Volume 28, Number 1 January 1999
ARTICLES
This year being the 100th anniversary of the founding of the
American Physical Society (the Centennial Meeting is being held
March 20-26 in Atlanta, GA), it is appropriate to celebrate the
past - and the future - of our publisher, the Forum on Physics
and Society. The lead article is a history of the Forum, written
just for this issue of P&S, by a long-time active member and
leader. It is followed by two pieces celebrating another
Centennial - the birth of one of the "pole stars" of the Forum.
Taken from presentations at the 1998, Spring APS meeting: "Leo
Szilard: A Symposium in Celebration of the 100th Anniversary of
His Birth" Columbus, Ohio April 18th 1998, one is by a
professional biographer, the other by a physicist-attorney Forum
member. Finally, we turn to the future with a piece by another
long-time Forum stalwart. (As usual, extensive footnotes have
been relegated to the Web versions of the articles.)
History of the Forum on Physics and
Societyt
David Hafemeister
Physics is a major component of many of society's difficult
issues: nuclear arms and their proliferation, energy shortages and
energy impacts, climate change and technical innovation. Because
physics principles underlie so many of these societal issues and
because physics offers a way to quantify some aspects of them,
members of the American Physical Society (APS) should be
encouraged to understand, analyze and debate them. That's
precisely why APS members formed the Forum on Physics and Society
(FPS). To those of us who have been long involved in FPS affairs,
it seems but yesterday that we attended the organizing meeting at
the 1972 APS San Francisco meeting. As the APS celebrates its
centennial by looking back over its first hundred years, it is
fitting that FPS also look back at its own accomplishments and
look ahead at the direction of its future activities.
The Early Years
The FPS was born in the tumultuous 1960's and 70's. The issues of
that era---the Vietnam War, the debate over the Anti-Ballistic
Missile system, the energy crisis, the start of the environmental
movement, the civil/human rights revolution---impelled that
generation of physicists to consider their professional
responsibilities. Many felt that the APS should have a division or
forum in which appropriate science and society issues would be
debated by informed participants before the APS membership. For a
review of these early days of the Forum, see the article by Mike
Casper in the May 1974 issue of Physics Today.
In its 27 years, FPS had too many excellent leaders to mention
each by name. But I would like to describe briefly the four
"founding fathers" pictured in Casper's article: Earl Callen
(American University), Martin Perl (SLAC) , Mike Casper (Carleton
College) and Brian Schwartz (then MIT, now CUNY). Callen was the
founding chair of the Forum. Although his particular interest was
international human rights of scientists, the major emphases of
Callen's term was building membership, developing a reputation
within the APS membership for quality and objectivity, and
establishing an effective working relationships with the APS
Council. Perl can only be described as a phenomenon. While acting
as the second chair of the Forum in 1973-74, he discovered the tau
meson, establishing the third family of leptons. (For this
discovery he was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in physics, shared
with Frederick Reines for the discovery of the electron's anti-
neutrino). And in his spare time Perl established and edited the
forum's newsletter, Physics and Society, from 1972-79 and
mobilized two Penn State Conferences on graduate physics education
(1974, 1977). Casper, the Forum's third chair, established the
two Forum Awards. Since then he has actively worked on arms
control and as a senior advisor to Senator Paul Wellstone.
Schwartz, the ninth chair of the FPS, served brilliantly and
creatively in the crucial job of organizing the first Forum panels
at APS meetings. While he might have been regarded as a "young
Turk" by the APS establishment in the 1970s, he has gone on to be
an APS insider, serving as the APS Education Officer and as APS
Associate Executive Secretary (1991-94). He is currently one of
those charged with planning the centennial activities.
The FPS was the first APS forum. Recognizing that the forum would
attract members from across disciplinary lines, the APS waived the
additional dues that are traditionally charge to members for
joining a division, such as the division of biophysics or the
division of condensed matter. Yet the APS still gives a certain
amount based on the forum membership to help defray such costs as
the printing and mailing of a newsletter. The success of that
idea has induced our Society to create other fora--first the forum
on history of physics (in 1980), then those on international
physics (1985), on education (1991) and on industrial and applied
physics (1995). Under the leadership of FPS Chair Tony Nero, a
council of the APS fora was established in order to coordinate and
enhance the work of all groups.
Winning respect
In its early days, the Forum was looked upon with suspicion by the
APS leadership, which was concerned that the Forum would move
issues too far and too fast. Because of this concern the APS
council appointed a senior APS member to attend the Forum
Executive Committee meetings to make sure that the Forum did not
embarrass the APS. Embarrassment never happened.
I recall two examples in which the Forum was very even handed.
The first concerns an amendment to the APS Constitution proposed
by Robert March, which would have required the APS to "shun
activities which contributed harmfully to the welfare of mankind."
It was very difficult to obtain a speaker against the March
amendment at an April 1972 FPS session. The first Forum Chair
Earl Callen stepped forward and filled that role (in which he
believed), which helped to defeat the March amendment. The second
example concerns the publication of a very political cartoon by
the editor of Physics and Society. That editor was warned not to
run any more such one-sided cartoons, but he ignored that warning.
Although in other respects, that person had been a good and
tireless editor, the Forum Executive Committee was forced to
adhere to the principle of objectivity and to fire him.
By now, the FPS has long since won the respect of the APS Council.
They no longer appoint a representative to the Forum Executive
Committee. The Forum is regarded as a source of manpower and
ideas for the APS to utilizein preparing its public positions. Of
the 24 chairs of the APS Panel on Public Affairs, four of these
have been chairs of the FPS.
The membership of the Forum is 4500, about 11% of the APS's 40,000
membership. The vast majority of Forum members are active physics
researchers and professors who are already overly committed to
their professional careers. These FPS members are not actively
publishing on the Forum issues of arms control, energy and
environment. However, these members do want the FPS to hold
debates, publish a viable Physics and Society newsletter, sponsor
occasional studies, offer short courses and give awards. As in
any division of the APS, the heavy lifting is carried out by the
1% of the membership who volunteer to be more heavily involved.
