Doomsday machine.

• Position: Total nuclear test ban eschewed by President Clinton - Editorial

The Doomsday Machine in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove was the metaphor for the nuclear arms race. Nobody--well, hardly anybody--wanted the device to go off and destroy the planet, but the mad momentum of superpower rivalry had its own irresistible logic. Ultimately, all fail-safe systems failed, and the movie ended to the sentimental strains of We'll Meet Again as the horizon filled with beautiful mushroom clouds.

The dread that lurked behind such gallows humor--the constant fear that the world might be consumed in a final nuclear Armageddon--was supposed to evaporate with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Suddenly, there was no "evil empire," armed with a nuclear arsenal second only to America's own, to threaten our national security. The esteemed Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved back the minute hand on its closely watched Doomsday Clock, and people everywhere breathed a deep sigh of relief. Nuclear disarmament organizations turned their attention to more mundane missions. If world peace wasn't at hand (and it obviously wasn't), at least the threat of nuclear war had been substantially diminished and perhaps even eliminated altogether.

Last fall, even the Congress of the United States moved, in its own timid and half-hearted way, to come to terms with the new realities. Following the lead of Russia and France, it agreed to a nine-month moratorium on nuclear testing. Though Congress stipulated that testing could resume, temporarily, after July 1 of this year, there was reason to hope that four of the major nuclear powers (Britain tests its bombs at the U.S. site in Nevada) might never again explode a nuclear weapon. This would give them strong leverage to curb testing by China, which is not a signatory to any testban treaty, and would endow the self-acknowledged nuclear-weapons states with the moral authority to discourage other nations from acquiring their own nuclear arsenals.

Opponents of the nuclear arms race have long believed that a total, comprehensive ban on testing is the key to ending the production and accumulation of these abominable weapons of mass annihilation. The Russians have sought such a ban for decades. They would have agreed to it in the early 1960s, when John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev negotiated the treaty barring atmospheric testing, but the United States insisted that it had to keep testing underground. When he headed the Soviet government, Mikhail Gorbachev twice instituted...