[Peace-discuss] Physicist Philip Morrison dies

[ppatton at uiuc.edu]

Last of the Outspoken Scientists
by Jennet Conant
 
Some deaths mark the end of an era, as with the passing of
kings, presidents, and certain beloved pop stars, but seldom
do they signal the end of a particular species, the last of
their kind.

With the passing of Philip Morrison last Friday, however, so
close on the heels of Hans Bethe and Robert Bacher, science
has lost the last of the brilliant atomic pioneers who
developed the first nuclear bomb, felt the blast of the
terrifying test explosion at Trinity, and bore witness to the
moral upheaval and unprecedented threat posed by the fiery
display of force on that gray New Mexico morning on July 16, 1945.

Forged in the heat of that indelible explosion and the
horrifying destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a
month later, Morrison, like many of his Los Alamos colleagues,
became a leading advocate of international arms control and a
vigorous critic of the political and military leaders he had
faithfully served.

He belonged to a generation of outspoken citizen scientists
who came of age before the nuclear transformation of warfare,
the repressive politics of the Cold War, and the reliance of
university research laboratories on military funding. The
chastening example of Los Alamos's controversial director, J.
Robert Oppenheimer -- who was investigated by the FBI for more
than a decade before his opposition to the hydrogen bomb led
to a humiliating hearing and his security clearance being
revoked -- has stood for five decades as a lesson to
scientists to keep their heads down and their mouths shut.
Today it would be regarded as foolhardy for any ambitious
young physicist to be an outspoken critic of US nuclear
policy. Not surprisingly, few dissenting voices are heard.

Perhaps Morrison's passionate commitment to public life
belonged to a time when American scientists' experience of war
was not limited to a televised demonstration of shock and awe.
Morrison was one of a handful of atomic experts sent to Japan
to inspect the damage inflicted by their awesome new weaponry,
and he accepted the assignment with the sense that he was
completing his ''long witness to the entire tragedy," from the
bomb's creation to its dreadful execution.

He traveled across the flattened country by train and saw
cities large and small left in smoldering ruins by raids of up
to 1,000 B-29 bombers. In Hiroshima he saw hundreds of wounded
lying along the railway platform and realized that most of
them would eventually die from radiation sickness.

''Yet there on the ground, among all those who had cruelly
suffered and died, there was not all that much difference
between old fire and new," he wrote. ''Both ways brought
unimaginable inferno." The real difference was less in the
nature or scale of the destruction than in the ease of the new
kind of war and ''the chilling fact" that a single bomb could
take out a good-sized city.

Morrison's death, along with that of the other Los Alamos
veterans, leaves not only a void but a troubling silence.
Scientists have become a quiet, docile lot, and it has been
left to the Los Alamos dragons like Morrison to have the
temerity to say again and again what they first warned of as
far back as August 1945.

''Secrecy will not defend us, for skill and atoms are
everywhere," Morrison wrote in Scientific American in August
1995, reaffirming views he held to be as right today as they
were at the end of the war. ''No defenses are likely to make
up for the enormous energy release; it will never be practical
to intercept every bomb, and even a few can bring grave
disaster. No likely working margin of technical superiority
will defend us, either, for even a smaller nuclear force can
wreak its intolerable damage."

Morrison remained convinced that the idealistic goal of
Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr was still the only viable course of
action: a comprehensive international control pact for nuclear
weapons. He was not naive about the diplomatic challenges
involved in achieving such an agreement, and he resolutely
continued to fight an against-the-tide battle for disarmament.
''The task is not simple," he wrote, ''but was any
international goal more important than securing the future
against nuclear war?"

Jennet Conant is the author of ''109 East Palace: Robert
Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos," due to be
published next week.
__________________________________________________________________
Dr. Paul Patton
spring semster 2005
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Biology, Williams College
Williamstown, MA
phone: (413)-597-3518

Research Scientist
Beckman Institute  Rm 3027  405 N. Mathews St.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign  Urbana, Illinois 61801
work phone: (217)-265-0795   fax: (217)-244-5180
home phone: (217)-344-5812
homepage: http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ppatton/www/index.html

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the
source of all true art and science."
-Albert Einstein
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