Status Updates From The Road from Los Alamos (M...

"Since preliminary fusion-power engineering is already under way, however, it is a reasonable hope that a prototype of a commercial fusion reactor could operate in about the year 2000, and that fusion might contribute a few percent of the country's power supply by the year 2020" (191).

"When our secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, was asked whether it really would be possible to control forces and make calculated decisions amid the destruction and confusion of nuclear battle, he replied, 'I just don't have any idea. I don't know that anybody has any idea.' Surely it is reckless to stake a nation's survival on detailed plans for something about which no one has any idea" (140).

"The Russians seemed stunned by the theory of the big hole. In private, they took the Americans to task for having spent the last year inventing methods to cheat on a nuclear test cessation agreement. Officially, they spent considerable effort in trying to disprove the theory of the big hole. This is not the reaction of a country that is bent on cheating" (43).

"I had the doubtful honor of presenting the theory of the big hole to the Russians in Geneva in November 1959. I felt deeply embarrassed in so doing, because it implied that we considered the Russians capable of cheating on a massive scale. I think that they would have been quite justified if they had considered this an insult and had walked out of the negotiations in disgust" (43).

Others have to work on weapons, much as they know their terror and abhor their actual use, and have to make their knowledge and opinion known to their government, much as politics may give them a feeling of frustration and divert them from science" (29).

"It is no longer possible for all scientists to return to the 'golden years' of the 1920s, to the ivory tower of pure research. Some of us can do so, and should do so, to the extent that 'big science' *can* live in the confines of an ivory tower.

"Scientists must preserve the precarious balance of armament which would make it disastrous for either side to start a war. Only then can we argue for, and embark on, more constructive ventures like disarmament and international cooperation which may eventually lead to a more definite peace" (29).

"In order to fulfill the function of contributing to the decision-making process, scientists (at least some of them) must be willing to work for government and in government, and they must be willing to work on weapons" (28).

"And we must break the habit, which seems to have taken hold of this nation, of considering every weapon as just another piece of machinery and a fair means to win our struggle with the U.S.S.R." (19).

On the hydrogen bomb: "We would invalidate our cause [opposition to the undemocratic USSR] if we were to use in our fight means that can only be termed mass slaughter" (17).