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Federation of American Scientists

70 years of

and counting Alexander DeVolpi Retired, Argonne National Laboratory

Freeman Dyson Retired, Institute for Advanced Study,

Charles D. Ferguson President, FAS

Richard L. Garwin IBM Fellow Emeritus, IBM J. Watson CHARLES D. FERGUSON Research Center Editor in Chief Frank von Hippel ALLISON FELDMAN Co-Director, Program on and Global Managing and Creative Editor Security, Princeton University

______Robert S. Norris Senior Fellow for Nuclear Policy, FAS

B. Cameron Reed Charles A. Dana Professor of , Alma FAS Public Interest Report College 1725 DeSales Street NW Megan Sethi Suite 600 U.S. Historian and Adjunct Professor, Cal Poly , DC 20036 Pomona and Southern New Hampshire PHONE: 202.546.3300 University FAX: 202.675.1010 Daniel Singer EMAIL: [email protected] Of Counsel, Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & The PIR welcomes letters to the editor. Letters Jacobson LLP should not exceed 300 words and may be edited Jeremy J. Stone for length and clarity. Founder, Catalytic Diplomacy ______

Annual print subscription is $100.00.

An archive of FAS Public Interest Reports is available online at: http://fas.org/publications/public-interest- reports/.

Cover image: U.S. military observe the explosion during Baker, a nuclear test conducted on on July 25, 1946. Source: U.S. Department of Defense. PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE: REINVENTION AND RENEWAL Charles D. Ferguson………………………………………………………………………………..1

THE LEGACY OF THE FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS Megan Sethi………………………………………………………………………………………...5

SCIENTISTS AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS, 1945-2015 S. Norris…………………………………………………………………..…………….....12

GOVERNMENT SECRECY AND CENSORSHIP Alexander DeVolpi……………………………………………………………………………...... 15

FAS HISTORY, 1961-1963 …………………………………………………………………………...………23

FAS IN THE 1960s: FORMATIVE YEARS Daniel Singer………………………………………………………………………………...……26

REVITALIZING AND LEADING FAS: 1970-2000 Jeremy J. Stone……………………..………………………………………………...……………29

FAS’S CONTRIBUTION TO ENDING THE NUCLEAR Frank von Hippel…………………………………………………………………………………35

FAS ENGAGEMENT WITH Richard L. Garwin……………………………………………………………………………...…40

NUCLEAR LEGACIES: PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING AND FAS B. Cameron Reed……………………………………………………………………………....…43

MORE FROM FAS Allison Feldman……………………...……………………………………………………………47

FAS LEADERSHIP AND STAFF..……………………………………………………………52

*Peter Agre * *Sidney Altman Nathan Keyfitz Ali Khademhosseini *Philip W. Anderson *Brian K. Kobilka *Kenneth J. Arrow * * *Roger D. Kornberg * *Robert J. Lefkowitz Drew Berry *Roderick MacKinnon *J. Michael Bishop *Eric S. Maskin *Gunther Blobel Jessica Tuchman Mathews * Roy Menninger Josh Bongard Matthew S. Meselson *Paul Boyer Richard A. Meserve *Michael S. Brown *Mario Molina Tad T. Brunye Stephen S. Morse *Linda B. Buck *Ferid Murad Anne Pitts Carter *Ei-ichi Negishi *Martin Chalfie Franklin A. Neva *Stanley Cohen *Douglas D. Osheroff *Leon N Cooper Aydogan Ozcan *E.J. Corey *Arno A. Penzias Paul B. Cornely *David Politzer * Paul Portney *Johann Deisenhofer Sidney D. Drell George Rathjens Join with more than 60 Nobel laureates on FAS’s Ann Druyan David M. Reif Board of Sponsors in being part of a community Xiangfeng Duan * Paul R. Ehrlich *Richard J. devoted to solving the world’s science and security Demetra Evangelou Jeffrey Sachs problems. George Sara Sawyer *Jerome I. Friedman *Phillip A. Sharp Your contribution helps FAS to… * *K. Barry Sharpless * Stanley K. Sheinbaum *Sheldon L. Glashow Evgenya Simakov Reduce the risks of *Roy J. Glauber Neil Smelser Increase government transparency *Joseph L. Goldstein Marin Soljačić Stop the spread of WMDs *Paul Greengard *Robert M. Solow *David J. Gross * Balance research and security Tina Grotzer *Thomas A. Steitz *Roger C.L. Guillemin * W. Nicholas Haining *Daniel Tsui *Leland H. Hartwell *Harold E. Varmus *Dudley R. Herschbach Robert A. Weinberg https://fas.org/join/ Frank von Hippel *Steven Weinberg * *Eric F. Wieschaus John P. Holdren *Torsten N. Wiesel *H. Robert Horvitz * Peter Huybers *Ahmed Zewail *Eric R. Kandel Leon Lederman*

*Nobel Laureate

Above: Linus and Ava Helen Pauling demonstrating in the streets for peace. San Francisco, CA, 1960s. Source: SCARC Holdings, Libraries. Charles D. Ferguson

rom its inception 70 years ago, the founders and members of the Federation of American Scientists were F reinventing themselves. Imagine yourself as a 26-year old having participated in building the first atomic bombs. You may have joined because your graduate school adviser was going to Los Alamos and encouraged you to come. You may also have decided to take part in the Project because you believed it was your patriotic duty to help America acquire the bomb before Nazi Imagine yourself as a 26-year old Germany did. And even when Hitler and the Nazis were chemist having participated in building defeated in May 1945, you continued your work on the bomb the first atomic bombs… because the war with Japan was still raging in the Pacific. Moreover, by then, you may have felt like Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Scientific Director, that the project was “technically sweet”—you had to see it through to the end.

