With an ear to the Soviet soil.

With an ear to the Soviet soil

Several dozen technical experts from the United States will get their first closeup chance to monitor a Soviet nuclear blast later this month. Officials from the Energy, State and Defense Departments will be on hand at the Kazakh testing site to demonstrate the CORRTEX system, a hydrodynamic technique that measures the strength of an explosion by means of an electric cable buried near the blast. These tests are part of a series of Joint Verification. Experiments aimed at removing obstacles to unratified treaties from the 1970s that limit the size of nuclear tests to the equivalent of 150 kilotons of TNT. In August, Soviet officials visited the U.S. test site in Nevada to measure a nuclear explosion using their own hydrodynamic system as well as seismic monitoring equipment (SN: 1/30/88, p.71).

Also observing the Sept. 14 Soviet blast will be several private U.S. scientists at three seismic stations, each located 100 miles away from the Kazakh test site. These scientists are working in conjunction with the Washington, D.C.-based Natural Resources Defense Council--a private environmental group that has negotiated its own monitoring agreement with the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Through this project, the council hopes to demonstrate that seismic equipment can reliably verify a total or near-complete ban on testing (SN:4/16/88, p.245).