Safety Belt

Although the National Committee on Radiation Protection and Fallouts has decided that the human body can stand twice as much Strontium 90 as they previously thought possible, it is nice to know that someone is still thinking about ending nuclear bomb tests. President Eisenhower's note to Khrushchev this week asking for a stoppage of tests in the atmophere thirty miles above the earth--permitting underground tests until a satisfactory inspection system can be set up--suggests that the Administration is more than casually interested in the success of talks on this subject.

It is certainly in the best interests of both the United States and the Soviet Union to arrange a test ban of this nature and enforce it--not only here and in Russia, but in those countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain which will soon be developing nuclear weapons and wanting to test them. The danger, it would seem, lies in the possibility that if this compromise measure were adopted it would be that much harder to do away with nuclear testing altogether. It is to be hoped that Eisenhower's proposal will prove not only a much-needed first step, but a prologue to total stoppage of tests.