But when the end came—the atomic bombings of and —in August 1945, you may have had doubts about whether you should have built the bombs, or you may have at least been deeply concerned about the future of humanity in facing the threat of nuclear destruction. What should you then do? About a thousand of the

“atomic scientists” throughout the country at various sites, such as Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Hanford, and began to organize and discuss the implications of this new military technology.1

This political activity was not natural for scientists. Almost all of the founders of FAS were so-called “rank-and-file” scientists in their 20s and 30s. Members of this youth brigade—led by Dr. Willie Higinbotham, who was in his mid- 30s but who looked younger—arrived in Washington. With their “crew cuts, bow ties, and tab collars [testifying] to their youth,” they roamed the halls of Capitol Hill, educating Congressmen and their staffs.2 Newsweek called them the “reluctant lobby.” As a history of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) notes, “Part of their reluctance stemmed from their conviction that the cause of science should not be dragged through the political arena.”3

Fortunately, these scientists persisted and achieved the notable result of successfully lobbying for civilian control of the AEC. While they also wanted Charles D. Ferguson (then Senior Research Associate international control of nuclear energy, they fell short of that goal. However, they for Nuclear at FAS) presenting at the 11th International Summer Symposium on Science and were indefatigable in their educational efforts on promoting peaceful uses of Global Affairs, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, nuclear energy and warning about the dangers of nuclear arms races. July 29, 1999.

Throughout FAS’s seven decades, the organization has transformed itself into various incarnations depending on the issues to be addressed and the resources available for operating FAS. To learn about this continual reinvention, I invite you to read all the articles in this special edition of the Public Interest Report. This edition has an all-star list of writers—many of whom have served in leadership roles at FAS and others who have deep, scholarly knowledge of FAS. These authors discuss many of the accomplishments of FAS, but they also do not shy away from mentioning several of the challenges faced by FAS.

What will FAS achieve and what adversities will occur in the next 70 years? As scientists know, research results are difficult, if not impossible, to predict. However, we do know that the mission of FAS is as relevant as ever, perhaps even more so than it was 70 years ago. Nuclear dangers—the founding call to action—have become more complex; instead of one state in 1945, there are now nine countries with nuclear arms. Instead of a few nuclear reactors in 1945, today there are more than 400 power reactors in 31 countries and more than 100 research reactors in a few dozen countries. Moreover, some non-nuclear weapon states have acquired or want to acquire

1 Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America 1945-47 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 1971). 2 Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939/1946: Volume I, A History of the Atomic Energy Commission (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), p. 448. 3 Ibid.

enrichment or reprocessing facilities that can further sow the seeds of future proliferation of nuclear weapons programs. For these dangers alone, FAS has the important purpose to serve as a voice for scientists, engineers, and policy experts working together to develop practical means to reduce nuclear risks.

FAS has also served and will continue to serve as a platform for innovative projects that shine spotlights on government policies that work and don’t work and how to improve these policies. In particular, for a quarter century, the Government Secrecy Project, directed by Steve Aftergood, has worked to reduce the scope of official secrecy and to promote public access to national security information. FAS has also contributed to the public debate on bio-safety and bio-security. Daniel Singer (one of the contributors to this issue) and Dr. have been active for more than 50 years in bio-ethics. Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg and Dorothy Preslar in the 1990s and early 2000s worked through FAS to develop methods (such as an email list serve, which was cutting edge in the 1990s) to connect biologists and public health experts around the globe to identify, monitor, and evaluate emerging diseases. In recent years, Chris Bidwell, Senior Fellow for Law and Nonproliferation Policy, has led projects examining potential biological attacks or outbreaks and the forensic evidence needed for a court of law or government decision making in countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The Nuclear Information Project, directed by Hans Kristensen, continues its longstanding work on providing the public with reliable information and analysis on the status and trends of global nuclear weapons arsenals. Its famed Nuclear Notebook, co-authored by Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, a senior fellow at FAS, is one of the most widely referenced sources for consistent data about the status of the world’s nuclear weapons.

