomics. Some 1,000 Micronesians live within 200 miles of Eniwetok, more than 10,000 within 600 miles. They remember the radioactive shower that fell on Rongelap, 100 miles east of Eniwetok, after a meteorological miscalculation in a 1954 U.S. test. The island's 82 inhabitants had to be quarantined on another island for 3 1/2 years before their home was considered safe. Twenty-three Japanese fishermen in the trawler Lucky Dragon suffered radioactive burns. Since the Marshalls are held in a U.S.-administered trust by the United Nations, any nuclear accident there can be politically as well as atomically explosive.

Moreover, the sliver-thin Marshall atolls cannot handle the mass of instrumentation that scientists use. Most of the equipment used in the last tests in 1958 has been removed or left to rust; re-use of the sites would save neither time nor money.

At his meeting with Britain's Prime Minister Macmillan in Bermuda, President Kennedy proposed a solution. He would like to use British-controlled Christmas Island, the largest and most easterly atoll in the Pacific.* Its advantages: it has two good runways, 6,500 ft. and 5,000 ft. long, just 3,400 miles southwest of California; there is little population closer than Hawaii or Micronesia, 1,600 miles to the west; it contains about 200 sq. mi. of sand-covered coral, room enough for considerable equipment and accommodations for 2,000 men; its isolation affords hope of keeping some tests secret. The British conducted three nuclear test series there in 1957 and 1958.

While hardly enthusiastic, Macmillan tentatively approved use of the island, as long as Britain need take no part in the actual testing. But he prudently reserved the right to get his Cabinet's reaction before granting formal permission. The outlook: probable, but far from a sure Christmas gift.

* The British govern the atoll as a crown colony, based on Captain James Cook's discovery of it in 1777. But in one of history's mildest international disputes, the U.S. has never relinquished, nor seriously pressed, its own claim, based on the working of guano deposits by an American firm there in the 1850s. Occupied jointly by the U.S. and Britain in World War II, the atoll supported a U.S. airbase. Britain had another Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean, 200 miles south of Java. In 1958 the island was transferred to Australia, which still uses it as a western outpost of the Woomera rocket range.

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