(See Cover) While grey autumn clouds obscured the sun over the nation's capital last week, the President of the U.S. closeted himself in the White House conference room for a crucial meeting with the members of the National Security Council. The Soviet Union's continued nuclear testing, climaxed by a 50-plus megaton explosion, left room for only one topic on the usually crowded agenda: how the U.S. should act to protect its own interests. After listening gravely to his advisers, John F. Kennedy walked briskly into his oval office to meet waiting reporters. Rarely had they seen him so grim, so abrupt. "Just wait a moment," he said. "Just stop taking pictures for a minute." Then Kennedy laid two heavily edited pieces of paper on the green blotter before him and began to read.
"In terms of total military strength," said Kennedy, "the U.S. would not trade places with any nation on earth. We have taken major steps in the past year to maintain our lead—and we do not propose to lose it." Because the Soviet tests might produce improved nuclear weapons for the Soviet Union, the U.S. will "proceed in developing nuclear weapons to maintain this superior capability. No nuclear tests in the atmosphere will be undertaken, as the Soviet Union has done, for so-called psychological or political reasons. But should tests be deemed necessary to maintain our responsibilities for free-world security, they will be undertaken only to the degree that effective progress is not possible without such tests. In the meantime, as a matter of prudence, we shall make necessary preparations for such tests so as to be ready in case it becomes necessary to conduct them."
Pandora's Box. Behind the President's carefully qualified words lay a decision already made: the U.S. will resume atomic testing in the atmosphere as soon as it can get ready to do so. For two months, the U.S. had patiently waited, staging only underground tests that produce no fallout, while the Soviet Union set off some 31 nuclear blasts, the biggest of them in defiance of a United Nations plea to spare the world the most monstrous man-made explosion in history. Now U.S. patience was exhausted.
By his rupture of the three-year moratorium on nuclear testing, Nikita Khrushchev had forced the U.S.—and the whole free world—to cope with a Pandora's box of questions. What military advance had the Russians achieved by their tests? What could the U.S. hope to gain by resumed atmospheric testing, and how far should it go? Had world reaction to the Russian tests permanently shifted any allegiances? How great is the danger of fallout from testing?
Mysterious Force. Many of those questions could not be fully and decisively answered because, in the 16th year of the Atomic Age, men were still seeking to penetrate the secrets of a mysterious natural force—as well as the inscrutable designs of an ironfisted dictatorship. But big hunks and hints of the answers lay about, ready to be fitted together and weighed to guide the U.S. on its course. The man whose job it is to weigh most of them—and to prepare the U.S. for renewed testing—is Glenn Theodore Seaborg, the craggy-faced chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.