I believe the greatest renewal and reinvention of FAS has been emerging in the past three years with the creation of networks of experts to work together to prevent threats from becoming global catastrophes. FAS has organized task forces that have provided practical guidance to policy makers about the implementation of the agreement on ’s nuclear program and that have examined the benefits and risks of the use of highly in naval nuclear propulsion. As I look to the next 70 years, I foresee Nuclear energy research travel (cosponsored by FAS) to the Republic of Korea, November 7, 2013, taken at Gyeongju National Museum: From numerous opportunities for FAS to seize by being the bridge left to right: Paul Dickman, Argonne National Laboratory, Lee Kwang- seok, Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, Florence Lowe-Lee, between the technical and policy communities. Global America Business Institute, Everett Redmond, Nuclear Energy Institute, and Charles D. Ferguson, FAS. I am very grateful for the support of FAS’s members and donors and encourage you to invite your friends and colleagues to join FAS. Happy 70th anniversary!

“Statement of the Federation of Atomic Scientists.” Issued by the Hollywood Independent Citizens’ Committee of the Arts, and Professions, 1945. Source: SCARC Holdings, Oregon State University Libraries. Megan Sethi

he Federation of American Scientists (FAS) formed after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, precisely T because many scientists were genuinely concerned for the fate of the world now that nuclear weapons were a concrete reality. They passionately believed that, as scientific experts and citizens, they had a duty to educate the American public about the dangers of living in the . Early in 1946, the founding members of FAS established a headquarters in Washington, D.C., and began to coordinate the political and educational activities of many local groups that had sprung up spontaneously at universities and research facilities across the country. The early FAS had two simultaneous goals: the passage of atomic energy legislation that would ensure civilian control and promote From its very inception, FAS was committed to promoting the broader international cooperation on nuclear energy issues, and the idea that science should be used to education of the American public about atomic energy. In benefit the public. addition, from its very inception, FAS was committed to promoting the broader idea that science should be used to benefit the public. FAS aspired, among other things, “To counter misinformation with scientific fact and, especially, to disseminate those facts necessary for intelligent

conclusions concerning the social implications of new knowledge in science,” and “To promote those public policies which will secure the benefits of science to the welfare.”1

Activist scientists’ idealism regarding the public and its role in a is evident not only in the rhetoric scientists’ use, but also in the choices that they make when establishing their educational program. FAS, concerned with scientists’ inexperience in public education, elected to enlist the assistance of other experts in the fields of advertising and public relations. They also established the National Committee on Atomic Information (NCAI) as an organization that would reach the public through the “opinion makers,” the leadership of public organizations like the American Federation of Labor, the League of Women Voters, and the National Council of Churches. On a local level, scientists’ associations across the country attempted to spread a message that went beyond simply the concern with atomic energy and endeavored to educate the public about science in general.

Early efforts to educate the public were hindered, however, by a basic dilemma facing the scientists’ movement: how to reconcile scientists’ reputation for objectivity with the sort of passionate political activism they attempted to embrace. Scientists believed that their public prestige hinged upon their popular image as objective experts, and so found it very difficult to navigate the murky waters of politics and propaganda. The scientists of FAS had a particular agenda that ran counter to the emerging Cold War, and thus, their message of “no secret, no defense, international control,” while grounded in scientific fact, was also explicitly ideological. FAS scientists were frequently chastised by politicians and the media for abandoning objectivity and for attempting to interject their opinions into the realm of international politics and military strategy. These rebukes, combined with scientists’ natural reticence toward political involvement, contributed to an extended period of conflict and consternation within FAS, beginning in the spring and summer of 1946 and continuing throughout the rest of the decade.

Some of the choices that the scientists’ movement made regarding their program of public education exacerbated this dilemma, and almost led to the collapse of the organization itself. For example, the educational campaign conducted through the NCAI was unable to fully capitalize upon opportunities offered by the American public. The public that contacted the NCAI wanted not only information, but leadership and guidance from scientists. FAS, however, did not quite know what to make of the suggestions and support “ordinary” Americans offered them. During their with social scientists and public relations experts, the scientists of FAS reached the conclusion that in order to educate the American people effectively, they might have to abandon their idealistic notions of the public’s role in democracy and attempt to manipulate the public using propaganda techniques. Activist scientists were uncomfortable with the prospect of abandoning their objectivity and uncertain how to effectively reach the public.

1 Aims of Federation, December 8, 1945, and FAS Constitution, July 21, 1948. Federation of American Scientists Records, Box 1, Folder 1, Special Collections Research Center, Library.

Member associations faced the same dilemma regarding advocacy and objectivity, and confusion over this issue led to the eventual collapse of many local groups. The dilemma of objectivity thus threatened to undermine the Federation.

