Twenty-four Harvard faculty members signed a telegram sent to Premier Khrushchev hours before Monday's enormous nuclear explosion calling upon him to "stop the current series of Soviet nuclear bomb tests, and in particular, to cancel the 50 megaton hydrogen bomb test."

Among those signing were professors Serge Chermayeff, Rupert Emerson, Donald Fleming, Mark De Wolfe Howe, H. Stuart Hughes, Howard Mumford Jones, and Pitirim A. Sorokin.

Altogether 78 prominent Bostonians, many of them professors at M.I.T., Brandeis, and Boston University, challenged Khrushchev's repeated assertions that the Soviet Union is dedicated to peace and disarmament. "We are convinced that any nation that puts its own military security above the interests of humanity as a whole is making a concious choice that will inevitably lead to a thermonuclear war," they stated.

The sharply worded telegram pointed to the large numbers of still-births, cases of leukemia, bone cancer, and mutations that will result from continuing bomb tests, and reminded Khrushchev that the disastrous effects of the bomb will be shared by the Russian people at an "enormous cost."

Affirming that they were opposed to nuclear tests by any country, including the United States, for any reason, the signers of the cable indicated that national security was an inadequate justification for what Jack Bollens, Peace Education Secretary of the New England American Friends Service Committee, called organization for mass murder.

Bollen urged the United States not to respond to the Soviet example and thus continue a vicious cycle of violence which would lead ultimately to thermonuclear war.

A copy of the massage was sent to the United Nations.