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Despite the puniness of the U.S. shots, Washington had been fearful that they would set off a wave of anti-American, ban-the-bomb reaction and rioting around the world. Against this, the Kennedy Administration had clamped the strictest sort of secrecy on the Christmas Island operations—admittedly more for psychological than for security reasons (after all, the Russians could learn with instruments just as much about these tests as the U.S. learned about theirs). There were to be no eyewitness news reports from Christmas Island, no photographs of mushroom clouds over the Pacific. A medical officer returning from Christmas told reporters in Hawaii: "I can't even tell you if we've got any Band-Aids out there." Arranged Reaction. Such secrecy precautions seemed superfluous. Most of the world's peoples were well aware that it was the Soviet Union that last fall broke a three-year test moratorium and made such advances as to endanger the world's balance of nuclear power. They also knew that Russia's Khrushchev had rejected repeated U.S. offers to forgo testing if he would only sign a meaningful no-test agreement, controlled by on-site inspectors.
There were, to be sure, ban-the-bomb demonstrations, but most had a prearranged, perfunctory quality about them.
In Japan, which has good cause for hating A-bombs, a drizzle discouraged demonstrators, but about 600 chorused antibomb songs in front of the U.S. embassy in Tokyo. U.S. Ambassador Edwin Reischauer later was heckled by 800 students at Kanazawa University, where he was lecturing on modern Japanese history. Some 800 leftist Zengakuren youths pushed and got pushed by cops who rather easily kept them away from the U.S. embassy. In Great Britain, where peace movements are strong, 1,500 marchers paraded past the U.S. embassy in London's Grosvenor Square, chanting "No more tests." Read some of the signs: "God Save the Queen, the Bomb Won't."
Among the neutralists, India's Prime Minister Nehru told his Parliament: "I am not here to blame either party, but I beg and appeal to all the nuclear powers to refrain from these tests while the Geneva conference is on." Cairo's Algumhuria wrote: "As the world cried in panic from Soviet explosions in Moscow a year ago, it does cry in panic today from the Washington explosions."
In Turkey, only one newspaper even put the news on Page One: some ignored it completely. Radio Iran approved the test resumption. There were no demonstrations in Buddhist Burma, but the Rangoon Guardian said that the nuclear race now "endangers mankind with annihilation." In the Philippines, apathetic reaction was summed up by citizens who asked: "Where's Christmas Island?"
In Europe, France's anti-American leftists failed to hold even a single meeting or publish a petition. Christian democrats and moderate socialists in Belgium organized a five-minute strike for May 8, but the U.S. embassy had not had a single protest. Stones were thrown through a few windows at the U.S. embassy in Copenhagen. 50 demonstrators were held back by police, but the newspaper Berlingske Tidende said, "The U.S. was given no choice," had "a duty to restore strategical balance." No demonstrations were reported in Latin America or Africa.