By the early 1950s, however, FAS was able to maintain a consistent, if somewhat moderated, presence in American political life. The movement as a whole had answered the question of whether scientists could (or should) be concerned with social and political issues in the affirmative. To some extent, the scientists of FAS traded their earlier passion for a new position of explicit neutrality. Given the excitement surrounding the movement’s initial activism, the exchange of evangelism for “dull, hard work” must have seemed disappointing to some scientists and their supporters. However, this shift in tone and methodology empowered FAS to expand its purview beyond simply advocating for atomic energy control and embrace an expanded mission: To bridge the gap between scientists and non-scientists, and to advocate for greater public understanding of science; for openness and transparency in policy- making; and for the health and safety of the world’s population. The national organization worked throughout the 1950s to press for that would serve the public interest, whether it was pushing for fuller disclosure of atomic information and the creation of a lively public sphere, or advocating for caution in nuclear testing and eventual world disarmament.2

Thus, the legacy of FAS can be measured in a variety of ways. Certainly its first and most tangible result was the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which many historians have argued was brought into being largely through the efforts of the organization itself. Had scientists not organized to oppose the initial May-Johnson bill, which left the domestic control of atomic energy largely in military hands, the history of the Cold War might have been very different. However, scientists were forced to compromise on some key principles within the McMahon bill, which allowed the Atomic Energy Act and the AEC to have a much greater military presence than they might have wished. The Federation’s lobbying efforts certainly left an important legacy on the history of American politics during the Cold War, but its success in this area was a qualified one, at best.

FAS also made a significant contribution to the creation of Cold War culture in America.3 Scientists’ use of apocalyptic rhetoric in describing the terrible effects of the atomic bomb brought the frightening reality of nuclear weapons home to millions of Americans. It is reasonable to suggest that without FAS, the American public might have been far less aware of the important issues surrounding atomic energy. Certainly books and films, such as , radio programs, and the innumerable pamphlets, brochures, and newsletters disseminated by FAS and

2 For more information about the early FAS and its activities, see Barnhart, Megan, “To Secure the Benefits of Science to the General Welfare: The Scientists’ Movement and the American Public during the Cold War, 1945-1960,” Ph.D. dissertation, , Los Angeles, 2007; Smith, Alice Kimball, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America, 1947-1947 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). 3 See Boyer, Paul, By the Bomb’s Early : American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

its affiliated groups are material artifacts of how the scientists’ movement contributed to the creation of an atomic culture.

Perhaps the most significant impact of the scientists’ movement lies in its effect upon both individual scientists and the American scientific community as a whole. Without question, individuals who joined FAS in the aftermath of World War II were changed in a number of concrete ways because of their involvement. Many scientists who were active in FAS during its early years, even those who fell away from the organization in the late , retained a conviction in the necessity for atomic energy control, international peace, and the preservation of the environment throughout their professional careers. Some channeled their beliefs into new organizations. For example, , initially one of the most ardent members of FAS, never stopped working for international control, and eventually established his own political action committee, the Council for a Livable World, in 1962.4 Others, such as geochemist and active FAS member , directed their postwar careers toward developing atomic energy for constructive, rather than destructive, purposes. In the 1950s, Brown was a leading organizer of the Pugwash Conferences, a series of international gatherings of scientists to discuss The original edition of One World or None (1946) sold 100,000 copies and was a Times bestseller. nuclear issues and international politics.5 He also influenced a number of It was reprinted in 2007. students, some of whom would later become politically active themselves. For example, leading environmental scientist and public policy expert John Holdren read Brown’s book as a teenager, and later went to Caltech to work with Brown, where he collaborated with other socially conscious scientists at the Environmental Quality Laboratory and the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica. Holdren became active in the 1970s as an environmentalist and critic of and today he is the chief science advisor to President Obama.6 Thus, not only did the scientists of FAS retain their beliefs and channel their activism in other directions beyond the postwar scientists’ movement, but many also influenced the next generation of American scientists toward political activism and the creation of public-oriented science policy.

4 See Hawkins, Helen S., G. Allen Greb, and Gertrude Weiss Szilard, eds., Toward a Livable World: Leo Szilard and the Crusade for Nuclear Arms Control, vol. 3, Collected Works of Leo Szilard (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 425. 5 Revelle, Roger, "Harrison Brown," in Biographical Memoirs, ed. National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1994), 43-44, 49-50. 6 Wellock, Thomas Raymond, Critical : Opposition to Nuclear Power in California, 1958-1978 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 101-02.

FAS also spurred the creation of future groups while serving as a foundation upon which these organizations could build. FAS was really the first major national organization of scientists to consider issues of science and policy; its establishment heralded the arrival of scientists on the American political scene, and signified an emerging consciousness of scientists’ social responsibility that would only grow and deepen in the years to come. In 1949, the Society for Social Responsibility in Science (SSRS) was founded as an organization of scientific workers who explicitly renounced militarism and promised “to...abstain from destructive work and devote himself to constructive work.” Never particularly large or visible in American political life, the SSRS nevertheless attracted the support of several prominent scientists, including .7 Another example was the Scientists’ Institute for Public Information (SIPI), established in 1963. SIPI was a direct outgrowth of the Greater St. Louis Citizen’s Committee for Nuclear Information, established in the late 1950s around the issue of fallout and the banning of nuclear testing. When these issues declined in the early 1960s, SIPI increasingly focused upon a broader environmentalist agenda. Although SIPI was designed to provide scientific and technical information to the public “free from moral and political judgments,” it, like FAS, was oriented around the assumption of scientists’ special responsibility to educate the public.8 Finally, Physicians for Social Responsibility, established in 1961, can also be seen as a direct descendent of FAS. All of these groups work to inform the public and legislators on scientific issues, just as FAS does.9

