My phone rang, waking me from a sound sleep at 5:00 a.m. Only a few hours before, I had returned home to New York City from three days of canoeing in the Adirondacks during the Memorial Day weekend of 1974. The caller was Eric Willis of the Department of Defense, who asked me to join a U.S. team that was leaving that evening for Moscow to negotiate what was to be called the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, or TTBT.
As I struggled to wake up, I agreed to be part of the group. Eric thanked me and told me I needed to get down to Washington, DC, immediately to pick up my visa before the Soviet embassy closed at noon. I took an 8:00 a.m. flight and, in my rush to get there, did not have time to put together clothes, scientific materials, or money. Hours later, I returned to New York, hurriedly packed, phoned a few people to let them know what I was doing, went to the bank, and headed back to Washington on an Eastern Airlines shuttle.
I had only the tail number of the Air Force plane that was leaving from Andrews Air Force Base with the U.S. delegation. My Eastern Airlines pilot radioed ahead that I was coming, and the plane to Moscow waited for my slightly late and breathless arrival. I had no idea if our sojourn in Moscow would last a few days or several weeks. Neither did the other members of the delegation. We ended up spending close to a month in Moscow.
Our group was initially described as one for “technical discussions” of a possible Threshold Treaty. A staff member for Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s secretary of state, informed us that our purpose was to explore whether the Russians were sincere about negotiating a bilateral treaty with the United States to limit the size of underground nuclear explosions. We soon learned that they indeed were interested.
In an effort to counter the ongoing political storm over Watergate, Kissinger had advised the U.S. government to seek a relatively quick and modest arms control treaty with the Soviet Union. Negotiating a more complex and comprehensive treaty, such as a Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) to limit long-range delivery systems for nuclear weapons, would have been a much too ambitious and lengthy endeavor. The Soviet Union was attracting international attention in 1974 by pressing for a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) while the United States resisted, citing concerns about verification and the reliability of the nuclear stockpile. At a meeting between Kissinger and Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko in March 1974, they agreed in principle to seek a ban on nuclear explosions above some yet-to-be-determined size. I did not know this when I joined the negotiating team on the plane to Moscow.
Our U.S. Air Force plane to Moscow, which had no passenger windows, stopped in Copenhagen. NATO allies were then informed about the general purpose of our mission. When we arrived in Moscow, Soviet “handlers” met us and took us to the Rossiya Hotel. Adjacent to Red Square, its twenty-one-story tower then loomed above the Kremlin walls and the cupolas of Saint Basil’s Cathedral. Our “handlers” and others from the KGB wore expensive sport coats or suits that definitely were not available to ordinary Soviet citizens.
I knew the Rossiya from stays in Moscow for an international meeting on geophysics in 1971 and as part of a U.S. delegation on earthquake prediction in 1973. Each floor had two kindly looking elderly women who observed our comings and goings. Except for Walter Stoessel, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, a State Department employee, and interpreters, no one else in our delegation knew Russian. Most had not been to the Soviet Union previously. From my one-semester course in Scientific Russian at Columbia, I knew the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet and some Russian words. I could not hold a conversation in Russian, but I was able to read signs, find my way around central Moscow, travel on the subways, and order breakfast from coffee bars in the Rossiya.
Our delegation included representatives from the Department of Energy, which funded the laboratories that developed and tested nuclear weapons, the departments of Defense and State, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ambassador Stoessel, a career diplomat, headed our delegation. Norman Terrell, who worked for Helmut Sonnenfeldt, senior counselor to Kissinger, made many important decisions. Terrell was the primary link to Kissinger and a panel called the “back-stopping” committee, a group of experts on nuclear testing, back in Washington.
Picking members of the negotiating team that was sent to Moscow had to have been a major concern. It is interesting to see who was picked for the U.S. team and who was not. Seismology was the main technology used to monitor the sizes of explosions and hence the treaty’s threshold. Of the twelve members of the team, three of us were seismologists. Our delegation was unusual in that it contained two university seismologists, Eugene Herrin from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and me. Carl Romney, a chief scientist at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the Pentagon, had formerly worked at the Air Force Technical Application Center (AFTAC).
It is strange that no one from AFTAC, the agency responsible for operating the U.S. classified Atomic Energy Detecting System (AEDS), was a member of the negotiating team. Many U.S. government officials probably considered that Romney and Herrin had the greatest expertise in understanding the U.S. classified capabilities in seismology. Seismologists from the U.S. weapons labs were not part of the delegation either. Donald Springer of the Livermore Lab would have been an excellent member, but he was not chosen.
Warren Heckrotte of Livermore, who was familiar with previous test ban negotiations, was replaced by Michael May, a high-level administrator at Livermore and an excellent physicist, about halfway through the negotiations when officials in Washington concluded that the Soviets were serious about negotiating a treaty. General Edward Rowny of the office of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was responsible for negotiations with the Soviet Union for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), also replaced one person from the Defense Department. Eric Willis of ARPA, a geochemist familiar with measuring radioactive isotopes, remained a member.
I had worked in geophysics at the Lamont Geological Observatory since 1960. My main expertise in 1974 was studying long-period seismic surface waves, plate tectonics, and the discrimination of the signals of underground explosions from those of earthquakes.