FPS Sessions
One of the most important activities of the FPS has been to
sponsor sessions at APS meetings on topical science-and-society
issues. Some FPS sessions have had more than 1,000 attendees.
Over the past 27 years, the FPS has offered 197 sessions for an
average of 7.3 +/- 1.7 per year. To provide more in-depth
background on certain issues, the FPS has offered short courses on
a number of topics. If one adds the 44 sessions from the two Penn
State conferences and the five short courses, the total number of
sessions rises to 241, for an average of 8.9 per year. The
approximate break-out by topic of the 197 APS sessions is as
follows: National security (51), science process (36), energy
(26), FPS awards (25), education (20), miscellaneous (16),
environment (14), contributed papers (9). Physics and Society
has published many of these symposia which we briefly list below.
The goal of Forum sessions is to present both sides of an issue in
a no-holds-barred debate. This is not always possible since there
are occasionally heretical views that don't make sense and confuse
the debate. For instance, at the spring 1986 APS meeting in
Washington, DC, the Forum held a session on the Strategic Defense
Initiative (SDI) and invited the representatives from the Reagan
administration and from the Congressional Office of Technology
Assessment, and some university professors. It never occurred to
us to invite Lyndon LaRouche's Fusion Energy Foundation. However,
since this group felt they should have been invited, they
attempted to shut down the session. As Forum Chair at the time,
it was my task to go head-to-head and threaten them with police
action if they wouldn't be quiet and allow the session to
continue. They did quiet down, and the details of lasers in
space were quantified and debated. It is difficult to define when
a position should be categorized as "unscientific;" luckily this
issue doesn't come up very often.
AAPT Booklets
The American Association of Physics Teachers has often shown an
interest in the FPS sessions and short courses. The AAPT
published three of the FPS sessions as informative booklets for
its members:
Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and the Arms
Race by Bernard Spinrad, John Holdren, Gene Rochlin and Herbert
York, January 1982, 48 pages.
Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear War by Philip Morrison, Hans
Bethe and Wolfgang Panofsky, April 1982, 35 pages.
Acid Rain: How Serious and What to Do by Myron Uman, George
Hidy, Michael Oppenheimer and Leonard Weiss, April 1985, 47
pages.
Physics and Society
This year 1999, P&S is in its 28th year. Martin Perln was
founding editor (1972-79, SLAC). He was succeeded in 1980 by the
late John Dowling (1980-86, Mansfield State University). Art
Hobson (University of Arkansas) was editor from 1987 to 1995. The
present editor, Al Saperstein (Wayne State University) took over
the job in 1995. P&S fulfills an extremely important function by
informing FPS members of current topics. It is much more than a
newsletter. Since there are not many journals that cover the
physics aspects of these issues, P&S provides a useful outlet for
physicists who have some viable data or theory to publish. It has
long been a goal of the FPS to convert P&S from a "quasi-journal"
to a full-fledged subscription journal. The display at the
Atlanta Centenary will show the evolution of the P&S masthead and
front-page. With the passage of time the contents of P&S have
shifted from more general commentary to the more technical aspects
of physics and public policy issues.
Many of the FPS symposia are published in P&S. Examples include:
SDI (September 1986), a forum-sponsored study of land-based
intercontinental ballistic missiles (July 1988), energy research
(July 1989), safeguards on plutonium and highly enriched uranium
(July 1990), pseudoscience (July 1990), a forum-sponsored study of
energy (October 1991), powerlines and public health (January
1992), climate change (October 1992), environmental physics (July
1993), physics and law (October 1993), risk and nuclear power
(July 1994), theater ballistic missiles (October 1994), legacy of
radiation from cold war (July 1995), sustainable technologies
(October, 1995) and linear low dose radiation (January 1997).
Among the talks in these various symposia, one of my favorites is
the one by James Randi (October 1989) on "Fooling Some Scientists
Some of the Time." The juxtaposition of Randi's talk and the big
APS debate on "cold fusion" at the 1989 Baltimore APS meeting was
indeed timely. The April 1991 issue of P&S contains a nice debate
between Peter Zimmerman and Art Hobson on the use of high
technology conventional weapons in the Gulf War. P&S also reviews
recent books and describes recent events in physics and public
policy. Over the years P&S has published a wide variety of
letters on both popular and unpopular topics. Many times an
editor (and the editorial board) has disagreed sharply with the
contents of some of the letters to the editor, but openness has
often dictated their publication as long as the view makes some
logical points.
Forum Studies
Over the years the FPS has sponsored three studies which have been
published by the AIP:
(1) Civil Defense: A Choice of Disasters, edited by John
Dowling and Evans Harrell, 1986, 248 pages
(2) The Future of Land-Based Strategic Missiles, edited by
Barbara Levi, Mark Sakitt and Art Hobson, 1989, 310 pages.
(3) The Energy Sourcebook: A Guide to Technology,
Resources and Policy, edited by Ruth Howes and Anthony Fainberg,
1991, 550 pages.
Each of these studies contains the caveat: "This volume was
prepared by a study group of the Forum on Physics and Society of
the American Physical Society. The American Physical Society has
neither reviewed nor approved this study." This disclaimer is
only fair since the APS Council did not take an active role in the
development of these studies. Time has eclipsed the large scale
plans for civil defense structures and the evacuation of cities.
If Russia ever ratifies START II, land-based missile will be
confined to single warhead systems. The energy issue may have
been forgotten in the press, but most FPS members think it will
return in the next century. At that time, hopefully, many
physicists will blow the dust from the Howes-Fainberg volume and
use the timeless principles within to help solve the problem.
These excellent studies have held up over the years and remain
good references today.
Physics Jobs
The first "job crisis" for young PhD's took place in the early
1970s. The Forum responded by organizing two conferences at Penn
State University (August 19-23, 1974 and August 1-3, 1977). Perl
and Roland Good were the driving forces behind these conferences,
which examined the data and possible responses by the physics
academic community. Of course, there was no easy solution then,
or now, to the vulnerability of young PhD's and postdocs to a
tight job market, but the conference developed a number of partial
solutions. The results of the first conference on "Technology
Change in Physics Graduate Education" were published in the 64-
page, February-1975 issue of Physics and Society. The results of
the second conference on "Changing Career Opportunities for
Physicists" was edited by Martin Perl and published in the AIP
Conference Series (Physics Careers, Employment and Education, AIP
39, 1978, 340 pages). These studies were a precursor to the later
studies by the APS Committee on Professional Concerns and the
Young Scientists Network.