An even more significant legacy of FAS would come to fruition in the late 1960s with the establishment of groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action (SESPA, later renamed Science for the People). These groups were both direct ideological descendants of FAS in at least one important respect: both organizations explicitly advocated for public education and for the creation of science policy that would serve public interests over those of the government or the military. The UCS arose out of a one-day work stoppage at MIT in the spring of 1969 to protest the War and the University’s complicity in the war. It was a collective effort between students and a number of MIT faculty, including some scientists who had previously been active in FAS. Faculty sponsors of the March 4 activities included Philip Morse, David Shoemaker, Irving Kaplan, and , all of whom had been active in FAS during its early days.10 SESPA also emerged in 1969 at a meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) when a group of graduate students and young faculty became dissatisfied with the failure of APS to oppose the . Eventually changing their name to Science for the People, the group called for using science to benefit the public, and for “empowering the poor with scientific

7 Press release from the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, July 19, 1950. Federation of American Scientists Records, Box 23, Folder 8, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. 8 See Nichols, David, "The Associational Interest Groups of American Science," in Scientists and Public Affairs, ed. Albert H. Teich (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974), 144, Smith, Allen, "Democracy and the Politics of Information: The St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information," Gateway Heritage 17 (1996), Sullivan, Jr., William Cuyler, Nuclear Democracy: A History of the Greater St. Louis Citizens' Committee for Nuclear Information, 1957-1967, Washington University College Occasional Papers No. 1 (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Press, 1982), 70-72. 9 Nichols, "The Associational Interest Groups of American Science," 148-49. 10 Allen, Jonathan, ed., March 4: Scientists, Students, and Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970).

knowledge, expertise and products.”11 Both UCS and SESPA/Science for the People thus followed in the footsteps of FAS, which advocated for science to serve the public interest as early as 1945.

Scientists in recent years have continued the tradition begun by FAS of speaking out against government policies which they believe distort science and mislead the public. On February 18, 2004, UCS released a statement signed by over 60 leading scientists entitled “Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking.” The UCS report accused the George W. Bush Administration of ignoring and/or censoring scientific research that contradicted its political ideology, and of undermining “the quality and independence of the scientific advisory system and the morale of the government’s outstanding scientific personnel.”12 Scientists and the Bush administration clashed over various issues, most frequently and publicly climate change and global warming.13 Bush’s successor, , has generally been considered to be more favorable toward science; however, as a 2010 LA Times article suggests, scientists have continued to raise many of the same concerns under Obama’s tenure as they did during the Bush years.14 Scientists have also Science cannot thrive when increasingly fought with some members of Congress. Most policymakers use policy disagreements as a pretext to attack scientific recently, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric conclusions without public evidence. Administration (NOAA) are contesting the attempts of Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the House science committee, to subpoena email correspondence regarding a ground- breaking climate change study published earlier this year. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and other scientific groups have publicly announced their support for NOAA, arguing that, “Science cannot thrive when policymakers – regardless of party affiliation – use policy disagreements as a pretext to attack scientific conclusions without public evidence.”15 A direct continuity can be seen between the early efforts of FAS and these recent examples of scientists’ political activism. The efforts of UCS, AAAS, and other groups to publicly oppose the alleged manipulation of science by government officials would perhaps never have come about, had FAS not set a precedent for scientists’ political activism.

Perhaps the most important legacy of FAS, then, is how it dealt with the issue of advocacy versus objectivity. In 1945, FAS embarked upon largely uncharted waters; although certainly some scientists before the war acknowledged such a

11 Moore, Kelly. "Doing Good While Doing Science: The Origins and Consequences of Public Interest Science Organizations in America, 1945-1990." Ph. D. Dissertation, University of , 1993. 12 Union of Concerned Scientists, “Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking,” January 23, 2007, http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interference/scientists-signon-statement.html (June 3, 2007). 13 Andrew C. Revkin, “Bush vs. the Laureates: How Science Becomes a Partisan Issue,” New York Times on the Web, October 19, 2004, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E3D9123AF93AA25753C1A9629C8B63&sec=health (June 3, 2007). 14 Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger, “Scientists Expected Obama Administration to be Friendlier,” LA Times (Los Angeles, CA), July 10, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/10/nation/la-na-science-obama-20100711 (November 18, 2015). 15 Letter from AAAS et. al. to Rep. Lamar Smith, November 24, 2015, http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/Intersociety%20NOAA_letter%2011-24-2015.pdf (November 27, 2015).

social responsibility, never before had scientists attempted to engage in American political life on such a large scale. Convinced of the righteousness of their cause and of their duty to educate the public about atomic energy control, the scientists of FAS embraced an ideology which ran counter to the Cold War mentality that was rapidly coalescing in American political and cultural life. By advocating such a relatively controversial agenda, FAS encountered a great deal of opposition among some quarters, and scientists faced the possibility of having to relinquish their image as objective experts. External opposition and internal conflict over the issue of scientific objectivity threatened to undermine the scientists’ movement. FAS was able, however, to move beyond these concerns in the early 1950s, and to embrace their foundational mission of working towards a publicly-oriented science. Its ability to retain its public image as a body of objective experts, while simultaneously advocating for a political agenda, set an important precedent for future generations of American scientists.

the

FAS 70th Anniversary Symposium and Awards Gala

September 28, 2016 Washington, D.C.

