Much happened about nuclear testing during the fifteen years prior to the signing of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in September 1996. U.S. congressional committees expressed considerable interest in it. I wrote and testified extensively about the verification of a CTBT and the determination of yields of Soviet explosions. From 1986 to 1988 Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) conducted the first independent review of the determination of Soviet yields and how well a CTBT could be verified.
During my sabbatical leave from Columbia University from July 1981 to June 1982, I corresponded with Jack Evernden of the U.S. Geological Survey and Dennis Flanagan, the editor of Scientific American, about an article on the verification of a CTBT. Flanagan accepted a proposal by Evernden and me, and our article “The Verification of a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban,” appeared as the lead article in their October 1982 issue. At that time Scientific American and its publisher, Gerard Piel, were known for including articles on various aspects of the nuclear arms race. Evernden and I exchanged drafts of materials for the article by airmail in early 1982 when I was at Clare Hall College of Cambridge University and he was working for the U.S. Geological Survey.
I find in rereading our 1982 article that it is still relevant today for educated, technical, and public policy audiences. It covers most of the issues related to the verification of a CTBT and came very close to forecasting the capabilities that now exist for using internal and external seismic networks to monitor the Soviet Union. Our subheading in 1982 stated, “Networks of seismic instruments could monitor a total test ban with high reliability. Even small clandestine explosions could be identified if extreme measures were taken to evade detection.” We commented that the issues to be resolved were political, which I think still is the case.
Evernden, Cifuentes, and I followed up our 1982 paper the next year with a longer, more detailed analysis of monitoring the Soviet Union. We showed that its areas of thick salt deposits could be monitored with stations in the USSR down to yields smaller than one kiloton even if small evasive tests were contemplated using underground cavities.
Our 1982 article helped to stimulate renewed interest in a full test ban throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 1986 Evernden, Archambeau, and I received the Public Service Award from the Federation of American Scientists for “Leadership in Applying Seismology to the Banning of Nuclear Tests, Creative in Utilizing Their Science, Effective in Educating Their Nation, Fearless and Tenacious in Struggles within the Bureaucracy.”
NEGATIVE VIEWS ABOUT MONITORING A CTBT BY BACHE AND ALEWINE OF DARPA
Evernden and I invited Bache and Alewine of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to give talks at a symposium titled “Verification of Nuclear Test Ban Treaties” which we organized for the American Geophysical Union in June 1983. This chapter discusses presentations at that symposium and conclusions in the OTA report of 1988 about verifying a full test ban. Determining yields of underground explosions and accusations of Soviet cheating on the Threshold Treaty were covered in the previous chapter.
In an unpublished 1983 manuscript “Monitoring a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty,” Bache and Alewine stated, “The conclusion is that serious technical problems remain to be solved to attain the capability to assert (with any confidence) that there is no clandestine program of a few events/year with yields up to a few tens of kilotons [my italics].” Bache criticized our Scientific American paper, stating, “In that article they state that the reliability of measures for the verification of a treaty banning explosions larger than one kiloton is no longer arguable. I assume that this must be an overstatement of their position, otherwise there wouldn’t be any point to this symposium.” In the 1980s Evernden and I claimed that two kilotons could be detected, much better than a few tens of kilotons.
To my knowledge, the U.S. government has never issued an unclassified statement about what yields constitute tests of military significance. Its absence has led opponents of a CTBT to change their positions over time about the importance of tests of various yields, no matter how small. What is too small, of course, involves policy as well as technical considerations.
Bache and Alewine are correct that a reliable regional method of identification is needed if the United States wants to identify events smaller than seismic magnitude mb 4.0. That is, in fact, why Evernden, Cifuentes, and I made computations in 1983 for a network that included fifteen seismic stations at regional distances in the USSR—that is, between 0 and 1250 miles (0–2000 km)—as well as more distant external stations.
Bache and Alewine presented a table of magnitudes and yields for explosions at the Nevada Test Site in (1) competent water-saturated rocks and (2) dry porous materials like dry alluvium. In 1982 Evernden and I stated that the maximum thickness of dry alluvium in the USSR leads to an upper limit of two kilotons for that evasion scheme, as scientists in the military branch of the U.S. Geological Survey had stated years before. In addition, explosions in dry alluvium are likely to create craters at the earth’s surface, which can be detected by satellites. Bache and Alewine made no mention of these difficulties in associating magnitudes of 4.0 and 4.5 with yields of 15 to 90 kilotons in alluvium.