Congressional Science Fellows
In 1973, APS chose its first two APS Science Congressional Fellows
in an AAAS program with different societies (IEEE, OSA, etc.) In
1973 Ben Cooper and Richard Werthamer were chosen as the first APS
Congressional Science Fellows. Cooper served a long and
distinguished career on the Senate Energy Committee, rising to the
position of the majority staff director under Democratic Senator
Bennett Johnston (and as a chair of FPS). Dick Werthamer served
his congressional year with Republican Congressman Charles Mosher
of Ohio and later served as Executive Secretary of the APS. Since
then, over 95 physicists have served as Science Congressional
Fellows, either as APS Fellows or as fellows from other scientific
organizations. Forum members Mike Casper, Richard Scribner and
Joel Primack played distinct and significant roles in the creation
of the APS Congressional fellowship program which former FPS chair
Scribner directed for many years at the AAAS.
Physics Education
Over the years, the Forum has organized 20 sessions on education
issues. Former FPS chairs Ruth Howes and Ken Ford took an active
role in organizing the Forum on Education in 1991. The Forum on
Physics Society still maintains an active interest in physics
education issues, but is now in a supportive role with the Forum
on Education and the APS Committee on Education.
Short Courses
In order to study physics and society issues more deeply, the
Forum has organized a series of short courses, which last for 2 to
3 days. For fees that have been around $100, the participants
hear some 20 hours of lectures from 15 assorted experts; later
they receive copies of the proceedings. The short courses are
usually timed to precede or follow APS meetings so as to attract
APS members who are already in attendance at those meetings. The
Forum has offered 3 short courses on arms race matters (1982 at
APS San Francisco, 1983 at APS Baltimore, 1988 at George
Washington University), one short course on energy (1985 at the
Office of Technology Assessment), and one on climate change (1991
at Georgetown University). The results have been published in the
AIP Conference Series:
Physics Technology and the Nuclear Arms Race, edited by D.
Hafemeister and D. Schroeer, AIP 104, 1983, 380 pages.
Energy Sources: Conservation and Renewables, edited by D.
Hafemeister, H. Kelly and B. Levi, AIP 135, 1985, 676 pages.
Nuclear Arms Technologies in the 1990s, edited by D.
Schroeer and D. Hafemeister, AIP 178,1988, 480 pages.
Global Warming: Physics and Facts, edited by B. Levi, D.
Hafemeister and R. Scribner, AIP 247, 1992, 326 pages.
APS (Forum) Awards
The FPS presents nominees to APS Council for two APS awards, the
Joseph A. Burton Forum Award and the Leo Szilard Award, for
significant work on physics and society issues. The Burton-Forum
Award "recognizes outstanding contributions to the public
understanding or resolution of issues involving the interface of
physics and society." The Szilard Lectureship Award "recognizes
outstanding accomplishments by physicists in promoting the use of
physics for the benefit of society in such areas as environment,
arms control and science policy."
The Awards were first offered by the FPS (and not the entire APS)
in 1974; David Inglis received the Szilard Award and Ralph Lapp
earned the Forum Award. Initially a modest honorarium of $250 was
given along with a handsomely scripted scroll. The honorarium
became even more modest in 1985 when the Szilard Award had to be
shared among the seven (!) dominant authors of the papers on the
"Nuclear Winter" calculations. The embarrassingly small stipend
led the FPS Executive Board to conclude that it was better to
offer no honorarium rather than an amount that would (in this
case) only buy one good dinner. In desperation, the FPS then
moved from monetary awards to symbolic art. Two California
artists created statues whose bases are engraved with the names of
the awardees. The current winners keep the statues for one year
after which they pass them to the next year's winners. The statue
accompanying the Szilard Award, which was created by David Smith,
is a dolphin, the symbol of Szilard's novella, The Voice of the
Dolphins. The Forum Award statue is an abstract spherical model
of the Earth created by Crissa Hewitt.
In the 1986, the two FPS Awards were promoted to awards of the
entire APS, but this promotion in status came with some pressure
to create a permanent endowment for the awards. In 1997, the
Forum Award was endowed with $70,000 from the Apker Award
Endowment, creating an annual honorarium of $3000, plus travel
expenses to the April meeting. The Forum Award was renamed the
Joseph A. Burton Forum Award in honor of Joe Burton, beloved
former APS Treasurer and long-time FPS supporter. In 1998, the
Szilard Award received an endowment of $70,000 from the MacArthur
Foundation, the Energy Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the FPS
and a number of individual donors. In order to create a climate
for graduate students to consider careers in physics and society,
the award was changed to a lectureship, and its name was changed
accordingly to the Leo Szilard Lectureship Award. Starting in
1999, the recipient will receive $1000 honorarium and travel money
to present talks at an APS meeting and at universities or research
laboratories.
POPA/Forum Differences
There is often confusion on the roles of the two APS entities that
deal with physics and society issues. The Panel on Public Affairs
(POPA) was established in 1974, two years after the Forum was
established. The major distinction is that POPA is an APS
committee whose members are elected by the APS Council and whose
role is to advise the APS council, whereas the FPS (and other
forums) is a membership organization, whose executive board is
elected by the members and whose roles include publishing a
newsletter and sponsoring invited sessions at APS meetings. As a
membership unit, the FPS is a responsible to the FPS membership
and not the Council, much as the Division of Condensed Matter
Physics is responsible to the condensed matter physicists. These
distinctions become blurred in the sense that all divisions and
fora are responsible to the Council if the actions of the APS
units run counter to the goals of the APS. POPA has sponsored
studies of certain issues, after receiving outside grants to pay
the expenses of experts. POPA also prepares reports by POPA
members, and gives advice to the Council on a wide variety of
issues. The advice from POPA generates about 3 APS resolutions
and 5-10 letters for the APS leadership per year.
