Political seismology or seismological politics: natural resources Defense Council-USSR experiments in underground nuclear test verification

• Autores: Anna Amramina
• Localización: Seismological Research Letters, ISSN 0895-0695, ISSN-e 1938-2057, Vol. 86, Nº. 2 (A), 2015, págs. 451-459
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In the 1980s, the Institute of Physics of the Earth (IPE) in Moscow was challenged by the Soviet Academy of Sciences with an ambitious task to become the Soviet representative in an unprecedented joint project with the United States of America in a defense-sensitive area. In 1986-1988, a series of experiments was held on two major nuclear test sites, in Nevada in the United States and Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, to prove the scientific possibility of verifying the exact location and yield of underground nuclear explosions. The story hardly sounds sensational; however, there are reasons to believe that it stands out in the chain of events that led to the current Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). This paper marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the exceptional example of seismologists acting on the forefront of global politics.

    The majority of available materials on this project exist only as technical reports, protocols, and presentations. The course of events was covered extensively from the U.S. point of view by an American historian of science, K.-H. Barth. His paper, as well as this article, argues that there are situations in which the critical mass of scientific knowledge can overpower the political pressure on the international scale (Barth, 2006); moreover, in times of a global threat, scientists can accumulate enough influence to become a strategic force for change. This paper attempts a glimpse of the international seismological research in nuclear arms control at the end of the Cold War through the lens of joint Soviet-American experiments in underground nuclear testing verifications from the historical rather than the geophysical point of view, and it is aimed at honoring the experiments as one of the independent research initiatives put forward by scientists that influenced the decisions of top government officials.