Nuclear Weapons, Scientists, and the Post-Cold War Challenge

The following sections are included:

• Contents

This volume includes a representative selection of my recent writings and speeches (circa 1992 to the present) on public policy issues that have substantial scientific components. Most deal with national security, nuclear weapons and arms control, reflecting my personal involvement in such issues, dating back to 1960…

The nine essays in Chapter I review how I first came to be involved as a theoretical physicist working on technical matters of national security, nuclear weapons, and arms control. They give a broad overview of the issues of primary concern to me that I encountered at the interface of science and public policy…

MY CAREER IN RESEARCH as a theoretical physicist dates back to fifty years ago shortly after the end of World War II. And it has been the best of times, Back then, it was a dream time to have been a graduate student! There was no need to worry about a job, unless for Some strange reason you felt that Harvard was the only place to be…

Throughout history there has been a close relation between physics and the military. In this article the author concentrates on the connection between physics and U.S. national security. In particular he discusses applications of physics to photo reconnaissance from space, antiballistic missile systems, nuclear testing, and scientific advising. The author also touches briefly on ethical aspects of the relation between science and the military.

The new technologies that are responsible for transforming the world in which we live derive from scientific progress. Mankind has reaped enormous benefits from advances in medical care, agricultural productivity, energy supply. Indeed all facets of the human condition have benefited from the deeper understanding of nature, both animate and inanimate, that we have gained from science. At the same time we face new risks and challenges, even to the very survival of the human species. One need not look beyond Hiroshima for a powerful reminder that what we learn about nature in our laboratories is linked, closely and inextricably, with the fate of our civilization…

On behalf of my fellow degree recipients I want to thank Tel Aviv University, its Trustees and distinguished faculty, and President Rabinovich for this high honor we have just received.

Future scholars looking back at the 20^th century will wonder at the record of our scientific achievements. After centuries of the philosophers' quests, scientists discovered the elusive atom. We now understand it, and have put the atom to work for us in a myriad of useful ways to improve all aspects of our material existence. We have pushed the frontiers of exploring the tiniest dimensions of nature to sizes 10's of billions of times smaller than the atoms themselves, in search of the elementary building blocks and the fundamental forces of nature. By joining what we are learning in this sub-atomic realm with explorations out to the farthest extremes of space and time, we have begun — just begun — to read the history of our physical universe all the way back to its initial beginnings some 15 billion years ago. This is one of the greatest voyages of discovery for modem man…

I am truly honored to receive the William O. Baker Award from a community whose work I value highly and support strongly; and to see here so many fiiends and colleagues in that community with whom I have had the privilege of working for many years. It is a personal thrill for me to receive an award that carries the name of William O. Baker. He has contributed in so many ways, both visionary and technical, to the advances in the intelligence strength of this nation that have enabled us to open our eyes and ears to threats to our national security — emerging threats as well as enduring ones. Bill is a true patriot, a gentleman, and a great scientist and inventor, a real triple threat, as well as a personal friend. I am also very proud to have my name added to the list of previous illustrious recipients of this award…

The following sections are included:

• Reminiscences of Work on National Reconnaissance¹

• Challenge of Detecting Bdlistic Missile Launches

• The Land Panel

• More of the People

• Challenges for Today and The Future

It has often been said that war is too important to be left to the generals and that peace is too vital to be left to the politicians. So, too, are matters of nuclear weapons and policy too important to be left to the nuclear-strategy “experts.” In reality, there are no experts on nuclear war. We have never had a nuclear war, and any scientist knows that you must have data before you can become an expert. We do not know how a nuclear war would start, be waged, or finally stopped. No one, including nuclear-strategy “experts,” knows what would be left after such a “war.”…

I am honored to receive the John P. McGovern Science and Society Medal and by the invitation to give this lecture. I have a very special affection for Sigma Xi. It presented me with my first ever significant award: election to associate membership in 1946 during my senior year at Princeton – I presume for my senior thesis work under Johnny Wheeler. At the award banquet I also received a copy of Fritz Zworykin's treatise on the Electron Microscope. That I soon traded that volume for an advanced theoretical physics text sounds, perhaps, ungracious but it wasn't by any means. It was simply evidence of the narrow – and properly so – focus of a young theoretical physicist's interests in esoteric fundamental science…

Dear Professor Burhop:

I am responding to your letter of April 11 describing views and concerns expressed at the last meeting of the Bureau of the World Federation of Scientific Workers with reference to participation by U.S. scientists in military activities of our government, In particular you ask of those who “have participated in the work of the Jason committee … how they felt it is possible to justify their actions to their consciences.” Your letter poses a serious issue and deserves, I believe, a serious response…

