When Scientific Evidence is not Welcome

This chapter concerns interactions in the 1980s between the technical community and the Reagan administration. Reports to the US Congress from the executive branch of government had stated that the Soviet Union was “in likely violation” of the bilateral Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT), which had been negotiated between the USA and the USSR in 1974 and which imposed a limit of 150 kilotons for the explosive yield of any underground nuclear weapons test conducted by these two countries after March 1976.