Bache and Alewine also cited the difficulty of detecting and identifying seismic events in the few hours after a large earthquake. That scenario, which is called “hide-in-earthquake,” has been resolved for a long time. The two subfigures of figure 11.1 show seismograms made in Norway for the same time. Both show clear signals from a large earthquake in the eastern Soviet Union. The lower subfigure, however, was filtered to better display high-frequency seismic waves and to deemphasize low frequencies. Unlike the standard record at the top, it clearly shows a large arrival from a very small explosion of about 0.5 kiloton in Eastern Kazakhstan following the signal from the large earthquake.
FIGURE 11.1
Seismograms from Norway for the same day and time in 1979. Time increases to the right from 0 to 200 seconds. Upper figure is a conventional recording of low-frequency seismic waves. Both figures show seismic waves starting at about 30 seconds from a large earthquake in the eastern Soviet Union. Seismic waves in the lower figure also include a large, impulsive P wave arriving just after 100 seconds from a very small explosion in Eastern Kazakhstan.
Source: Office of Technology Assessment, 1988.
What about testing in a large nearby earthquake? Since earthquakes cannot be predicted except for time periods of a few decades, a potential violator would have to wait years to decades to set off an explosion in a large nearby earthquake. The violator would need to have a nuclear explosion ready to detonate at a moment’s notice and to determine the location and size of the earthquake accurately within a few minutes. “Hide-in-earthquake” is not a realistic evasion scenario even for an explosion of a fraction of a kiloton.
The remarks by Bache and Alewine in 1983 and previously indicate that they and their office in DARPA did not take problem-solving approaches to test ban verification. Nevertheless, DARPA’s mission going back to 1960 was to improve nuclear verification. DARPA does deserve credit for subsequently funding programs to analyze large volumes of seismic data and for promoting the installation of small seismic arrays.
SEISMIC MONITORING BY U.S. SCIENTISTS IN THE SOVIET UNION
In 2013 Frank von Hippel stated that he personally showed Figure 11.1, illustrating the detection of a very small Soviet explosion, to General Secretary Gorbachev in July 1986. Elected to that position in March 1985, Gorbachev and several of his more liberal scientific and technical advisers, such as Evgeny Velikhov, wanted to end the nuclear arms race. Gorbachev’s first arms control initiative, on July 30, 1985, was to declare a unilateral moratorium on nuclear weapons tests for the remainder of that year—to be extended indefinitely if the United States reciprocated. Von Hippel states, “Reagan administration spokesmen argued that the Soviet Union had chosen to stop testing only after deploying a whole new generation of warheads. By contrast, they said, the US needed to test new warheads for the MX and Trident II missiles and for Edward Teller’s antimissile x-ray lasers…. Moreover, they contended, a test moratorium could not be verified.”
Von Hippel says that he met Velikhov at a conference in October 1985, and “Velikhov suggested that since the U.S. government was not interested in a mutually verified test moratorium, perhaps some non-governmental organization might be interested in verifying that the Soviets were not testing, even at low yields.” The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a private environmental group in the United States, was interested.
In May 1986, NRDC signed an agreement with the Soviet Academy of Sciences to deploy three seismic stations near the nuclear test site in Eastern Kazakhstan. The stations, which were to be operated jointly and the data made available publicly, operated successfully for about a year. I was on NRDC’s advisory committee from 1986 to 1988. Archambeau and several seismologists from UC San Diego set up and maintained those stations. NRDC also helped to set up three similar seismic stations around the Nevada Test Site, which involved U.S. and Soviet scientists. The stations gave important seismic information on tests set off by the other country. Most important, they helped to move the CTBT debate forward.