With the collapse of the Soviet Union we entered the post-Cold War era. This brought to the fore new diplomatic opportunities for walking away from the brink of catastrophic nuclear war. Most importantly they included the 1991 initiatives by Presidents George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev to remove most of the tactical, or short-range, nuclear forces, and to reduce the size of the strategic nuclear arsenals. Interest was renewed in the proposals at the 1986 Reykjavik Summit to do away with all strategic ballistic missiles, or “fast fliers” as President Reagan called them, so that there would be no need for hair-trigger response in time of crisis. There were also renewed calls for an end to all underground nuclear explosive tests and negotiation of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. These issues are addressed in this chapter in four essays…

My talk was given a prescient title by the organizers of this program. It has the virtue of allowing me to talk about pretty much anything on my mind. I am grateful for that because any more specific title that might have been proposed several months ago would very likely have been somewhat overtaken by events, particularly following the speech of President Bush on September 27 and the October 5 response by President Gorbachev…

With the end of the Cold War, and indeed of the Soviet Union itself, we are witnesses to momentous changes in the world's political and strategic balance. These changes have triggered spectacular developments in arms control as confrontation and stalemate have transformed to cooperation and a dizzying pace of progress…

During the Cold War, the possibility of a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States was always remote. To be sure, there were crises, and there was always the chance of an accident or misunderstanding leading to catastrophe. But the buildup of huge arsenals of long-range nuclear missiles on both sides—and the assurance that they would be used to counter a fist strike—kept disaster at bay. Deterrence worked…

The following sections are included:

• A Dramatically New Situation

• From Opponents to Friends

• A Doctrine of Defensive Last Resort

• Reducing Nuclear Reliance

• Phasing Out Nuclear Testing

• Strategic Defense

• Lowering Weapons Deployments

• Immediate Steps and Long-Term Progress

As the 20th century ended two major U.S. National Security issues were being debated energetically. One had to do with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the second addressed growing concerns about bio- and chemical-terrorism.

In 1992, President George H. W. Bush initiated a moratorium on underground explosive tests of nuclear weapons. His successor President Bill Clinton continued it when he entered office, and shortly thereafter the U.S. Department of Energy enhanced its stockpile stewardship program at the national weapons laboratories (Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia) into a multi-faceted comprehensive one with a deeper emphasis on the fmdamental science involved in nuclear explosions. This was done in order to establish a firm basis for maintaining our nuclear arsenal in the future without resorting to underground tests…

During his second campaign for the presidency against Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, Governor Adlai Stevenson spoke out strongly and clearly for an end to the testing of thermonuclear “H-bomb” weapons. His call for such a ban came shortly after the first demonstration of a successful hydrogen bomb, or so-called super bomb, of such great destructive power that it released explosive energy equivalent to millions of tons of TNT, a hundred times more destructive than the primitive atom bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The hydrogen bomb triggered concerns about the very survival of civilization. Stevenson viewed a test ban to prevent their further development to be a small step “for the rescue of man from the elemental fire which we have kindled,” p. 329 in McGeorge Bundy's “Danger and Survival” (Random House, NY, 1988)…

Thank you for this invitation to appear before you once again. I last had this privilege little more than three months ago, on June 23, when I testified on the findings of the Special Investigative Panel (the Rudman Panel) of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board on the security problems at the Department of Energy. We recommended creation of a semi-autonomous agency and I am pleased that this has now come to a reality. I hope its implementation will meet the country's need to establish appropriate security at our DOE weapons laboratories while at the same time preserving the outstanding science they are doing, as we emphasized in our report…

STANFORD — Since the first issue of NPQ appeared ten years ago, the Soviet Union has ceased to exist and the Cold War has ended. It was also a period during which the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia signed landmark bilateral arms control treaties in their continuing efforts to reduce the danger of nuclear conflict…

The nuclear tests by India and Pakistan have led some in the United States Senate to seek further delay on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which has already been awaiting ratification for more than a year and a half Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, said on Friday that “the nuclear spiral in Asia demonstrates the irrelevance of U.S. action” on the treaty, calling the pact “unverifiable and ineffectual.”…

For more than five decades, we have served in a variety of foreign policy, national security and intelligence positions for both Republican and Democratic administrations. A common thread in our experience is that our national interest is best served when America leads. When America hesitates, opportunities to improve our security and lost, and our strategic position suffers. This year, America has an opportunity to lead a global effort to strengthen nuclear nonproliferation by ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT)…

The following sections are included:

• INTRODUCTION

• TECHNICAL ARGUMENTS FOR TESTING

• NUCLEAR WEAPON SYSTEM SAFETY
  • Enhanced Nuclear Detonation Safety
  • Insensitive High Explosive
  • Fire-Resistant Pits
  • Missile Propellant

• RELIABILITY OF THE NUCLEAR WEAPON STOCKPILE
  • A Nondevice Component
  • The Device
  • Reliability Assessment of the Stockpile

• NUCLEAR WEAPON EFFECTS

• DESIGN COMPETENCE

• VERIFICATION

• POLITICAL ISSUES IN THE COMPREHENSIVE TEST BAN TREATY DEBATE

The news report “End of an Era: Superpowers Sign START, Limiting Nuclear ICBMs” (August, page 49) contains the incorrect statement that the House Armed Services Committee Panel on Nuclear Weapons Safety endorsed continued underground nuclear tests…

There is a bit of a gambler in each and every one of us. This is evidently a rather wide-spread and prevalent condition as one reads about all the activities and wide participation at lotteries, gambling casinos, pari-mutual betting and the like. Gambling is no big deal if properly controlled and sensibly waged; that is if it does not threaten the life of oneself or others, or the physical overall well being and responsibilities to one's family – in other words, if it's a low consequence activity. I, personally, only make minor, relatively low consequence wagers: a bet there won't be a traffic jam en route to the airport to catch a plane or not lugging a raincoat around all the time in changeable weather. But I've never bet that I could walk a tight rope more than 6” above the ground either…

The U.S. commitment to a true zero-yeld comprehensive test ban treaty, that President Clinton signed on September 26, 1996, depends on you – on the success of this community to meet the major challenge that has been presented to you. Under a ban on all nuclear explosions, you must do the good science, which means gathering the critical data and developing the understanding that will be necessary if we are to maintain, as we must, in the years ahead what we now enjoy, i.e. confidence in our enduring nuclear weapons stockpile. You, and through you our government and military leaders, must have the confidence that you will hear whatever warning bells that may ring, however unanticipated they may be, alerting us to evidence of deterioration of an aging stockpile. You also must have the means, and the knowledge, to do what has to be done, in a timely way, by way of refurbishment and/or remanufacturing in order to fix problems that may arise…

The existence of a direct threat from abroad to the U.S. homeland is not new. Nuclear weapons have posed one for more than fifty years. But today we face the new—and in many ways more challenging—threat of attack from biological and chemical weapons (BCW). This present threat is not posed by just one or two nuclear-armed nations. It is much more pervasive. With modern advances in biotechnology and pharmaceutical manufacturing, there is a threat of attack against U.S. society from a growing number of nations and terrorist units…

Chapter IV of this book takes us forward in time into the 21st century, up to the present. The gravest danger today is no longer viewed to be a nuclear holocaust between two superpowers, one of which has passed into history. In fact the United States and Russia have declared themselves to be allies in the war against terrorism. The gravest danger we face today is the chilling prospect that nuclear weapons, capable of destruction and devastation on an historically unprecedented scale, may be acquired by very dangerous hands — be they rogue nations or suicidal terrorists. Our daunting challenge — brought home so vividly on 9/11 — is to preserve and strengthen a nuclear nonproliferation regime that is threatened by the spread of technology…

Last year CIA director George Tenet cautioned the U.S. Senate that we are seeing “the continuing weakening of the international nonproiiferation consensus” and that “the domino theory of the twenty-first century may well be nuclear.” Lets hope he will be proved wrong, Iraq was a dry well as far as existing nuclear weapons are concerned, but the danger of their proliferation is very real, as is evident in North Korea and Iran, Nuclear bombs are not just one more weapon. With an energy release a million times larger than that of previous explosives, mass destruction is inevitable. These weapons pose an existential issue: Can civilization survive? Ronald Reagan, who understood this, often said, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”…

The following sections are included:

• A Cold War Success

• Preventing Proliferation

• U.S. Nukes

• The Case for the CTBT

• What If Our Nonproliferation Efforts Fail?

• Looking Ahead

For you students this is a wonderful moment of recognition. Congratulations. By your own good work, and with valuable encouragement from your families and teachers, you earned the opportunity to attend one of the world's great universities; and, as is clear from the recognition you are receiving here tonight, you took full advantage of it to widen and deepen your horizons of knowledge. This achievement is all the more impressive to me considering where you did it, surrounded by the extraordinary beauty and attractions of nature in this region that present monumental temptations to distract you away from work. I stand in awe of your achievements…

The following sections are included:

• Executive Summary

• What Are Nuclear Weapons For?