On the other hand, the Forum organizes sessions to raise technical
issues in a public arena, publishes a quasi-journal Physics and
Society, carries out Forum studies, offers short courses, and
organizes the presentation of two APS Prizes Awards each year.
POPA's budget is about $25,000 per year, spent mostly on travel
for three meetings each year. The Forum's budget is about $20,000
per year, spent mostly on the publication of Physics and Society
and travel expenses for speakers who are non-APS-members.
POPA submits proposals for APS studies to the Council for its
consideration. If the Council supports the proposal, POPA assists
the APS Executive Director and the Council in selecting the study
participants and obtaining funds. The most famous POPA study was
the 1987 Directed Energy Weapons Study. The Forum also carries
out studies, with modest budgets of about $5,000, as compared to
POPA studies with budgets of about $600,000. POPA has helped
organize some 9 APS studies and the Forum has produced 3 studies.
In recent years, POPA has found it more difficult to obtain
funding for the more lengthy studies, with the result that POPA
has undertaken 3 POPA "reports" written by POPA members on
electromagnetic fields of powerlines, helium conservation, and
energy policy.
Forum Problems and Future
There has been an interesting trend in the make-up of the Forum
leadership over the years. The early Forum leaders were
essentially all from academia, but this is not true today. This
year, the past chair, the chair, and the chair-elect all hail from
outside a university setting (Sigma Xi, the National Academy of
Sciences, ACDA). However, on average about one-half of the recent
Forum leadership comes from universities and the other half from
non-academic institutions. This mixture is very good since the
non-university scholars add significant knowledge that professors
do not have. At any rate, it is very important for the Forum to
continue to present the issues and show young PhD students that
there are career paths other than the academic route. Our task
has been complicated by the shift of the April APS meeting from
Washington, DC to other cities around the country. It is far, far
easier and cheaper to organize a critical physics and society
session in Washington than it is in the cities beyond the
beltway. It is imperative that the Forum keep the candle of
professional responsibility well lit. We cannot slip backwards to
the old days when APS meetings had no sessions on physics and
society issues. The FPS continues to be a way for physicists in
all fields of endeavor to keep easily abreast of the technical
aspects of problems facing society. At the personal level, the
Forum's members have been a great source of friendship, knowledge
and inspiration to me and the other members. A number of our
members have moved on from forum activities to larger roles.
Examples include former Executive Board members Vern Ehlers, who
serves as a Republican Congressman from Michigan, and Rush Holt,
whio has just been elected to that position as a Democrat from New
Jersey. I like to think that the Forum's examination of the
critical aspects of science and society issues not only helped
send them on their way, but also shaped their approach to some of
the issues that they deal with today. [The Cal Poly Physics
Department library maintains a repository of FPS-BAPS abstracts,
P&S, FPS books, and Physics Today articles.]
David Hafemeister
Physics Department
California Polytechnic State University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Leo Szilard:
Physics, Politics, and the Narrow Margin of Hope
William Lanouette
Leo Szilard was a "Martian", one of those brilliant
Hungarians in the Manhattan Project who spoke an unearthly
language and were clearly brighter than any mortals. Other
Martians included Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and Edward
Teller.
Being a Martian, Szilard didn't know what you couldn't do as
a human, so he tried some extraordinary things -- and often
succeeded. For example, Szilard conceived the nuclear chain
reaction in 1933; he co-designed with Enrico Fermi the world's
first nuclear reactor in 1939; he told Albert Einstein about the
reactor in 1939 and enlisted him to sign a letter to President
Franklin Roosevelt that warned about German nuclear research and
led to the Manhattan Project; he wrote to Joseph Stalin and Nikita
Khrushchev, and at a private meeting with Khrushchev in 1960
gained his assent to a Moscow-Washington Hot Line.
Szilard says he acquired his audacious attitude from a
childhood experience that gave him the disposition to "save the
world." At age 10, he read The Tragedy of Man, a Hungarian epic
poem by Imre Madach in which humanity faces extinction from the
dieing out of the sun yet continues to survive by maintaining a
"narrow margin of hope." Being too young when he read the epic,
Szilard recalled, "I grasped early in life that 'it is not
necessary to succeed in order to persevere'."
And persevere Szilard did, living both sides of the nuclear
arms race. First, from 1933 to 1939, he worked to forestall
nuclear weapons development by keeping his chain-reaction concept
a secret from German scientists; next, from 1939 to 1945, he
helped create the Manhattan Project and became its chief physicist
(at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago) in a race to beat
Germany to the A-bomb; and finally, from 1945 until his death in
1964, he lobbied and plotted to outlaw nuclear weapons.
An ideal example of how Szilard pursued that "narrow margin
of hope" is his effort in July 1945 to prevent the use of atomic
bombs against Japanese cities by sending a petition to President
Harry Truman. The petition was the last of several tries.
Beginning that March, Szilard had drafted and sent a letter from
Einstein to Franklin Roosevelt, this time urging the president to
hear Szilard's ideas for post-war nuclear controls that might
forestall a US-Soviet arms race. But FDR died in April, before
receiving the letter. Next Szilard took the letter to the Truman
White House, and was sent to incoming Secretary of State James
Byrnes; their May meeting left Szilard discouraged because Byrnes
saw the A-bomb as useful to make the Soviet Union "more
manageable" in Eastern Europe. In June, Szilard helped draft the
Franck Report by Manhattan Project scientists that urged
demonstrating the bomb before using it on Japanese civilians. When
this was rejected, Szilard finally tried his petition.
Szilard began circulating a draft on July 1st, still not
knowing if -- or when -- the A-bomb might be tested. On July 2nd,
Szilard's letter to fellow scientists in the Manhattan Project
echoed his childhood lesson from The Tragedy of Man. "However
small the chance might be that our petition may influence the
course of events," Szilard wrote, "I personally feel that it would
be a matter of importance if a large number of scientists who have
worked in this field went clearly and unmistakably on record as to
their opposition on moral grounds to the use of these bombs in the
present phase of this war."
