The Limited Test Ban Treaty

Abstract

The Limited Test Ban Treaty came at the end of nearly five years of frustrated efforts to obtain a comprehensive test ban. Negotiations toward that end had begun in October 1958. At the same time a voluntary, informal moratorium on tests was initiated. The negotiations soon stalled over the Soviet Union’s resistance to internationally supervised inspections on its soil. This problem mostly concerned underground tests, which were difficult to distinguish from earthquakes with monitoring equipment located far from the test site. To overcome the problem, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed in April 1959 a phased ban that was to be limited at first to atmospheric tests conducted below an altitude of 50 kilometers. Such tests were thought to be easily verifiable. The Soviets rejected this idea and continued to insist that a complete test ban need not require numerous inspections. The two sides nevertheless appeared to be nearing agreement on a treaty to ban all but relatively small underground tests when, in May 1960, an U.S. U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over Soviet territory. The bitter recriminations against Eisenhower that followed made it impossible to progress further toward a test ban while he was president.1KeywordsNuclear WeaponForeign RelationSenate CommitteeCongressional RecordEdward TellerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.