Statement by the President on Nuclear Test Inspection.

I STATED on March 2, the United States earnestly desires a test ban treaty with effective controls² The essential element upon which the United States has insisted, however, is that there be an objective international system for ensuring that the ban against testing is being complied with. This means that there should be an international organization for operating seismic stations and for verifying that seismic events have been detected, located and are appropriate for inspection. Most important of all, the organization should have the power to conduct a limited number of on-site inspections to verify whether a seismic event was an earthquake or an explosion. Without these inspections there can be no confidence in any system of detection, because it will not tell us whether an underground event is a nuclear explosion or an earthquake.

² See Item 71.

On this subject one must distinguish carefully between detection and identification. We can detect and locate significant underground events by seismic means, but of course the same seismic means detect many shallow earthquakes. The problem is to identify a particular detected event as an explosion or as an earthquake. Seismic means alone simply will not do the job. This matter has been reviewed again and again by the best technical minds of the United States and Great Britain, and the answer is always the same. And no serious technical evidence to the contrary has been produced by any other country. A few of the larger earthquakes can be identified as such, and very large underground tests outside of seismic areas can be identified with a high measure of probability; this was the case with the Soviet test on February 2nd. But the seismic records from the large majority of the events are such that they could be from either earthquakes or explosions. In other words they cannot be identified.

The only way we know to perform this identification is to have a scientific team go to the site of the event and examine it. By studying the rocks and the radioactivity and by drilling holes one can find out with satisfactory certainty whether it was an explosion. This is the on-site inspection which we insist is the only way to verify the character of an underground event.

Now the Soviet Government objects to our April 1961 draft treaty on the test ban quite simply because it provides for international inspection in Soviet territory. It objects specifically to having any control posts for test detection in their territory. This is a sharp and inexplicable regression from the Soviet position of even a year ago. In addition, the Soviets object to any on-site inspections whatsoever.

In earlier years the Soviet Government, at all levels, clearly accepted both the idea of control posts and the basic principle of on-site inspection. Now it is claimed that such control posts and inspections are useful only for purposes of espionage.

As Mr. Rusk pointed out in Geneva last Friday, such fears of espionage from the proposed system of control and inspection are wholly unjustified.

Members of fixed control posts would be under Soviet supervision at all times and could go nowhere at all without Soviet approval. Members of inspection teams would be under constant Soviet observation and would be limited to the execution of technical tasks in an area which, at the very most, would never exceed more than one part in 2000 of Soviet territory in any year--and most of this work would be done in the earthquake areas of the USSR, far from centers of military or industrial activity. Finally, occasional air sampling teams would fly in Soviet planes under fully controlled conditions. I submit that no one interested in espionage would go at it by the means of control and inspection worked out in this treaty after years of effort involving Soviet scientists as well as our own.

Nevertheless the Soviet Government is now absolutely opposed not only to this particular system of inspection, carefully supervised and narrowly limited as it is, but to any inspection at all. This position has been made very clear both publicly and privately-most plainly by Mr. Gromyko on the United Nations radio on March 27.

We know of no way to verify underground nuclear explosions without inspections, and we cannot at this time enter into a treaty without the ability and right of international verification. Hence we seem to be at a real impasse. Nevertheless, I want to repeat with emphasis our desire for an effective treaty and our readiness to conclude such a treaty at the earliest possible time.