At Los Alamos, Szilard's friend and fellow Martian, Edward
Teller, refused to sign the petition, and turned it over to lab
director J. Robert Oppenheimer. Teller wrote Szilard that "actual
combat use might even be the best thing" to educate the public
about nuclear weapons. "The accident that we worked out this
dreadful thing should not give us the responsibility of having a
voice in how it is to be used." Oppenheimer agreed that the
scientists deserved no say in "political" decisions, but used his
own position as lab director to argue for dropping the bomb on
Japanese cities.
On July 4th, from the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory (Met
Lab) Szilard sent petitions to the secret Manhattan Project
uranium plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, again pleading on "moral
grounds" to oppose the bomb's use. There 67 scientists signed a
petition urging an A-bomb demonstration.
By July 6th, Met Lab security agents knew that Szilard was
circulating his petition and warned General Leslie Groves, the
Manhattan Project's military head. On July 7th, the Army decreed
that "Groves had no objection" to the petition, provided Szilard
classified it "Secret" and sent it through official channels.
On July 8th, intelligence officers handed over to General Groves
copies of the petition and lists of the signers. And on July 9th,
Groves received from censors copies of the Szilard-Teller letters,
along with an intelligence officer's warning that "Szilard might
attempt to get fellow scientist[s] to stop work." For his
part, Szilard had nothing so practical in mind. Still, by July
11th, an Army intelligence officer was newly alarmed that the
petition, the transmittal letter, and the names of signers "are
unclassified as the Subject [Szilard] did not classify them
himself."
On July 12th, to discredit the petition, Groves had a poll
distributed to Met Lab scientists that posed five options, from
military use of the bomb to no use at all. To the Army's
surprise, Szilard's ideas had wide support: 127 of the 150
scientists polled (72%) favored a demonstration.
Before dawn on July 16th, the first A-bomb was tested at the
"Trinity" site in the New Mexico desert. General Groves was
elated, but a few hours later he phoned the Pentagon with a
warning to "be alerted with particular vigilance on...Leo."
But in Chicago, Leo was toning down his petition in order to
attract more signers. The final version, dated July 17th, did not
call for an outright ban on the bomb, but said it should be used
only after Japan received detailed surrender terms. Then the
President's decision should be tempered "by all the other moral
responsibilities which are involved."
Szilard's cover letter states that 67 Chicago scientists had
signed his petition, although 70 names appear on the pages that
ultimately reached the White House -- and are now in the National
Archives. Another 85 signed amended versions at Oak Ridge. In
all, 155 Manhattan Project scientists signed petitions that raised
moral questions about dropping A-bombs on Japan's cities.
On July 17th, the same day Szilard sent off his petition,
Oppenheimer reported to General Groves about Szilard's appeal for
Los Alamos scientists to sign. And in Oak Ridge, Groves's
assistant, Col. Kenneth Nichols, telephoned the General at the
Pentagon to ask: "Why not get rid of the lion?" Groves answered
we "can't do that at this time." But Groves did the next best
thing by negotiating with Szilard's Met Lab superior, Arthur
Compton, for a week about how he should forward the petition, and
it was July 24th before the package went to Nichols at Oak
Ridge.
On July 26th, Truman, Churchill, and Stalin issued their
"Potsdam Declaration," which concluded: "We call upon the
government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of
all Japanese armed forces....The alternative for Japan is prompt
and utter destruction."
Meanwhile, Groves's assistant, Colonel Nichols, held
Szilard's petition for another week, finally sending it by courier
to Groves in the Pentagon on July 30th. On July 31st, after
Groves had received a telex from Tinian Island in the Pacific that
"Little Boy," the uranium bomb, was ready, he forwarded the
petition to the Secretary of War's office.
On August 6th, the "Enola Gay" dropped the uranium bomb on
Hiroshima, instantly killing 70,000 inhabitants. On August 8th,
Russia declared war on Japan, an act Tokyo had long dreaded. On
August 9th, "Bock's Car" dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki,
killing 40,000. Within five years, more than 200,000 Japanese
would die from aftereffects of these two bombs.
On August 10th, Japan accepted the terms of the Potsdam
Declaration, but with one condition: the emperor must be allowed
to stay on the throne. President Truman ordered that a third A-
bomb -- expected to be ready about August 20th -- should not be
shipped, because, he said, he didn't like the idea of killing "all
those kids." The United States accepted Japan's condition to keep
the emperor, and on August 14th the war ended.
Beginning on August 6th, Szilard tried to publicize the
petition, which, on purpose, he had not classified as "Secret". On
August 16th, an Army intelligence officer agreed with Szilard that
the petition could be declassified. Next, Szilard asked the
President's secretary to concur with the petition's release, and
offered Science magazine the chance to publish it -- once the
White House approved. But before Truman could decide, General
Groves intervened, and had the petition classified "Secret".
Szilard first mentioned his petition publicly in a speech in
December 1945, but it was not described in print until Arthur
Compton's memoirs appeared in 1956. The petition was declassified
beginning in 1957, but all the versions and the letters relating
to it were only released in 1961. The anthology The Atomic Age
was the first to publish a complete copy of Szilard's petition, in
1963. This year, the petition and a list of its signers appeared
in Hiroshima's Shadow (Pamphleteer's Press 1998), an anthology of
contemporary and current writings about the bomb.
Despite the shroud of military censorship, Szilard's idea
that scientists become activists succeeded immediately. On
September 9th 1945, physicist James Franck and 64 other Chicago
faculty members signed a petition to President Truman urging him
to share atomic secrets with other nations -- in order to create
an international control scheme that would curb a nuclear arms
race. The next day, Franck's petition was reported widely in the
newspapers, and the day after that Secretary of War Stimson argued
the scientists' viewpoint at a cabinet meeting. In the spring of
1946, the United States proposed an international control plan for
the atom at the United Nations, although this was never
achieved.