The afternoon will feature panel discussions relating to FAS’s mission, future issues and endeavors, and the work to be honored in the evening. The gala will follow, where the , Public Service, and Richard L Garwin Awards will be presented.

For more information on the awards and past recipients, please visit: http://fas.org/about-fas/awards/ Robert S. Norris

n August 8, 2015, twenty-nine scientists sent a letter to O President Obama in support of the agreement with Iran that would block (or at least significantly delay) Iran’s pathways to obtain nuclear weapons. This continues a tradition that began seventy years ago of scientists having a role in educating the public, advising government officials, and helping shape policy Public Meeting Announcement, November 3, 1957. about nuclear weapons. Source: SCARC Holdings, Oregon State University Libraries.

Soon after the end of World War II, scientists mobilized themselves to address the pressing issues of how to deal with the many consequences of atomic energy. Of prime importance was theSource: question SCARC of Holdings, which Oregongovernment State University entity Librarieswould control the research, development and production of atomic weapons, and any peaceful applications. Would it be the military, as it was during World War II, or a civilian agency, such as the newly created Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)?

The Federation of Atomic Scientists was founded on November 1, 1945, as a collection of groups from the major Manhattan Project sites. The following January, it renamed itself the Federation of American Scientists and soon had nearly 3,000 members, many of whom had been part of the Manhattan Project. The standard history on the early years is documented in Alice Kimball Smith’s A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists Movement in America, 1945-47. On almost every milestone throughout the Cold War, scientists weighed in with an opinion – sometimes they were for the issue and sometimes against. This was accomplished through formal federal advisory committees, testimony before Congressional Committees, and articles published in such magazines as The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the Public Interest Report.

In the face of the detonating a nuclear bomb in August 1949, ending an American monopoly, the issue for President Harry Truman was how to respond. The decision to approve or reject development of a bomb involved major American scientists. The Chairman of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee was J. Robert Oppenheimer. He and the majority of the committee members recommended against development of an H- bomb, even referring to it as “a weapon of genocide.” Stronger opposition was stated by a minority that included and I. I. Rabi. Included in their lengthy report, they believed that “it is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.” and his supporters, , , and Luis Alvarez (among others), pressed Truman to proceed. The President’s press release of January 31, 1950 directed the AEC to continue “work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or super-bomb.”

Scientists were later involved in the debate over a limited test ban treaty and whether radiation from atmospheric detonations was harmful. For example, in “ Bombs Held Cheap, Plentiful.” New York Times, November, 18 1946. 1962, FAS member won a Nobel Peace Source: SCARC Holdings, Oregon State University Libraries. Prize for his efforts in mobilizing millions of Americans, especially mothers, against nuclear testing, and in 1962 and 1963, FAS Chairman Freeman Dyson and other members of the FAS Council were very active in educating Congress about the test ban. (See the article in this issue by Professor Dyson.) More recently, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was debated in the Senate in 1999, and although testing by the United States stopped in 1992, the treaty remains un-ratified. For decades from the late 1960s, scientists (particularly many FAS affiliated scientists) have had opinions about strategic arms control treaties with the Soviet Union and Russia, such as SALT and START, as well as the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty of 1987. In the 1980s, FAS affiliated scientists (notably Hans Bethe, Frank von Hippel, and Richard L. Garwin) advised the U.S. government and the larger public about the strategic risks and technical challenges of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or the so-called “Star Wars missile defense system.” More recently, in 2000, FAS mobilized 50 Nobel Laureates to sign a letter, written by Hans Bethe, to advise then-President Bill Clinton to defer deployment of even a limited national missile defense system until the strategic and technical concerns were resolved. President Clinton did defer deployment, but his successor President George W. Bush went ahead with deployment and in parallel, withdrew the United States from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty.

On March 29, 2016, FAS published a letter, signed by 35 Nobel Laureates in the sciences, to the national leaders at the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit, held in Washington, D.C. from March 31 to April 1. The letter urged global action on three technical issues that, if fully resolved, would reduce the risks of nuclear and radiological terrorism close to zero in those three sectors. [See fas.org for a copy of the letter and full list of signatories.]

Throughout its history, the Federation of American Scientists has been an organization where scientists have served on its Board of Directors and the FAS Advisory Council and debated public policy positions on nuclear weapon . From the late 1940s through the 1990s, the Council would regularly issue policy position statements with the intention to advise political leaders. [Refer to previous issues of the FAS Newsletter and the Public Interest Report for news of these statements.]