As it turned out, Herrin and I came to form a buffer between two warring factions within U.S. government officials at the negotiations—those who sought a verifiable treaty and hawks who opposed it, seeing it as an unadvised step toward a complete ban on nuclear testing. One member of the delegation from the Defense Department, a former professor of engineering at Columbia University, described himself to me as a “professional bastard.” Fortunately, he did not have much impact on the negotiations.
After two weeks, some agencies in Washington wanted to replace Herrin and me with others from within the government. Ambassador Stoessel successfully resisted replacing us on the grounds that we made significant contributions to the technical discussions and to the balance of the delegation.
About two weeks into the negotiations, the ambassador asked each of us in the delegation to state whether the allowed explosive yields of nuclear tests should be set at a threshold of 100 or 150 kilotons (a kiloton, abbreviated kt, is equivalent in explosive energy to one thousand tons of the chemical explosive TNT). Officials in Washington had sent those numbers to the ambassador. Herrin and I said that seismic waves generated by explosions of either of those yields could be detected readily all over the world, and their seismic signals could be distinguished easily from those generated by earthquakes.
Our delegation had to be careful about classified materials. We were instructed not to leave any in our hotel rooms or on the conference room table, where they could be photographed by cameras hidden in the ornate ceiling of our meeting room in Moscow. We were not to talk about classified materials or the negotiations in Soviet cars that transported us to and from meetings. We should not talk to any of our scientific colleagues in Moscow who were not members of the Soviet delegation. I went to an opera in the Kremlin one evening where by chance I met Malcolm McKenna, a famous U.S. expert on paleontology, who held joint appointments at the American Museum of Natural History and our department at Columbia. He was en route to Mongolia to negotiate the reopening of joint scientific work between U.S. and Mongolian paleontologists at a famous dinosaur area that had not been visited by Western scientists since the 1930s. I could not tell him why I was in Moscow other than it involved earthquakes and explosions.
A general in our delegation planned to attend the opera and asked one of the “handlers” what he should do if he got lost. The answer, in very accented English, was “Do not worry.” Obviously there was no chance of that because we were under close surveillance. One weekend our delegation traveled overnight by train to Leningrad for sightseeing. Upon our arrival at the train station, military officers saluted one of the Soviets accompanying us. Although she was not a scientist or a member of the Soviet delegation, she was obviously a high-ranking official.
Our delegation met formally with representatives from the Soviet Union about four times a week, when members made formal presentations on specific topics followed by questions from the other delegation. I presented one on the determination of seismic magnitudes. At other times we met in the U.S. embassy, where we went over in detail the papers that were to be presented to the Soviets. Some of us walked from the embassy to our hotel for exercise and fresh air. One of our Soviet handlers later remarked that we were fast walkers.
The Soviet delegation contained at least two members who worked on peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs). They stated that PNEs were greatly needed for their national economy such as constructing a major canal. We met informally for dinner and drinks a few times and traveled with members of their delegation on weekends. At other times we ate with members of our delegation at our hotel. (Interestingly, we received better food after our ambassador formally announced agreements on specific topics, such as using yield as a measure of the threshold.) Roland Timerbaev of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs took two of us to the nearby historic town of Zagorsk another weekend. I was surprised that he, a Muslim, said he expected the Soviet Union to eventually accept the Russian Orthodox religion, which it did many years later.
Kissinger and Nixon negotiated the final details of the TTBT in the first few days of July 1974. A few days later, Nixon and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the treaty, which set the underground testing threshold at the more conservative 150-kiloton level. I flew home from Moscow to Frankfurt on a U.S. Air Force transport plane that had delivered a red convertible to Moscow, Nixon’s gift to Brezhnev, who was known to like fast cars.
I think the Threshold Test Ban Treaty brought us another step closer to a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) by outlawing all nuclear weapons tests above the yield threshold. Nevertheless, I had no idea that twenty-two years would pass before a full test ban (a CTBT) finally would be approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations and signed by President Clinton and leaders of many other nations in 1996.
As of mid-2017, 183 out of a total of 196 states had signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and 166 had both signed and ratified it. Those signing in 1996 included all states that acknowledged having nuclear weapons. The 1974 TTBT was signed about midway between the adoption of the CTBT in 1996 and the first serious calls for a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1954, soon after the United States and the Soviet Union had tested very large hydrogen (thermonuclear) weapons in the atmosphere.
Nevertheless, although the major nuclear countries signed the CTBT in 1996, it can enter into force only after it has been signed and ratified by all forty-four countries that have either nuclear weapons or reactors. On-site inspections become possible under the treaty after its entry into force. Russia, Britain, and France have signed and ratified the treaty.
Entry into force unfortunately remains an elusive goal. Neither the United States nor China nor Israel has ratified the treaty, even though each signed it in 1996. India, North Korea, and Pakistan, which now possess nuclear weapons, have not signed the treaty. Though not ratified, the CTBT has been very successful in that the countries that signed it have not tested nuclear weapons of military significance since 1996. India and Pakistan have not tested since 1998.
Nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in space, and underwater was outlawed by the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) of 1963. Nevertheless, the LTBT neither prohibited underground testing nor stopped the continued development of new nuclear weapons, as the 1996 CTBT does. While the LTBT did prevent great amounts of radioactive debris from entering the atmosphere and oceans, it was largely a public health measure.