A second result of activism within the Manhattan Project was
the establishment of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago in the fall
of 1945. The group formed to debate nuclear policies, to work for
civilian control of atomic energy at home and international
control abroad, and to "educate public opinion." Since 1945, they
have published the influential Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
a magazine that uses as a logo the "doomsday clock" ticking off
the minutes to midnight -- before nuclear Armageddon. As a
Martian, Szilard may have failed to realize that, by earthly
convention, scientists do not ordinarily write to the American
President. But from the experience of sending his petition to
President Truman, Szilard learned the difference between science
and politics. This discovery he revealed in a December 1945
speech. "Politics," Szilard said, has been defined as "the art of
the possible" while "science might be defined as the art of the
impossible. The crisis which is upon us may not find its ultimate
solution until the statesmen catch up with the scientists and
politics, too, becomes the art of the impossible."
WILLIAM LANOUETTE is the author of Genius in the Shadows:A
Biography of Leo Szilard, The Man Behind the Bomb (Chicago 1994).
Leo Szilard. Toward a Livable
World
Edward Gerjuoy
It is a pleasure and a privilege to be speaking here today, at
this session honoring Leo Szilard on the 100th anniversary of his
birth. One of my major objectives is elucidating why the Forum
has attached SzilardUs name to its Science in the Public Interest
Award. Probably the best known reason the physics community
associates SzilardUs name with science in the public interest is
SzilardUs persistent though ultimately unsuccessful effort to
prevent the atomic bombing of Japan, after he had successfully
convinced President Franklin Roosevelt to initiate the enormous
United States commitment needed to actually construct atomic
bombs. But SzilardUs failure to forestall the use of atomic
weapons against Japan did not discourage him from continuing his
attempts to influence United States nuclear weapons policy. In
particular, he devoted the remainder of his life to unceasing
efforts to prevent any succeeding wartime use of nuclear weapons,
a use which he feared might destroy Western civilization if not
mankind.
In the course of this all-consuming endeavor, however, Szilard
lavished his energies on many other notable causes. Some of these
causes were obvious corollaries of his basic "no nuclear weapons
use" objective, but others were quite independent of that basic
objective and were undertaken primarily because of his abiding
respect for the enduring values underlying this nationUs free
democratic society. His efforts on behalf of these many other
notable causes, all of which if not exactly "science in the public
interest" surely fall under the rubric of policy concerns having
great import for science as well as for the entire public, began
even before World War II. Allow me to remind you of some of these
other causes and of SzilardUs contributions to them, ordered by
calendar date (of course I deliberately am omitting any mention of
SzilardUs many scientific contributions):
1933: Prime initiator of the British Academic Assistance Council
(AAC) to help find jobs for refugee scholars from Nazi
Germany.
1945: Leader in successful struggle to prevent Congress from
giving control of the postwar development of atomic energy to the
military.
1945: Helped organize the Federation of Atomic Scientists and its
"Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists".
1945 and for years thereafter: Proposed initiatives to convene
U.S. and Soviet scientists for arms control discussions.
1946: Prime initiator of "Emergency Committee of Atomic
Scientists" to raise money for public education on atomic
energy.
1947: In a published article, and in talks, called for a "crusade
for an organized world community"; suggested the U.S. should be no
less willing to issue "peace bonds" than war bonds.
1947: Against State Dept. wishes, wrote an open "Letter to
Stalin" urging Stalin to broadcast his ideas for world peace
directly to the U.S. public.
1949: Leader in opposition to the proposal, endorsed by many
scientific organizations, that applicants for AEC Fellowships must
sign a non-Communist affidavit.
1957: Played an important role in initiating the first Pugwash
Conference, and for years thereafter participated importantly in
subsequent Pugwash Conferences.
1960: Had a private two hour conversation with Kruschev in New
York; came up with idea for Soviet-American telephone hot
line.
1961: Gave a series of talks titled, "Are We On the Road to War?"
urging, inter alia, that the U.S. adopt a "no first use of nuclear
weapons" policy.
1962: Formed the Council For A Livable World, the first political
action committee for arms control and disarmament issues.
Time restrictions do not permit me to discuss more than a single
one of these causes and/or SzilardUs contributions to them. Thus
of the many Szilard public policy concerns that I have listed, I
will elaborate only on his 1949 opposition to the requirement that
applicants for AEC Fellowships sign a non-Communist affidavit. I
have chosen this particular cause mainly because it so aptly
illustrates the fact that SzilardUs dedication to securing a more
livable world was not confined to nuclear policy issues. I
emphasize that three of the institutions in whose creation Szilard
played a prominent role, but which I do not have the time to
discuss in this talk, namely the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, Pugwash and the Council for a Livable World, are
healthy still, and still battle for the causes Szilard espoused;
there are very few men or women of any era whose legacies have
similarly flourished for a full 34 years after their deaths. I
also want to acknowledge that much of the immediately following
discussion, indeed much of this talk, relies heavily on
LanouetteUs admirable biography of Szilard[1], often even to the
use of LanouetteUs own language, which I saw no reason to try to
improve.
In 1947 President Truman, under pressure from the House Committee
on Un-American Activities, had ordered an FBI security check of
all Federal employees. In 1949 Congress was considering extending
the security checks to all applicants for AEC Fellowships. A
number of scientific organizations, including the National Academy
of Sciences and the American Institute of Physics, issued
statements expressing their belief that while FBI investigations
of all applicants for AEC Fellowships was overkill, requiring a
non-Communist affidavit was reasonable. I donUt know whether the
American Physical Society took a stand on this issue, and have
been afraid to find out. In any event, Szilard was appalled by
these statements by scientific organizations he held dear, and
published an article on the subject in the Bulletin of Atomic
Scientists. Here is part of what Szilard wrote:
" Are we scientists going to follow the principle of the
lesser evil? Our colleagues in Germany have trodden that
path.... A few months after the Hitler government was installed in
office, it demanded that instructors of the Jewish faith be
removed from their university positions. At the same time every
assurance was given that professors who had tenure would remain
secure in their jobs...The German learned societies did not raise
their voices in protest against these early dismissals. They
reasoned that there were not many Jewish instructors anyway, and
so the issue was not one of importance. Those of the dismissed
instructors who were any good, so they pointed out, were not much
worse off, since they were offered jobs in England or America.
The demand of the German government for the removal of these
instructors did not seem altogether unreasonable, since they
couldnUt very well be expected wholeheartedly to favor the
nationalist revival which was then sweeping Germany. To the
learned societies it seemed much more important at that moment to
fight for the established rights of those who had tenure, and this
could be done much more successfully, so they thought, if they
made concessions on minor points.