CONGRESS’S OFFICE OF TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT (OTA) ON VERIFICATION OF A FULL TEST BAN
The 1988 OTA report Seismic Verification of Nuclear Testing Treaties was the first serious analysis of test ban issues in the United States outside of the departments of Defense and Energy. It stated, “Verification—the process of confirming compliance and detecting violations if they occur—is therefore central to the value of any such treaty. Yet in the arena of arms control, the process of verification is political as well as technical. It is political because the degree of verification needed is based upon one’s perception of the benefits of a treaty compared with one’s perception of its disadvantages and the likelihood of violations.” It involves an assessment of what is an acceptable level of risk and a decision as to what should constitute significant noncompliance. “Consequently, people with differing perspectives on the role of nuclear weapons in national security and on the motivations of Soviet leadership will differ on the level of verification required.”
About half of the 1988 OTA report was devoted to monitoring the Soviet Union under either a full nuclear test ban or a low-yield threshold treaty. It stated, “A hypothetical seismic network with stations only outside the Soviet Union would be capable of detecting well-coupled explosions with yields below 1 kt anywhere within the Soviet Union and would be able to detect even smaller events in selected regions.” It went on, “From a monitoring standpoint, stations within the Soviet Union are important [more] for improving identification capabilities than for further reduction of the already low detection threshold.” The report cited the recording of high-frequency seismic waves by the three NRDC stations in Kazakhstan, but OTA had few other data on capabilities for monitoring within either Russia or China.
The OTA report was published just prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union. Many earthquakes once in the former Soviet Union, especially those in areas of thick salt deposits, are now located in independent countries. This considerably reduces the number of small earthquakes and potential nuclear explosions by the Russian Republic that must be monitored.
In a section titled “How Low Can We Go,” the 1988 OTA report discussed various Soviet yield levels and how well they could be monitored.
Level 1—yields above 10 kt. Nuclear tests can be monitored with high confidence with external seismic networks and other national technical means [satellite images and other intelligence]. No method of evading a seismic network is credible.
Level 2—below 10 kt but above 1–2 kt. Demonstrating a capability to defeat credible evasion attempts would require seismic stations throughout the Soviet Union (especially in areas of thick salt deposits) and provisions in the treaty to handle chemical explosions. Expert opinion about the lowest yields that could reliably be monitored ranges from 1 kt to 10 kt.
Level 3—below 1–2 kt. The burden on the monitoring country would be much greater.
Level 4—comprehensive test ban. There will always be some threshold below which seismic monitoring cannot be accomplished with high certainty. The OTA report states that a comprehensive test ban treaty could still be considered adequately verifiable if it were determined that the advantages of such a treaty would outweigh the significance of any undetected testing below the monitoring threshold.
Experts from the weapons labs and the Department of Defense (DoD) were involved in the four panels convened by OTA from 1986 to 1988. It was not clear until the last minute if the DoD would permit Robert Zavadil, chief of the Evaluation Division, Directorate of Geophysics of AFTAC, to brief the OTA panels at the Secret level about classified network capabilities, identification, and yield determination. He briefed the OTA panels in an informative and straightforward way. Nevertheless, some officials of DoD (not Zavadil) criticized the OTA report soon after it was published in 1988.
OTA went on to conduct a separate study, The Containment of Underground Nuclear Explosions, which was published in 1989. Gregory van der Vink was the project director. I discuss containment, which involves assuring that radioactive products are not released into the atmosphere, in later chapters on international monitoring and evasion.
LETTER FROM BACHE TO ME ABOUT HIGH-FREQUENCY SEISMIC MONITORING
The American Geophysical Union asked me to write a six-page review on nuclear testing for the U.S. National Report to the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, which is published every four years. My paper “Underground Nuclear Explosions: Verifying Limits on Underground Testing, Yield Estimates, and Public Policy” was printed in Reviews of Geophysics in 1987.
Bache soon wrote to me (figure 11.2) concerning my statement that the paper “An Evaluation of Seismic Decoupling and Underground Nuclear Test Monitoring Using High-Frequency Seismic Data,” by Evernden, Archambeau, and Edward Cranswick of the U.S. Geological Survey, probably was the outstanding article of the last four years published by U.S. scientists on test ban verification. I had made a general statement about the potential use of high-frequency seismic waves at regional distances in the Soviet Union. The paper by Evernden and colleagues represented an effort to move forward on the monitoring of explosions smaller than one to two kilotons, especially ones that might be detonated in an evasive manner. I think it was the start of an important process, not the end. The monitoring of high-frequency waves by seismic stations at distances up to 1250 miles (2000 km) within the Russian Republic, China, and surrounding countries became one of the outstanding contributions to nuclear verification in the following twenty-five years.
