Nature during the cold war

The editorials that David ‘Dai’ Davies wrote about nuclear weapons and nuclear power during the 1970s bring home how little progress has been made in the debate about nuclear power and in efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons and achieve nuclear disarmament. Depressingly, almost all his editorials about nuclear issues are as relevant today as they were 30 years ago.

When Davies was editing Nature, the cold war between East and West was at a high point, and there was widespread fear that all-out nuclear war would break out, destroying civilization in the Northern Hemisphere. In 1973, the United States had about 29,000 operational nuclear weapons deployed and the Soviet Union about 16,000. The other nuclear powers — China, France and the United Kingdom — had comparatively small nuclear arsenals, containing about 150, 120 and 275 nuclear weapons, respectively. During Davies’s six years as editor, the global nuclear arsenal increased significantly.

Nature published many editorials, news and articles about the nuclear arms race. In an editorial on 12 October 1973, Davies predicted that India would be the sixth country to test a nuclear weapon. He was right: the test, called ‘Smiling Buddha’, was conducted underground on 18 May 1974 at the Indian Army Pokhran test range in the Thar Desert, Rajasthan. India made two more nuclear tests in 1998, and now deploys about 50 nuclear weapons.

Before coming to Nature, Davies was a geophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory in the United States and worked on the seismic detection of underground nuclear tests. He was, therefore, professionally interested in nuclear-weapon tests. He was a strong advocate of a comprehensive test-ban treaty. The 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty banned nuclear tests in the atmosphere, but France continued such testing until 1974 and China’s last atmospheric test was in 1980.

On 28 June 1974, Davies denounced the British government for secretly conducting nuclear tests at the American test site in Nevada, trying to have them labelled as American tests — “nuclear hypocrisy” he called it. The real significance of these events, he wrote, “is that they show how inextricably linked are British and American nuclear interests. It is just not possible for one country to detonate explosions at another country’s facility without there being such a high degree of liaison that one is bound to conclude that the two countries act as one in nuclear matters.” The two countries still act as one in nuclear-weapons issues, as the British decision in 2007 to renew Trident, with American assistance, shows.

As Davies pointed out on 21 August 1975, the “Partial Test Ban Treaty was even used as a justification for the United States to increase its nuclear research and development activities.” He also noted that the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) were “a positive encouragement to qualitative improvement of missiles”. He explained that pressure from the military-industrial complex made the negotiation of any arms-control agreement difficult, to say the least. Even the most eminent scientists of the day were unable to persuade the political leaders of the great powers to control the nuclear arms race. “The scientist’s role as an input of information is a pretty minor one,” Davies wrote,” and at least on the nuclear field is likely to remain so.” Subsequent history has proved how right he was.

After the Partial Test Ban Treaty came into force, appeals were made for further measures to limit the size and number of nuclear-weapons tests until a comprehensive ban was negotiated. On 3 July 1974, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT) that prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons with explosive yields greater than 150 kilotonnes. There was considerable opposition to the treaty, particularly by the nuclear-weapons laboratories, which were very enthusiastic about nuclear testing, and the treaty did not enter into force until 11 December 1990.

Davies was highly critical of virtually all aspects of the TTBT. He pointed out (19 August 1976) that it was “cosy bilateralism” and that the threshold of 150 kilotonnes “was too high for sensible arms-control purposes” and that “the complications of geology made accurate seismic monitoring of the threshold difficult”. He asked (15 January 1976) if it were not time for Britain “to drop the convention of not speaking out against American initiatives, and to expose the treaty as a sham?” Britain still hardly ever speaks out against American initiatives.

Contributing to the debate on how to control the spread of nuclear weapons, Davies argued, in an editorial on 27 September 1979, that “it is difficult if not impossible for the international technological community to do much in the final analysis to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons — a nation with a strong political will to go nuclear can easily overcome such technical obstacles as are put up.” He was critical of the established nuclear powers for their failure to fulfil their commitment under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to work towards nuclear disarmament, and his arguments apply just as much today as they did then.

In September 1979 nuclear issues clashed with the freedom of the press. Two publications in America ran articles giving details of the construction of nuclear weapons, including H-bombs. The US government had tried to prevent publication on the grounds that this was secret information that would jeopardize national security. The publishers argued that all the information was already in the public domain. Davies took an unusual stand on this issue. He argued that the NPT requires that the United States will not in any way assist any non-nuclear-weapon state to acquire nuclear weapons, and “there are sincerely held views” that the documents would assist such states to do this. There are “no clear frontiers” in the field of nuclear secrets, he concluded, and the case for publishing the two documents “is not as strong as might seem at first sight” (18 October 1979).

In his last editorial (3 January 1980), Davies wrote about the UK government’s decision to build a new generation of reactors for nuclear power. He stressed “the need for critics of nuclear power to have complete access to information”, particularly about the design and safety of nuclear reactors. He also argued that funding for R&D into alternative sources of energy should be increased. This editorial could well be written today, as the United Kingdom seems about to decide to build a new generation of nuclear reactors.