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The Russians had been testing furiously, too—and the world was embroiled in a bitter debate over the fallout effects of such things as strontium 90, carbon 14, cesium 137, iodine 131. Adlai Stevenson had fanned fallout fears in his presidential campaign of 1956, urging the U.S. to stop testing. Now Russia announced it would stop its tests unilaterally. While President Eisenhower pondered about halting U.S. tests, the nation's scientists were at one another's throats.
Teller and then-AEC Commissioner Willard Libby, a Nobel Prizewinning chemist, asserted that the fallout dangers were highly exaggerated. Teller said that the U.S. must keep testing, since there was no sure way to detect Soviet cheating in low-power or underground tests. AEC Chairman John McCone doggedly opposed a test stop. Physicist Edward U. Condon prophesied that "many thousands of persons will die agonizing deaths from bone cancer and leukemia." Nobel Chem ist Pauling cited the mutation threats to future generations. Cornell Physicist Hans Bethe, who had opposed H-bomb development, headed a presidential study, reported that detection of Soviet tests was technically feasible. Reluctantly, Eisenhower said that the U.S. would refrain from tests for one year beginning Oct. 31, 1958, if the Russians would start talks on an inspection system by that date. Thus the tiresome talkathon and the tricky moratorium began.
Time for Tinkering. The moratorium was a period of frustration for the weapons specialists at Los Alamos and at the University of California's other AEC laboratory in Livermore. They had no way of knowing when — if ever — their nation might desperately need their rare knowledge again. As the moratorium continued, they gleaned every last value out of past data, developed new theories that lay useless without test confirmation. Some began drifting into other fields.
Ogle shifted easily into the AEC's pro gram to develop nuclear rocket propulsion, ostensibly a peaceful venture — but with obvious military possibilities. After spending more than a quarter of the previous twelve years away from home (he had not missed one U.S. atomic-test series either in the Pacific or Nevada), he enjoyed being with his wife Minnie and their five children, now aged three to 20.
He could tinker with his four battered used cars, catch up on his avid reading of Arctic exploration (sample title: Narra tive of the Discovery of the Fate of Sir John Franklin and His Companions, published in 1859), spend weekends working on the ranch house that he and his sons were building on a lonely 13-acre site near Los Alamos.