FIGURE 11.2
Letter from Thomas Bache, 1987.
In his letter, Bache asked me if I had read their paper. Of course I had; undoubtedly he was being facetious. He went on to say that “this article goes beyond any reasonable bounds—and, of course, many of the seismological ‘conclusions’ are absurd.” Then he stated, “Rather, I assume it reflects your opinion that the article is politically correct. That is a sort of a ‘red guard’ approach to science, isn’t it?…But you can see that it goes beyond bounds I am willing to tolerate quietly.” In a note attached to his letter, Bache wrote, “Some things are beyond endurance….”
On July 8, 1987, Bache also wrote to van der Vink, the head of the OTA study on seismic verification, complaining about Evernden’s “Post-Meeting Calculations and Discussions.” He stated, “From a technical perspective it seems that the Evernden & Archambeau work should collapse on its own weight, but I realize that it is difficult to discuss anything in this subject from a purely technical perspective.” Bache took his opinions and political views as correct and those of others, like me, as tainted. I did not reply to him.
DARPA had previously set up a Center for Seismic Studies in Arlington, Virginia, which operated under contract to the consulting firm S-CUBED and employed several excellent seismologists. When Romney retired from DARPA, he moved to SAIC. The contract for operating the Center for Seismic Studies was soon up for renewal. Two consulting firms—S-CUBED and SAIC—bid to run it. Even though S-CUBED had much greater seismological expertise, the contract was awarded to SAIC. As far as I know, S-CUBED did not complain officially to DoD; complaining likely would have jeopardized their obtaining future DoD contracts. An irony is that S-CUBED was purchased by Maxwell Industries, which later did away with S-CUBED on the grounds that it was not making enough money. Scientists at S-CUBED then moved to SAIC.
CONGRESSIONAL ACTIONS TO HALT NUCLEAR TESTING
Congress moved on several fronts toward a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). In February 1986, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a joint resolution by a vote of 268 to 148 requesting that President Reagan resume negotiations with the USSR toward a Comprehensive Treaty and submit the Threshold and Peaceful Explosions treaties to the Senate for ratification. A similar proposal had passed the Senate by a vote of 77 to 22 in 1985. The House passed an amendment in August 1986 deleting funds for all U.S. tests in 1987 larger than one kiloton provided the Soviet Union would do likewise and would also accept a U.S. monitoring program. The House dropped its amendment prior to the Reykjavik summit when the Reagan administration agreed to submit the Threshold and Peaceful Nuclear Explosions treaties to the Senate for its advice and consent. The House voted again in May 1987 on a similar amendment. That November formal negotiations opened in Geneva on the limitation of nuclear tests.
In September 1992, the U.S. Senate, by an overwhelming vote, passed the Hatfield-Exon-Mitchell Nuclear Moratorium Amendment, which had three key elements. One set a deadline for the United States to stop testing. The second required a major scientific effort to ensure that we could maintain confidence in our nuclear weapons, absent actual nuclear tests. The third mandated that the next administration negotiate a CTBT no later than September 1996.
Just before the presidential election of 1992, President George H. W. Bush reluctantly decided not to veto a funding bill that included the moratorium amendment. It phased out U.S. nuclear testing except for fifteen tests, at most, if they were needed to deal with safety or reliability issues. Hazel O’Leary, President Clinton’s energy secretary, stated that no tests of those types were required.
Nevertheless, some members of Congress and several of the directors of the nuclear weapons labs in the United States continued to argue that nuclear testing was needed to ensure that our existing stockpile of weapons would work if testing ceased, to develop new and safer weapons, to ensure that other countries would not cheat under a full test ban treaty, and to retain expertise in designing and maintaining nuclear weapons.
