Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume VII, Arms Control and Disarmament

160. Memorandum From the Commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission (Haworth) to the Assistant Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (Long)⁰

Washington, March 20, 1962.

Our meeting with the British on March 17 and 18 clearly brought forth a number of points which, for differing reasons were not explicitly stated in the written conclusions.¹ I have listed them below adding, for context sake, some points that were included in the memorandum.

1. The data and interpretations presented by the British constitute an interesting and useful advance in the technique of observing seismic events. In my opinion, however, they do not represent a major improvement over methods that have been projected in our own plans for the future; certainly they do not, at least at this stage, constitute a “breakthrough.”

2. Using these and other projected methods, an external system can probably be made adequate for detection and localization purposes after a few years. There is, however, no real evidence that such systems will have any appreciable identification capability except possibly at the upper end of the yield range of interest.

3. Of crucial importance is the fact that, as stated in the memorandum, there appears to be no prospect of being able to identify an event as an explosion by seismic means alone. At best, seismic systems can merely reject certain events as being earthquakes, leaving a substantial fraction of the observed events uncertain as to origin. External systems alone would, so far as can be foreseen, leave this fraction very large. It is, therefore, abundantly clear that on-site is an absolute requirement for any system.

4. The technical possibilities of cheating are such that no dependence can be placed for identification and inspection purposes on data derived from stations manned only by nationals of the country under observation. Hence, proposals in which the criteria for inspection would be based on Geneva (or any other) networks manned by Soviets inside the USSR are completely unacceptable.

5. The only national system arrangement that could conceivably be satisfactory would be one in which inspections could be demanded on the basis of data acquired from external stations with no veto power resting in the country under observation. (In this connection it should be noted that it is technically possible to manufacture data on which to base a claim for inspection rights.) That the Soviets would grant such unilateral inspection rights to us seems inconceivable even though they might not fear that we would cheat for intelligence reasons. Indeed it is not clear that we should grant such rights to them.

6. Any system using internationally manned external stations to determine the eligibility of events for inspection would, if used both ways, be the mirror image of the Geneva plan and therefore unacceptable to the Soviets.

7. Suggestions that data from nationally manned stations be submitted to international groups to evaluate in terms of inspection eligibility criteria are impractical for many reasons, including the difficulties of agreeing on satisfactory criteria and the possibilities of doctoring the original data.

Although I did not take time to show this memorandum to the other Commissioners, we have thoroughly discussed the subject and are in complete agreement on the substantive points that I have made.²

Leland J. Haworth³

0. Source: Kennedy Library, National Security Files, Subjects Series, Nuclear Weapons, Testing, 2/17-4/4. No classification marking. Attached to the source text is a memorandum from Haworth to McGeorge Bundy, March 20, which reads: “It occurred to me that you might be interested in the enclosed memorandum I have written to Dr. Long in connection with the UK-US technical meeting last weekend.”
1. See Document 159.
2. In a March 20 memorandum to McNamara, Harold Brown, Director of Defense Research and Engineering, similarly concluded that in the meetings “no technical results were presented by either the U.K. or U.S. scientists to indicate that the problems of underground test detection had been solved”; and he recommended that McNamara oppose any move toward a test ban agreement with only national systems for control. A draft of the agreed conclusions reached at the meeting is attached to Brown’s memorandum. (Washington National Records Center, RG 330, OSD Files: FRC 66 A 3542, Atomic 000.01-400.112, 1962) See the Supplement. In a March 20 memorandum for the record, Herbert Scoville, Jr., Deputy Director for Research at the Central Intelligence Agency, noted that Sir William Penney visited the CIA on March 19 to discuss the recent weekend meetings with U.S. scientists. Penney reported that “preliminary data” revealed in the meetings “gave considerable hope of eventually improving the ability to detect nuclear explosions,” but no data was presented indicating that these new techniques “could specifically identify explosions.” Scoville concluded that “the data is still very preliminary and considerable research will be required before any change in the present US/UK negotiating position would be warranted.” (Central Intelligence Agency, DCI, ER Subject Files)
3. Printed from a copy that bears this typed signature.