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On 17 October 1961, at the opening of the 22nd Communist Party Congress in Moscow, Khrushchev made the following announcement: ‘The tests of new nuclear weapons are proceeding successfully. We shall probably complete these by 30 or 31 October by a blast of fifty megatons.’ At the same time, Khrushchev stated that he was not going to adhere to his previously proclaimed deadline of 31 December for signing a separate peace treaty with East Germany, and he reiterated his peaceful coexistence stand. He violently attacked those who persist in thinking along the lines of Stalin, the author of so many crimes, whose policy had led Soviet Russia to a dead-end, and would eventually have led it into war. In his attempt to debase the former Communist god, he denounced the cult of personality. Finally he declared, considering it as a great victory, that the Soviet harvest that year was second only to the record crop of 1958, in spite of rather unfavourable climatic conditions; he added that in 1980 the Soviet Union would have the highest standard of living of any nation in the world.
As if the undercurrent of a myth was moving through Khrushchev's words—a myth which continues to be relived in America on Halloween—the American reaction to Khrushchev's speech, as faithfully reported by the Press, was mainly expressed in terms of Halloween and the myth attached to it. ‘K: We’ll fire 50 megatons on Halloween’—such was the front-page big headline of the New York Herald Tribune on 18 October 1961. (It should be noted that Khrushchev had not said that the super-bomb explosion would take place on 31 October. In fact, it was to be exploded on 30 October.) ‘Halloween horror’ was the title of an article on the 50-megaton bomb in the New York Herald Tribune of 27 October 1961, by Earl Ubell, science editor. On 24 October, the New York World Telegram published an article by Richard Starnes entitled ‘Who's afraid of witches?’. In this article, dealing with the super-bomb, Richard Starnes compar