for a two-to-three-year testing moratorium. The moratorium would be overseen by an international commission reliant on national monitoring stations, but, importantly, would involve no on-the-ground inspections. Eisenhower initially saw the deal as favorable, but eventually came to see otherwise. In particular, Strauss and Teller, as well as Ernest Lawrence and Mark Muir Mills, protested the offer. At a meeting with Eisenhower in the White House, the group argued that testing was necessary for the US to eventually develop bombs that produced no fallout ("clean bombs"). The group repeated the oft-cited fact, which was supported by Freeman Dyson, that the Soviet Union could conduct secret nuclear tests. In 1958, at the request of Igor Kurchatov, Soviet nuclear physicist and weapons designer Andrei Sakharov published a pair of widely circulated academic papers challenging the claim of Teller and others that a clean, fallout-free nuclear bomb could be developed, due to the formation of carbon-14 when nuclear devices are detonated in the air. A one-megaton clean bomb, Sakharov estimated, would cause 6,600 deaths over 8,000 years, figures derived largely from estimates on the quantity of carbon-14 generated from atmospheric nitrogen and the contemporary risk models at the time, along with the assumption that the world population is "thirty billion persons" in a few thousand years. In 1961, Sakharov was part of the design team for a 50 megaton "clean bomb", which has become known as the Tsar Bomba, detonated over the island of Novaya Zemlya. In the spring of 1957, the US National Security Council had explored including a one-year test moratorium and a "cut-off" of fissionable-material production in a "partial" disarmament plan. The British government, then led by Macmillan, had yet to fully endorse a test ban. Accordingly, it pushed the US to demand that the production cut-off be closely timed with the testing moratorium, betting that the Soviet Union would reject this. London also encouraged the US to delay its disarmament plan, in part by moving the start of the moratorium back to November 1958. At the same time, Macmillan linked British support for a test ban to a revision of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (McMahon Act), which prohibited sharing of nuclear information with foreign governments. Eisenhower, eager to mend ties with Britain following the Suez Crisis of 1956, was receptive to Macmillan's conditions, but the AEC and the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy were firmly opposed. It