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"A Valid Subject." On the television program with Adlai, heartily approving his ideas, was New Mexico's Senator Clinton Anderson, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (who had previously said he did not believe the U.S. should call off its tests). Also there was Missouri's Senator Stuart Symington (he quickly changed the subject to the need for greater national defense). Public backing for Stevenson came from ten Caltech scientists (including Speech Adviser Harrison Brown). They were promptly rebuked by Caltech President Lee DuBridge for their "partisan stand." Sixty-two scientists from the Atomic Energy Commission's Brookhaven Laboratory edged in with a notation that the dangers of Strontium 90 were "a valid subject for further discussion and study"-as indeed they are.
For a few days the issue ballooned in the headlines, and President Eisenhower, after slashing back at Stevenson in his Portland and Hollywood Bowl speeches, announced that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Defense Secretary Charles Wilson and Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis Strauss would prepare a full-dress answer to Stevenson and explanation of the Administration's thermonuclear program. Although no one knew precisely how much new information they might bring to bear, some of the obvious answers were that Stevenson:
¶Grossly exaggerated the dangers of fallout from H-bomb tests; the four-month-old, nonpolitical National Academy of Sciences report found that the radioactive fallout from hydrogen tests, if continued for the next 30 years at the rate of the last five, would amount to about one-thirtieth of the dose the average person would receive from routine X ray and fluoroscopic examinations. Atomic Energy Commissioner Willard Libby has said that even if tests were to continue at the present rate indefinitely, the quantity of radioactive Strontium 90 in humans might increase only to 64/1,000ths of the "maximum permissible concentration."
¶Erred grievously in his claim that if the Russians violate the ceasefire, the U.S. can set up tests and get going within eight weeks; a major test requires about two years' preparation, involves a task force of more than 10,000 scientists, technicians and military men, along with fabulously intricate and delicate instrumentation that changes from test to test.
¶Missed the basic point of atomic weapons research: nuclear experimentation is in its infancy. To stop thermonuclear testing now would mean that scientists might not discover their mistakes until too late (some of the most profitable tests have been the fizzles), might miss a breakthrough to a whole new magnitude of nuclear understanding.