October 6, 1999
32 Nobel Laureates in Physics Back Atomic Test Ban
Related ArticleBoth Parties Seek Graceful Way to Put Off Nuclear Treaty Vote
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
group of 32 Nobel laureates in physics on Tuesday urged the Senate to approve the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, calling it "central to future efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons."
U.S. approval is imperative, the scientists said, and would mark "an important advance in uniting the world in an effort to contain and reduce the dangers of nuclear arms."
The plea was conveyed by the American Physical Society, the world's leading group of physicists, which sent letters Tuesday to every senator. Representatives of the group said they knew of no instance in which so many prominent American physicists had shown such unity.
"To line up this many physics Nobel laureates is unprecedented," said Dr. Robert L. Park, a physicist at the University of Maryland who directs the group's Washington office.
The 32 signers range from hawks to doves, Park pointed out, making the appeal wide and deep. A few are former designers of nuclear arms, a field dominated by physicists.
Jerome I. Friedman, the president of the physics group, a Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an organizer of the letter, said the test ban "is important for the future of humankind, and therefore has to be taken extremely seriously."
He criticized the Senate's moving to vote on the ban next week without carefully weighing the treaty's merits. "It's very disturbing that something so important won't have extensive hearings," he said in an interview. "I have the impression that things are being rushed through so people can't make informed decisions."
Backers of the ban see it as blocking the creation of new kinds of nuclear weapons and preventing the start of new global arms races. The makers of nuclear arms usually must detonate newly designed ones in fiery blasts to spot flaws and insure potency. So the absence of explosive testing acts as a brake on development -- just as new cars cannot be produced without a number of test drives.
Skeptics, including some Republicans in the Senate, have worried that the ban may undermine the soundness of the nation's own nuclear stockpile, a charge that many Democrats dispute. The letter addressed no other technical issues.
Without giving details, the one-page letter from the laureates said that "fully informed technical studies" had concluded that nuclear testing was unnecessary to ensure a stockpile's reliability.
The sending of the letter was long delayed because the process of treaty approval has lain moribund in the Senate for years before recently coming back to life. Representatives of the group said the letter's writing and signing was organized after President Clinton sent the treaty in September 1997 to the Senate, where it stalled, its ratification tied to other treaties until recently.
The gathering of laureate signatures began in January 1998, representatives of the group said.
The delay has meant that the letter carries at least one voice from the grave: that of Henry W. Kendall, a Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who in February this year died at age 72 while diving in an underwater photography session.
The American Physical Society is based in College Park, Md., and has about 40,000 members, a third of them in federal labs, a third in academia and a third in industry.
In addition to Kendall and Friedman, the group's president, the signers are Philip W. Anderson, Princeton University; Hans A. Bethe, Cornell University; Nicolaas Bloembergen, Harvard University; Owen Chamberlain, University of California; Steven Chu, Stanford University; Leon N. Cooper, Brown University; Hans Dehmelt, University of Washington; Val L. Fitch, Princeton University; Donald A. Glaser, University of California; Sheldon Glashow, Harvard University; Leon M. Lederman, Illinois Institute of Technology; David M. Lee, Cornell University; T.D. Lee, Columbia University; Douglas D. Osheroff, Stanford University; Arno Penzias, Bell Labs; Martin L. Perl, Stanford University; William Phillips, National Institute of Standards and Technology; Norman F. Ramsey, Harvard University; Robert C. Richardson, Cornell University; Burton Richter, Stanford University; Arthur I. Schawlow, Stanford University; J. Robert Schrieffer, Florida State University; Mel Schwartz, Columbia University; Clifford G. Shull, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Joseph H. Taylor Jr., Princeton University; Daniel C. Tsui, Princeton University; Charles Townes, University of California; Steven Weinberg, University of Texas; Robert W. Wilson, Harvard University, and Kenneth G. Wilson, Ohio State University.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company