In the 21st century, FAS remains committed to providing a platform for scientists to advise government officials about nuclear policy. Recently, FAS has been forming task forces and study groups (that include scientists and engineers, as well as legal and political experts) to examine the technical and policy aspects of challenging problems in nuclear security, nonproliferation, and arms control. Also, through the Nuclear Information Project and through publications of the Nuclear Notebook (distributed by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists), FAS continues to serve as the leading source of information on nuclear weapons around the world. In sum, FAS has (and will continue to have) an enduring role in ensuring that scientifically credible information and analysis remain an essential part of the public debate.

Alexander DeVolpi

rom its beginning, the Federation of American Scientists has been immersed in policies and issues regarding F government secrecy and censorship. By the time World War II broke out, the fission process had been observed, followed by detection of the , and recognition of induced uranium fission. In the early 1940s, some scientists in the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and Germany realized the potential for nuclear weapons.

The three atomic bombs detonated in the summer of 1945 were created and assembled at secret U.S. government sites by a mixed pedigree of scientists, engineers, and military officers. The decision to drop two of them on Japanese cities was determined by military and political events then occurring, particularly in the final year of World War II.

Our Soviet wartime ally, excluded from the American, British, and Canadian nuclear coalition, used its own network to remain informed. Well-placed sympathizers and spies conveyed many essential details of nuclear-explosive development. Through this network, Stalin learned of the Manhattan Project and the test. As the German invaders began to retreat from Soviet borders, he established his own secret nuclear development project. Stalin also turned shortcomings of American secrecy to his political advantage, notably his entering the war against Japan at the very last minute in order to ensure a voice in the final post-war territorial settlement.

These cited events are detailed in a pair of well-documented volumes, Nuclear Shadowboxing: Contemporary Threats from Cold War Weaponry (2004-2005), resulting from a post-Cold-War collaboration of four coauthors: a former Soviet weapons scientist, an nuclear-engineer emigre who had served in the Soviet Navy, a Canadian-born nuclear , and myself. It is replete with references and documentation. Excerpts can be accessed on Google Books. Later I adapted and updated much of that material into a more readable, less academic trilogy of books, Nuclear Insights: The Cold War Legacy (2009), available on Amazon.

A memoir now in draft stage, Cold War : Nuclear Arms and Civil Rights, recalls my experiences with information control and government secrecy. The draft includes a detailed history of the Cold War from an activist’s viewpoint.

Immediately after the war, American policymakers made a profound miscalculation that the United States would have an enduring nuclear monopoly (safeguarded by secrecy). But, in response to the atomic bombing of Japan, the Soviets accelerated their own program to make a nuclear weapon, getting their first reactor in operation before the end of 1946. Despite Western efforts to control materials, information, and scientists, the Soviets succeeded with testing their own nuclear-explosive device in 1949, an achievement that profoundly influenced the ensuing Cold War.

By the 1950s, the Cold War became a prominent factor that quickly led to the , the first space travel by humans, construction of radiation-fallout shelters, and deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Britain, , and China became members of the “nuclear club,” and both the USSR and the United States tested thermonuclear weapons. Air, missile, and undersea launch platforms for launching nuclear weapons came under development, and some began deployment. By the early 1960s, the long Vietnam War had begun.

Although the attempted to develop a policy for international control of nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union and the United States couldn’t reach an agreement. This was but one factor in what turned out to be a Cold War ratcheting, largely between the two superpowers. Citizens everywhere saw both as a massive threat and as a source of useful energy. In the 1960s, the weapons states carried out numerous nuclear-explosive tests and the total number of nuclear weapons grew rapidly. Atmospheric testing generated radioactive fallout, contributing to a public debate about nuclear arsenals. The (1962) brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Paradoxically, this confrontation caused the Soviet Union to build more missiles, while also creating in both the United States and the Soviet Union for international control of nuclear weapons. The United States began harnessing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, and nuclear-power plant construction began worldwide.

Concurrently, considerable domestic and international public opposition evolved against nuclear-arsenal expansion. Discomforted by lawful dissent, the U.S. government often resorted to information management and domestic spying. Human rights in the West were frequently disregarded in the name of national security. In the USSR, essentially all dissent was quashed by heavy-handed dictatorial methods.

Proxy wars began to break out around the globe, as well as prolonged government psychological campaigns, propaganda dissemination, and espionage. The Cold War gradually became a chronic, largely East-West conflict. With political hostility characterized by threats, propaganda, and other measures, it was pursued primarily through economic pressure, political actions, propaganda exercises, extra-legal acts, and proxy wars (often waged through surrogate nations and client states). Some events led to an increasing role for government secrecy, censorship, and surveillance.