STRONG VIEWS BY KIDDER ABOUT QUESTIONABLE NEEDS FOR NUCLEAR TESTS
Ray Kidder, one of the most senior nuclear scientists at Livermore, argued that few U.S. nuclear explosions had been conducted to test the reliability of existing weapons a number of years after each weapon had been tested several times prior to its deployment. Later tests for reliability were so few that they were not a meaningful statistical measure of reliability. He said that most explosions, in fact, had been detonated to test new nuclear designs. A few were for so-called effects tests, which subjected electronic equipment, satellites, and delivery systems to the blast, heat, and radiation from a nearby nuclear explosion. Kidder clashed with several officials in the weapons labs over the need to continue testing existing weapons to confirm their reliability. Congress asked him to put his views in writing, which he did.
In 1985 Kidder published the percentage of U.S. nuclear weapons tests of various yields from 1980 through 1984. He argued that peaks in the number of tests near 5 to 20 and 150 kilotons could be taken as a measure of their perceived high military value. During that period, the military significance of tests below one kiloton was perceived to be low as judged from their small percentage (see Figure 12.6). The large numbers of tests near 150 kilotons resulted in part from testing strategic weapons at reduced yield that otherwise would have exceeded the limit of the Threshold Treaty. That limit of 150 kilotons was not important to the physics of weapons. Yields between 5 and 20 kilotons, however, were very important because they involved testing the primary (fission) triggers for thermonuclear weapons and testing at partial yield the ignition of the fusion (secondary) stage of weapons.
MY PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT WITH TEST BAN ISSUES
I was busy in the 1980s and 1990s on test ban issues and other aspects of the control of nuclear weapons. I co-taught a course on the nuclear arms race for undergraduates in 1984 and 1985. While it drew only twenty-five students per year, it attracted very bright undergrads from Columbia College and graduate students from the School of International and Public Affairs. The latter wanted more technical background on the arms race. I was a member of the Columbia University Seminar on Arms Control (for faculty and invited guests) from 1984 to 1996. In 1987 Paul Richards and I co-taught a Seismology Seminar course at Lamont on the “Verification of Nuclear Test Ban Issues.”
From 1988 through 2000, I spoke in public on several occasions about the verification of nuclear testing. I participated in the Belmont Conference on Nuclear Test Ban Policy in 1988 and was an invited speaker at the Princeton Symposium on Non-Proliferation and Nuclear Testing in 1992. On May 31, 2000, I co-organized a second symposium for the American Geophysical Union on the Verification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. I was a member of the board of directors of the Federation of American Scientists from 2000 to 2003 and was on their test ban panel.
INTERNATIONAL SEISMIC MONITORING EFFORTS
Starting in 1976, much happened at the international level as well as in the U.S. government on developing improved and more sophisticated systems of seismic monitoring of nuclear tests, including a rapid international exchange of data. In their 2009 book Nuclear Test Ban: Converting Political Visions to Reality, Ola Dahlman of the National Defense Research Institute of Sweden and his colleagues describe more about those international developments from 1976 until the signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996.
In 1976 the UN’s Conference of the Committee on Disarmament (CCD) established “an Ad-Hoc Group of Government-appointed experts to consider and report on international co-operative measures to detect and identify seismic events, so as to facilitate the monitoring of a comprehensive test ban.” It was referred to as the Group of Scientific Experts (GSE) and reported to the CCD and its successor, the Conference on Disarmament (CD).
Experts from many countries spent huge amounts of time each year on these endeavors, indicative of the importance most countries attached to halting testing and the development of more sophisticated nuclear weapons. China, France, Norway, Russia, Sweden, the UK, and the United States had long-standing programs in nuclear verification. Those governments picked some of their own scientists to represent them on the GSE. The U.S. representatives, who were appointed by the government, tended to be more conservative than many of us in the U.S. arms control community. Seismologists from small countries became involved in the technical details of monitoring through their participation in the GSE.
The GSE worked to design a global seismic verification system with rapid exchange of data, initially using the telecommunications system of the World Meteorological Organization. Fortunately, seismology and meteorology had long traditions of exchanging data globally on earthquakes and weather. The GSE proposed to collect information at special international data centers.
The first large-scale test, called GSETT-1 (Group of Scientific Experts Technical Test-1), took place for two months in late 1984. It involved the daily exchange from seventy-five stations in thirty-seven countries of very basic seismic parameters, such as the arrival times and amplitudes of P waves from earthquakes and explosions. Prototype International Data Centers, which prepared preliminary lists and final bulletins of seismic events, operated in Moscow, Stockholm, and Arlington, Virginia (near Washington, DC). The DARPA Center for Seismic Studies, which was one of these, was also the U.S. prototype National Data Center. Ann Kerr of DARPA was the U.S. coordinator for GSETT-1.
