The military’s need to distinguish earthquakes from nuclear tests brought seismology “kicking and screaming” into the twentieth century, according to Frosch. At one point, he said, he funded almost “every seismologist in the world, except for two Jesuits at Fordham University” who refused to take money from the Pentagon. Frosch’s ambitious idea for advancing both seismology and nuclear test detection was to build a novel system that would identify the vast majority of Soviet earthquakes, resolving once and for all the debate over distinguishing earth tremors from nuclear tests.