In a sense the German government kept its word with
respect to those who had tenure. It is true that before long most
professors who were considered "undesirable" were retired, but
they were given pensions adequate for their maintenance. And
these pensions were faithfully paid to them until the very day
they were put into concentration camps, beyond which time it did
not seem practicable to pay them pensions...
The German scientists could not, of course, have saved
academic freedom in Germany even if they had raised their voices
in protest in the early days of the Nazi regime when they still
could do so with impunity. They could not have changed the course
of history, but theycould have kept their hands clean."
To this point in this talk I have concentrated on Szilard's many
public policy concerns and have totally ignored his personality,
which deserves to be recalled. I now proceed to remedy this
oversight, starting with my own recollections of Szilard during
my limited interactions with him, over a relatively short period
toward the end of his life.
I first became acquainted with Szilard in about June 1958, when I
joined the scientific staff at the General Atomic Laboratory in
San Diego. Szilard was a consultant at General Atomic, and
thatUs how I met him, via casually shared lunch tables and
conversation in the cafeteria. Soon I began to go out of my way
to spend time with him whenever he showed up at General Atomic,
because I found his company unusually enjoyable. Mainly he was
enjoyable because he so often had a good humored original way of
looking at and describing the life situations, including the
national and international news, into which he and I and all the
other working U.S. scientists daily were being immersed.
Moreover, although he unquestionably was genuinely witty, as his
reputation had led me to expect, his wit often was self-
deprecatory and typically not at some victimUs expense (as I had
not expected). He maintained this good humor despite the fact
that at the time (1958-1959) he had serious health problems, of
which neither I nor anyone else I knew at General Atomic had any
inkling. In particular, we now know, from a book by the Swedish
biomedical scientist George Klein, that Szilard had not been
feeling well, in fact had been observing blood inhis urine, for
some six months before he was diagnosed with bladdercancer in the
summer of 1959.
I wish I could recall for you some of the funny original remarks
Iheard Szilard make, but unfortunately I canUt. Moreover, apart
from the The Voice Of The Dolphins and other fictional ventures,
SzilardUs published writings do not even begin to convey the
flavor of his conversation, because those writings uniformly are
deadly serious, though often strikingly unique in their
viewpoints. Here and there the Szilard I knew does peek out from
his "Recollections," dictated into a tape recorder in 1960 during
SzilardUs bladder cancer hospitalization. For instance Szilard
recounts a conversation with Hans Bethe in 1943, when Szilard was
disturbed by what he thought was the inefficient administration of
the Manhattan Project. Szilard writes:
"Bethe," I said, "I am going to write down all that
is going onthese days in the project. I am just going to write
down the facts--not for anyone to read, just for God." "Don't you
think God knows the facts?" Bethe asked. "Maybe he does, " I
said--"but not this version of the facts."
Also worth repeating here are SzilardUs recollected thoughts after
his futile attempt, described by Bill Lanouette, to convince
TrumanUs future Secretary of State James Byrnes that dropping the
atomic bomb on Japan would be contrary to the best interests of
the United States. Szilard says: "I was rarely as depressed as
when we left ByrnesU house and walked toward the station. I
thought to myself how much better off the world might be had I
been born in America and become influential in American politics,
and had Byrnes been born in Hungary and studied physics."
The conversational wittiness that first drew me to Szilard has
been noted by Lanouette, as well as by Szilard interviewers who
wrote articles about him during his lifetime. In particular,
Lanouette writes that "Szilard is remembered by his friends for
his wry and puckish humor"; Lanouette then illustrates SzilardUs
wit with the anecdote that Szilard once proposed the National
Science Foundation should pay second-rate scientists not to
conduct research and publish articles, a suggestion that many of
us would find more wry than humorous. A brief unsigned 1961
article about Szilard in Life Magazine quotes Szilard as saying,
"IUm all in favor of the democratic principle that one idiot is as
good as one genius, but I draw the line when someone takes the
next step and concludes that two idiots are better than one
genius."
One of Szilard's interviewers also has remarked on his "almost
saintly freedom from any sense of grievance toward his
detractors." This unwillingness of Szilard to bear a grudge is
exemplified by his reaction to the AEC hearing which led to the
revocation of OppenheimerUs clearance. Although Szilard disliked
Oppenheimer personally, Szilard wrote to scientists who might be
called to testify urging them to support Oppenheimer, and did his
best to deter SzilardUs good friend and compatriot Edward Teller
from testifying against Oppenheimer. In LanouetteUs words, this
put Szilard in the position of "opposing someone he liked but
disagreed with while supporting someone he agreed with but
disliked."
This talkUs reminiscences about SzilardUs personality would be
incomplete without some mention of SzilardUs famous originality,
and of the equally famous generosity with which he shared his many
original ideas, a generosity which undoubtedly contributed to the
affectionate regard so many of his colleagues had for him.
Eugene Wigner has praised Szilard with the words: "During a long
life among scientists, I have met no one with more imagination and
originality, with more independence of thought and opinion, than
Leo Szilard." The Nobel Laureate French biologist Jacques Monod
has written:
" Most scientists of course do not formulate any
significant new idea of their own. The few that do are in general
inordinately jealous of, and unduly faithful to, their own
precious little ideas. Not so with Szilard: he was as generous
with his ideas as a Maori chief withhis wives."
I now return to the objective of mine that I mentioned earlier,
namely elucidating why the Forum has attached SzilardUs name to
its Science in the Public Interest Award. Although I have
searched, I could find no illumination of this question in the
Minutes of the Forum or of APS Council; apparently the idea of
giving SzilardUs name to the Award seemed so appropriate that no
discussion of the idea was required. This search brought me to
Barry Casper, who co-authored the Forum letter to APS Counci
requesting approval of the Szilard Award. When I asked him why
SzilardUs name had been chosen, his quite matter of fact reply
was, "Szilard is my hero."
