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We will end our “voluntary moratorium” on nuclear tests, the President announced last week in Augusta, and begin a “period of voluntary suspension.” It was, as Mr. Hanson Baldwin commented, “a dusty answer” to a policy dilemma that is conspiring to strip the West of the means to defend itself.

Fifteen months ago Dwight Eisenhower took a gamble with the nation’s security that most military experts regarded as irresponsible, if not wanton. Test suspension was considered irresponsible, in sober quarters, not only because it would deprive the U.S. of precious opportunities to strengthen its nuclear capacity, but because it committed the nation to a propaganda position that would attach severe, if not prohibitive, penalties to test resumption. Under the pressure, mostly imagined, of “world opinion” the President accepted these real and certain handicaps on a long- shot bet: that the Soviets could be persuaded to accept adequate safeguards for a permanent test ban.

LB

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L. Brent Bozell Jr.

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We will end our “voluntary moratorium” on nuclear tests, the President announced last week in Augusta, and begin a “period of voluntary suspension.” It was, as Mr. Hanson Baldwin commented, “a dusty answer” to a policy dilemma that is conspiring to strip the West of the means to defend itself.

Fifteen months ago Dwight Eisenhower took a gamble with the nation’s security that most military experts regarded as irresponsible, if not wanton. Test suspension was considered irresponsible, in sober quarters, not only because it would deprive the U.S. of precious opportunities to strengthen its nuclear capacity, but because it committed the nation to a propaganda position that would attach severe, if not prohibitive, penalties to test resumption. Under the pressure, mostly imagined, of “world opinion” the President accepted these real and certain handicaps on a long- shot bet: that the Soviets could be persuaded to accept adequate safeguards for a permanent test ban.