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Just last week Russia's Nikita Khrushchev told some visiting Japanese that the Soviet Union has perfected a sensational new weapon "that is a means of the destruction and extermination of humanity."
What was the weapon? Was it what famed U.S. Physicist Ralph Lapp calls a "gigaton" bomb—a nuclear weapon packing the power of a billion tons of TNT that could be detonated 100 miles off the U.S.'s coastline and still set off a 50-ft. tidal wave that would sweep across much of the entire North American continent? Was it a cobalt bomb that would send a deadly cloud sweeping forever about the earth? A "death ray" or a germ bomb? Or even an empty boast? Two days later Nikita Khrushchev said it wasn't nuclear, and, besides, he had been misinterpreted. For public consumption, his weapon had been cooled off.
It was quite a performance, and one that only a dictator could bring off. But, as one U.S. journalist warned, it would be "struthious"* folly to ignore the implications of what Khrushchev said. In the same sense, it would be struthious for the U.S. electorate to base its November judgment on the notion that either presidential candidate has discussed the nuclear control issue accurately or fully.
*Ostrichlike.