Word: underground
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...life Lydia wanted to dance. Even before her family moved to France from Poland when she was seven, she was already attending the Warsaw Opera Ballet school. Ten years later when the Nazis overran France, Lydia's father Wladimir became a Resistance chief for the French underground's F-1 foreign-born unit, and the 17-year-old Lydia became an invaluable spy. Each day she played the role of an ingenuous, admiring schoolgirl watching Nazi troop movements; at night, from the Lipskis' Pigalle apartment, "Cipine" radioed her findings to London. Handy with pen and brush, Lydia...
Last week another small step was taken. It was not even a difficult one, yet neither was it a totally insignificant one. By agreeing to a conference of experts on the problem of detecting underground explosions the Russians gave definite indication that they do desire a treaty permanently halting nuclear tests...
Knowledge about the identification of underground tests and of those beyond the atmosphere, however, was sketchy. There was, at that time, only the one Mt. Rainier underground explosion to serve as an example. The only observable products of an underground explosion are shock waves, waves which are very similar to those of an earthquake. The experts concluded that a control system of 180 stations equipped with seismographs would be adequate to detect with "good probability" explosions of five kilotons or more. Such a system could also spot tests of smaller extent but with less reliability...
Intransience developed at the beginning of this year however, when the White House declared that data from the Hardtack II series of four underground nuclear explosions the previous October invalidated the findings of the Geneva experts. The main result showed that primary waves were weaker than expected and therefore were harder to distinguish from smaller quakes. The Russians steadily refused to study this data until last week, claiming it was merely an attempt by the U.S. to sabotage the conference. Certainly the way and manner in which this information was released by the U.S. appeared to be deliberately misleading...
...data may require modifications in the control system, but it will not result in the exclusion of underground tests from the agreement. The efficiency could be restored by several simple measures: seismographs located at the bottom of deep holes to minimize background noise, unmanned seismographs every 100 miles in certain areas rather than every 600 as formerly suggested, or the "inelegant method" of increasing the number of seismographs at each station from...