Beyond doubt the Forum decided to honor Szilard in 1974, just as
we here today have decided to honor Szilard on his hundredth
anniversary, for his unflagging lifetime endeavors to steer human
society "Toward a Livable World"[2]. I am convinced, however,
that our admiration of Szilard stems not only from the content and
impact of those endeavors, but importantly also from the fact that
his efforts to achieve a livable world always were conducted with
humor, originality, generosity and stubborn integrity. On no
other basis can I understand how Szilard could have so captured
our hearts and imagination: that more than a few physicists would
declare "Szilard is my hero"; or that as many as three biographies
of Szilard have been published, the last in 1996[3]; or that a
nonphysicist writer named Gene Dannen, who first heard about
Szilard in 1981, has maintained a "Leo Szilard" Website for the
past three years and is himself planning a book about Szilard.
Let me sum up. We unhesitatingly are honoring Szilard for his
unceasing efforts to assure a livable world and for the admirable
way he carried out those efforts, though we are well aware that
such a world still lies in a very distant future. This awareness
in no way diminishes our desire to honor Szilard because no
sensible person, and certainly not Szilard himself, ever has
believed that the hoped-for assuredly livable world, if attainable
at all, would be attained in a mere thirty or so years after
SzilardUs death. We recognize, as Szilard himself did, the
importance of struggling for our ideals, even when there are good
reasons to believe our struggles may not succeed. I cannot do
better than to close this talk with SzilardUs own words in that
regard, written at the end of the article I previously quoted, on
the requirement that AEC Fellowship applicants be required to sign
a non-Communist affidavit:
" [I]f we give battle, we cannot be sure that we shall
win...But there are more important things for us to think about
these days than our good public relations. There are more
important considerations than our natural desire to win every
battle. There is justice to think about, and freedom, and our
integrity.
Justice and freedom have never been secure for very
long in any one area of the world. None of us can say for sure
what fate awaits them in the United States in the crisis through
which we shall be going in the remainder of this century. Freedom
and justice might survive this crisis; or they might not. They
might perish and the efforts of scientists might be of little
avail. What we scientists can do is to resolve that they shall
not be allowed to perish without a fight."
We are honoring Leo Szilard for writing these words and living
them.
1. William Lanouette, "Genius in the Shadows. A Biography of
Leo Szilard" (University of Chicago 1992).
2. These four words, which constitute the title of this paper,
obviously reflect the name of the "Council For A Livable World"
that Szilard created. However H. S. Hawkins, G.A. Greb and G.W.
Szilard, "Toward A Livable World: Leo Szilard and the Crusade for
Nuclear Arms Control" (MIT 1987), already have incorporated the
same four word phraseinto the title of their book.
3. In addition to Lanouette, ibid, these biographies are: Arnulf
K. Esterer and Louise A. Esterer, "Prophet of the Atomic Age"
(Julian Messner 1972), and David A. Grandy, "Leo Szilard. Science
as a Mode of Being" (University Press of America 1996).
Edward Gerjuoy
Department of Physics, University of Pittsburgh
gerjuoy@vms.cis.pitt.edu
Caroline L. Herzenberg
A longer version
of this article
Prologue
The investment of time and effort in looking ahead and planning
for the future can be a very important one for science and for
scientists. Because accomplishing our work takes so long in
comparison with that of most other individuals in our society, and
because our work as a whole is a cumulative enterprise, it is
important for us to examine science policies and future
directions. We may also need to revisit past issues, as they may
remain and present themselves in new and different frameworks in
the future.
Concern for the role of science in society and the future of
science has been with us and these topics have been examined in
the past since the time of Francis Bacon, with some landmark
contributions by J.B.S. Haldane, and, for the case of science in
America, Vannevar Bush, whose ideas, presented in Science, the
Endless Frontier, are currently being reexamined. This paper is
intended as a contribution to the contemporary discussion of the
redirection of American science policy from that of the post-
Vannevar Bush era.
Science continues, in many respects, to be an endless frontier.
Many of Vannevar Bush's ideas have stood the test of time and do
not appear seriously flawed. However, the ideas that Vannevar
Bush presented do need updating and in some cases significant
modification. Most notably, a reconsideration of the broader
social context in which science progresses would be desirable in
reassessing science policy, particularly considering the enormous
impact of science on our society and the critical ability of
science and technology policy to leverage social action.
Science and reason
Science results and is constituted from the application of reason
to the world around us. At present, science is the discipline in
which reason has the freest play. Since the Enlightenment, there
has been consideration that in the future this aspect of science
may be expected to further rationalize other disciplines and areas
of human activity. Science has greatly influenced public policies
and programs in the United States, but has not led to the
developments of the types anticipated by American progressive
thinkers like John Dewey, who expressed the hope that the
operation of cooperative intelligence as displayed in science
could be a working model for the union of freedom and authority
which might be applicable to political and other activities.
Attempts to deploy the cooperative intelligence of science as a
model for rationalizing the development of other areas of culture,
economics, politics, and society have not achieved comparable
success, and have elicited considerable antagonism. Science has
not become the prototype for all human common action. However,
use of scientific approaches and methodology within the present
domain of the sciences continues to be widely accepted.
Problem solving with science
Science is of intrinsic importance in advancing our understanding
of the natural worid. It is also a superb method for problem
solving for society. In looking at the future of science, we
therefore need to address questions such as those recently put to
the scientific community by Rep. Vernon Ehlers:
What are the most important intellectual challenges rising over
the scientific horizon in the next half century? What will be the
biggest problems facing our nation and our planet in the future,
and how can science and technology help overcome or avoid them?
What should our scientific and technological enterprise strive to
be 10, 20, or 50 years from now? And what changes do we need to
make in our present system in order to get there?
The scope of the present paper, however,is much more limited. In
the politically and socially conservative society in which we live
at present, the possibility of immediate or radical restructuring
of the research and development system seems unlikely and perhaps
undesirable. In any consideration of the reorganization of science
policy, we must be careful to avoid the danger of the
reorganization destroying those very characteristics (such as
originality and spontaneity, independence of thought, and the open
sharing of knowledge) which are essential to the progress of
science. However, there are modifications of the present system
which could go a great deal of the way toward improving the
scientific enterprise and t |