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Still, the world must obviously prepare for the day when fallout, even from tests, may rise beyond tolerable levels. The U.S. is improving a vast detection system that will enable it to give public warning to its citizens if radiation becomes a real danger. Should the level of radioactivity rise markedly, babies could be kept on processed food longer to avoid radiation; milk and other vulnerable foods could be kept in freezers for a longer time before consumption, allowing short-lived radioactive materials to decay. Contaminated milk could also be diluted with uncontaminated milk, bringing radioactivity below the danger point. People could be protected from radioactive iodine by taking potassium iodine in their diet to block out or neutralize radioactivity. Farmers could use stored feed grain for their cattle during periods of high radioactivity. As for the vital water supply, most potable U.S. water sits in huge reservoirs for years before it is consumed, giving plenty of time for short-lived radioisotopes to die; the addition of chemicals in treatment plants would further cut radioactivity. Says University of California Professor Everett R. Dempster: "Fallout is a thing to be avoided, but we're not at the danger point yet. To me the issues of peace and war are very much more important than fallout and mutations."
Polishing the Adjectives. It is in the interests of those issues that the U.S. finds itself with little choice but to resume atmospheric testing. Though the Administration has not yet decided just when to begin testing, pressure grew in Congress for a quick test resumption. New Mexico's Senator Clinton P. Anderson and California's Representative Chet Holifield—the two senior Democrats on the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy—called last week in strong words for atmospheric tests. Said Anderson: "We must conduct atmospheric tests because the underground tests have not given us all the answers we need." Connecticut's Democrat Senator Thomas J. Dodd demanded a crash program of testing to develop a deadly neutron bomb (TIME, July 7), which scientists still consider several years away from reality. Added Georgia's Democratic Senator Richard B. Russell: It is essential to ''conduct some atmospheric tests—until we perfect the neutron bomb."
Opposition to renewed testing was not based so much on fear of fallout as the feeling by some Government officials that the U.S. will suffer an international political disaster if it resumes atmospheric tests. The notion is that many unaligned nations and wavering neutrals will be glad to stop yelling at Khrushchev, who frightens them and pays no attention to them, and start yelling at the U.S., which acts the part of a gentleman and in the past has taken their complaints with utmost seriousness. Says USIA Chief Edward R. Murrow: "Editorial writers in the non-Communist-bloc countries have just about exhausted all the known adjectives in expressing their condemnation of the Soviet nuclear tests—but they'll polish up some new ones when we begin testing." Yet the U.S. may certainly be pardoned for feeling that this transitory expression of world opinion—including new Afro-Asian adjectives—is less important than its own security and the future of freedom everywhere in the free world.