Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [31]
Teller and his allies insisted that there was nothing to fear from a little extra radiation, even as nuclear tests were strewing fallout around the globe. The AEC’s Willard Libby declared to a university audience in 1956, “It is possible to say unequivocally that nuclear weapons tests as carried out at present do not constitute a health hazard to the human population.” He was lying. One test in 1957 produced “observable fallout on Los Angeles.” And worldwide, strontium-90 levels were indeed rising rapidly. Scientists gathered data from unusual places. A research group in St. Louis pushed for mothers to donate 50,000 baby teeth for analysis. Others sampled the bones of children who died of other causes.25 All the data showed that concentrations of strontium-90 were doubling every two years.
Teller, for his part, also tried consistently to squelch the growing fears about fallout. The radiation from atomic testing is “very small,” he argued. “Radiation from test fallout might be slightly harmful. It might be slightly beneficial.” He ridiculed the public’s concerns. Afraid of the risk of mutations caused by radiation? “Our custom of dressing men in trousers causes at least a hundred times as many mutations as present fallout levels,” he wrote in 1962, “but alarmists who say that continued nuclear testing will affect unborn generations have not allowed their concern to urge men into kilts.” Teller even suggested that the dead captain from the Daigo Fukuryu Maru might have died from hepatitis, not from radiation exposure.26 In his view, the “fallout fear-mongers” were damaging the security of the United States because they were threatening to end his nuclear schemes. In Teller’s view, “insignificant and doubtful medical considerations” about fallout led to an event “which has contributed decisively to our weakness and our danger”: a nuclear testing moratorium.
In March 1958, Nikita Khrushchev came to power in the Soviet Union. Within days, he took the offensive against the United States. “The Administration was bracing itself today for Moscow’s next big propaganda strike,” warned the New York Times on March 29. “It is expected to be a declaration that the Soviet Union would end nuclear testing or production or both.” Two days later, the plan was revealed: a complete moratorium on nuclear testing. On Moscow Radio, Andrei Gromyko, the foreign minister, announced the “cessation of tests of all forms of atomic and hydrogen weapons in the Soviet Union.” The world wanted a solution to the growing fallout problem and a stop to the nuclear arms race, and the Soviet Union, unlike the United States, had responded. With the promise to suspend testing, “Russia has beaten us on propaganda all around the world,” declared House Speaker Sam Rayburn.
This immediately posed a problem for U.S. politicians. How should they respond to the USSR’s moratorium on nuclear testing? Should they ignore it and risk losing ground in the propaganda war against their Communist rival, or should the United States also cease testing? Teller was dead set against such a ban. Stopping nuclear testing was tantamount to surrendering America’s nuclear advantage to the Russians. Teller would do almost anything to stop it from happening. At an Atomic Energy Commission meeting in May, Teller argued that the United States needed a combination of underground and surface testing to get necessary data on new weapons systems. He warned that banning even surface explosions, much less following Russia’s lead and banning tests entirely, would prevent the development of antimissile warheads. Then he stressed that a moratorium would damage Project Plowshare, his program for peaceful nuclear bombs.
Despite Teller’s arguments, the pressure was too great for the administration to resist. The United States would follow the Russian lead—it would voluntarily cease testing nuclear weapons right