Top physicists speak out against Bush Administration policies in the war on terror.
Saturday, May 13th, 2006On April 17, 2006, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that the United States had tabled plans to employ tactical nuclear weapons against Iran to halt their burgeoning nuclear program. A letter had been sent to President Bush that same day, condemning what its authors worried would be a radical departure from the official US nuclear weapons policy of “only as a last resort.”
The 19 signatories of the document were neither weapons experts nor policy wonks; rather, all were physicists, “members of the profession that brought nuclear weapons into existence.” These individuals, including six Nobel laureates, were asserting the parental rights to their brainchild as Oppenheimer, Einstein and others had once done after WWII.
The nation’s physicists, whether the government cares to acknowledge them or not, are increasingly willing to speak out on the “moral consequences” of the Bush Administration’s hawkish maneuvers. In the past year, 1,800 physicists have attached their names to another letter denouncing the use of nuclear weapons as a general policy. This past week, the American Physical Society, representing some 45,000 physicists from around the globe, joined the chorus by noting that the use of “nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states threatens to undermine the Non-Proliferation Treaty.” In their statement, they further called for policy makers to “engage in a dialog with scientists.”
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