• A New Strategic Paradigm and Its Implications
  • Rethinking Deterrence
  • New Goals for Deterrence

• Nuclear Deterrence in the 21st Century
  • Russia
  • Present Adversaries
  • Potential Adversaries
  • Regional Conflicts
  • Biological and Chemical Weapons
  • Nuclear Deterrence in Context

• Implications for U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces
  • U.S. Nuclear Force Size
    • Operationally Deployed Force
    • Responsive Force
  • To Sustain This Force
  • Contingencies Involving Other Nations

• Are New U.S. Nuclear Weapons Needed?

• Including Other Nuclear-Weapon States
  • China
  • India and Pakistan
  • Israel
  • Iran
  • North Korea
  • The United Kingdom and France
  • Cooperation in Ballistic Missile Defense

• Why the Urgency?

• Cold War Thinking About Nuclear Weapons
  • The First Decade, 1945–54
  • The Second Decade, 1955–64
  • The Third Decade, 1965–74
  • The Fourth Decade, 1975–84
  • The Fifth Decade, 1985–94

• U.S. and Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces

Most, if not all of us, have experienced the disappointment of arriving at an event, expecting to hear or see a great star in action, only to be disappointed. Perhaps Pavarotti had to cancel with a sore throat or Barry Bonds had a bum knee. But I never thought much about how the stand-in or the pinch hitter must have felt in such a situation…

Chapter V includes the text of five speeches presented at memorial conferences celebrating the lives and contributions of four individuals who were revered both as great physicists and as leaders in the efforts to see that progress in science was used for the betterment of humanity.

Amos de Shalit was a contemporary of mine, a distinguished nuclear physicist, and very close personal friend who worked throughout his short life to ensure that the government in his native country, Israel, recognized the importance of basic research in building a society. He also strove diligently to develop trust and international cooperation as essential ingredients for both peace and good science…

Speaking at the Weizmann Institute 10 years ago at a similar occasion marking the 20^th anniversary of Amos deShalit's tragically premature death, I recalled our first meeting in 1952 and said the following: “We soon developed close bonds, as did our families, and I learned to appreciate and love Amos as the gentlest, wisest, and most honorable and and colleague I have ever known. I grew to respect him as a creative scientist of the highest achievements and standards, a patriot of inexhaustible energy, a person of noble values, and, generally, a very beautiful person.” Today with the further passage of time those sentiments have been even more indelibly etched into my memory as I recall Amos's extraordinary achievements, unfailing commitment to the highest standards and noblest values, and his devotion to his country, to peace, and to his family. Friendships with individuals such as Amos are among life's richest experiences, and are cherished throughout one's lifetime…

We are here to celebrate the wonderfully full and rich life of one of the most beloved physicists of our time. I have visited MIT many times since I first arrived here 50 years ago to audition for the appointment as Viki's Research Associate. This is the first time that I have come to MIT and there is no Viki here; and I cannot help but feel a sense of tremendous personal loss…

I am of the generation that entered in to serious study of physics just after World War II. I soon realized that some of the great names of modern physics, from whose theories and experiments I was learning the most exciting new stuff, were prominently in the news. They were speaking, debating, testifying in Congress on issues of grave policy importance concerning the impact on the human condition of the new technologies spawned by the latest scientific progress, and discussing what our government should be doing about it. Nuclear weapons were of special concern in this regard. With their enormous destructive potential that posed a threat to civilization as we know it, in the event of a nuclear war…

To start with I bring to you the greetings of the American Physical Society on this occasion honoring the memory of our late distinguished colleague and very dear friend, Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, on the 75th anniversary of his birth. I do this on behalf of Dr. Robert Schrieffer, President of the American Physical Society, who is unable to attend. Ten years ago, when I began my own term as APS President, Andrei Sakharov was isolated to internal exile in Gorky. My first formal action as President was to send a letter to your then General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev on January 23, 1986 urging him to free Andrei and permit him to return to a normal citizen's privileges in Moscow, no longer isolated from his scientific colleagues, their discussions, criticisms, and latest results which are so essential to a scientist's work. I recall with great pleasure that, in my last official act as President, I was able to send the following telegram to Gorbachev on December 19, 1986: “Greatly appreciate important action by Soviet government granting permission to the Sakharovs to return to Moscow and resume normal academic work. I expect this to contribute to improving scientific cooperation.”…

The following sections are included:

• Sakharov's four principles

• A changed world

• Building trust and cooperation

• A new approach is necessary

• References

The following sections are included:

• Afterword: What Are Nuclear Weapons For?