The GSE held a technical workshop on the design and function of an international data center in October 1987. The international group concluded after GSETT-1 that a future global system should involve seismic data that were recorded digitally. It conducted the second large test called GSETT-2 in 1991. By then many of the stations recorded data digitally, and more seismic array stations were operating.
The group conducted its third and last large-scale test, GSETT-3, starting full-scale operation on January 1, 1995, with data from sixty countries. It served as a prototype for the verification system adopted during the negotiations for the CTBT from 1995 to 1996. A single international data center located in Arlington, Virginia, received seismic waveform data in digital form. Waveforms contain much greater information than the exchange of simple parameters like the arrival times of P waves during GSETT-1. The center employed a staff of about fifty people from various countries.
The GSETT tests continued through the buildup of facilities for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) in Vienna, Austria. The center in Arlington closed its prototype International Data Center (IDC) function in March 2000. Data from stations making up what was called the International Monitoring System (IMS), a part of the CTBTO, shifted from Arlington to Vienna. The computers and data handling in Vienna were similar to those in Arlington.
The GSE and its tests fostered international cooperation on tangible tasks. It also provided aid to developing countries in establishing modern seismic stations and arrays, training personnel and familiarizing diplomats and scientists with knowledge about nuclear verification. It showed that an international monitoring system and data transmission were realities and not abstract concepts. DARPA provided substantial funds for the operation of the data center in Arlington and for much more powerful computers and programs to analyze seismic waveforms.
INITIATIVES AND FUNDING BY DARPA
DARPA formed a Research and Systems Development Initiative, which they announced to industry in November 1987. In addition to the operation of the prototype national and international data centers, the initiative proposed a next generation capability for integrated data processing, high-speed global communication (mainly by satellite), authentication of data, long-term storage of what were then vast amounts of data, and a research test bed for examining new concepts and for signal analyses. The operation of a state-of-the-art center in Vienna, rapid communication of data, processing of full waveform data, and rapid distribution of data and results to national data centers would not have occurred so quickly without DARPA’s initiatives and funding.
In contrast, the U.S. national center was a stand-alone facility. Its database was available only to designated users in the United States. The national center included work on yield estimation, which the international center did not, and analysis of classified U.S. data.
DARPA’s method of operation was to contract the development of seismic instruments, arrays, satellites, communications, data analysis, and research to private industry and occasionally to universities. It employed relatively few people itself in nuclear monitoring. In contrast, the weapons labs did many similar tasks in-house with their own personnel. Alewine was the director of DARPA’s Nuclear Monitoring Office from 1980 to 1996, when he became deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear treaties and his office was transferred to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He is now retired.
DARPA officials stymied consideration of a full test ban by the U.S. government for decades on the grounds that it could not be verified and argued for twenty years that the Soviet Union was testing weapons with yields larger than those permitted under the TTBT. By 1987, however, officials in DARPA became very involved in helping to create modern instrumentation and data transmission facilities for monitoring a full test ban. That decision was likely driven by four factors: (1) increased political pressures in the United States and internationally for a CTBT, (2) recognition that DARPA could no longer continue arguing about the yields of Russian explosions, (3) acknowledgment that Russia was testing within the 150-kiloton limit of the Threshold Treaty, and (4) wanting to show that DARPA could draw upon and use its long technical and scientific expertise in defense issues, as it had done it developing the Internet.
DARPA’s influence on U.S. policies about nuclear monitoring and a CTBT was profound. In my estimation, much of their long influence was negative and based on poor science. Officials well below the level of the secretary of defense generated most of DARPA’s policies about testing, which were then passed up to higher authorities. The U.S. Defense Department had employed “red teams” to criticize some proposed policies, but to my knowledge it did not do so for test ban issues. More independent analysis within the executive branch of the U.S. government and stronger congressional oversight might have helped to resolve test ban controversies much sooner. The 1988 report Seismic Verification of Nuclear Testing Treaties by Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment helped to constrain test ban issues technically, but it occurred more than thirty-five years after the first hydrogen bomb explosion.
