Alexandra’s Reviews > American Scientists and Nuclear Weapons Policy > Status Update

“Whereas the politician often seeks to persuade an opponent through appeals to passion, the threat of force, and the use of force, the scientist tends to assume there is one truth to which all reasonable men will accede once its nature has been explained” (306).

American scientists were sent to the Geneva Conference of Experts without a clear mandate from US leadership ("the Administration did not know what it wanted from the negotiations" (220)). Not being diplomats, they allowed errors in wording in the final report to remain and let the Soviet delegation (scientists and negotiators) modify the terms of the agreement in several crucial ways.

After a series of moves by the AEC which only served to increase suspicions that it had deliberately falsified its original report, on March 11, 1958, the AEC revised the maximum distance from 250 miles to 2300 miles. The apparent dishonesty of this maneuver did much to discredit the case made by the opponents of a nuclear test ban that detection was not technically feasible" (182).

"In its official announcement of March 6th [1958] on the Rainier underground explosion, the AEC had stated that the maximum distance to which the shot had been detected was only 250 miles. This statement brought immediate outcries from many scientists who took their case to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.