Silencing the Bomb: One Scientist’s Quest to Halt Nuclear Testing

The obscure art of detecting underground nuclear explosions animates tussles over nuclear-weapons treaties in this arcane memoir. Sykes, professor emeritus of Earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, recounts his decades-long work as a U.S. government adviser on nuclear agreements from the 1974 Threshold Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (abolishing underground tests with yields over 150 kilotons), which he helped negotiate in Moscow, to the latter-day campaign to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) abolishing all nuclear tests. Most of the book covers debates over seismology’s ability to detect explosions, distinguish them from earthquakes, and gauge their yields. The dovish Sykes maintains that all but the smallest (less than one kiloton)—and therefore least useful—tests can be identified, while hawks claimed that the Soviets and others could use geology or evasion techniques to disguise much more powerful tests. Sykes offers occasional glints of passion in his account (“outrageously deceptive” is his verdict on one hawkish seismologist), but it’s mainly a clear, bone-dry rehash of verification science, replete with geological maps, squiggly seismic graphs, and details of myriad seismic waves. Larger questions—would a CTBT have stopped North Korea?—are treated too sketchily in Sykes’s narrowly technical take on a vast and vexing issue. Illus. (Dec.)