The United States, while proceeding with a robust nuclear-weapons testing and improvement program, simultaneously embarked on peaceful applications of nuclear energy, such as civilian power and medical radioisotopes. Proposals ( for Peace) were made for sharing and controlling the international “It Takes Lots of Courage.” York Gazette and Daily. September, 20 1962. Source: SCARC Holdings, Oregon State University Libraries. development of non-military applications of nuclear fission. These proposals had been influenced by a secret June 1945 report conveyed to President Roosevelt: The , written in part by , later the founding editor of the journal that became known as The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, conveyed a plea against dropping the atomic bomb on Japan; it also warned of a possible post-war arms race and a destructive nuclear war. Just one month after the atomic bombings of Japan, a secret (“classified”) U.S. planning document was formulated, embodying a nuclear first-use policy if war broke out with the Soviet Union. Secrecy provided a curtain for sustaining an arms race: hidden behind that veil were deliberate fear-generating government tactics. Overly trusting publics were unaware of the implications (and even the existence) of fateful decisions.

In a classified 1948 document (NSC-20), the United States overhyped the perceived Soviet threat to security as both “dangerous and immediate.” A nuclear-warfare policy was recommended for dealing with the Soviet Union and with the potential spread of . The U.S. Strategic Air Command designated major Soviet urban-industrial concentrations as nuclear-bomb targets. Had such attacks happened, that could have largely foreclosed political settlement because Moscow and many other cities would have been obliterated. And, conversely, the United States might have been “decapitated” by nuclear retaliation, losing its leadership and a substantial number of inhabitants.

Now, among the less-tangible Cold War remnants are excessive secrecy and surveillance. Those policies and practices were once deemed necessary in controlling dangerous information, especially on how to make nuclear weapons.

However, carefree strategies of nuclear brinkmanship were also concealed by censorship. And domestic spying was not uncommon — against those outside of, or opposed to, government policies.

A major challenge for security in our new millennium is to lessen the still-present danger of deliberate, accidental, or unauthorized use of nuclear explosives. Even now, although East-West belligerency is over, the quantitative and qualitative nuclear-arms race has not entirely died out; nor are arsenals being drawn down at a pace consistent with the newfound security that came with the end of superpower confrontation. Many alarming and frightening situations have occurred.

Early in the Cold War, scientific organizations were divided on the potential benefits of civil defense and emergency planning. Choosing to promote arms control rather than war planning, the Federation of American Scientists, along with its chapters throughout the United States, began to speak out against the frantic and illusory appeal of civil defense in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Under the leadership of Argonne physicist David R. Inglis (later chairman of the national organization), the Chicago FAS chapter articulated the limitations of civil defense. The Argonne group engaged in detailed analysis of a public discussion of advance preparations and emergency responses in the event of nuclear war.

In our westernmost state, home of the Seattle FAS Chapter, a legislative committee was looking for communists. The following information, found in an FBI file released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), shows that at least one state government had its own investigative committee, which acted in coordination with Congress:

In connection with his testimony before the Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, State of Washington, on July 20, 1948, Dr. J.B. Mathews, former Research Director for the Special Committee on Un- American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives [HUAC], submitted a list of “COMMUNIST Front Organizations,” which included the FEDERATION OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS.

Senator Joseph R. McCarthy became the leading anti-communist crusader of the late 1940s and early 1950s; he made the U.S. Senate a forum for charges similar to those being levied in the House. Senator McCarthy’s campaign against communist “subversion” ruined many careers and contributed substantially to the anti-communist hysteria of the time. His tactics gave rise to the abiding and derogative term “McCarthyism.”

In 1950, McCarthy specifically denounced FAS as being “heavily infiltrated with communist fellow-travelers.” McCarthy received information directly from J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI. One of Hoover’s agents later admitted that: “We were the ones who made the McCarthy hearings possible. We fed McCarthy all the material he was using.” Here’s one explanation for this controversial period:

With the war going badly in Korea and communist advances in Eastern and in China, the American public was genuinely frightened about the possibilities of internal subversion....

[In the House of Representatives], fearing communist infiltration, HUAC sought the return of nuclear research to military control, but in a classic turf battle, the Atomic Energy Commission attempted to protect the civil rights of its scientific staff. During this period, anonymous panels remained arbitrary and capricious, in one case denying clearance because of membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It also became difficult to hold international scientific meetings, because many foreign invitees were denied visas, and passports for overseas travel by Americans were withheld. The FAS Los Angeles Chapter became involved in these controversies.

A common tactic used by investigators was to cut a deal by pressuring a suspect to inform on others: if the suspect did not give names, he or she would be thrown in jail or branded as seditious, and could not find work at all.

Government surveillance extended from the federal to the local level. Simply joining an organization was enough to trigger a seemingly ominous information entry in government dossiers. For example, using FOIA, I found that my being a member of FAS caused the FBI to add that piece of information to the (once-secret) file they kept on me.

Among those speaking out against McCarthyism were I.F. Stone, a journalist, who published a weekly journal, and his son, Jeremy J. Stone (a PhD mathematician), who headed FAS from 1970-2000.

Even before the end of World War II, the government’s fear of communist spying spread into many sectors of public life. American communists were distrusted as possible “subversives.” In June 1945, the FBI arrested six people associated with Amerasia (a journal about Asian affairs), accusing them of espionage on behalf of the Chinese communists. Two of the six were convicted of unauthorized possession of documents.

In 1947, when pressed by HUAC, President Truman imposed a Loyalty Order on all federal employees and ordered FBI security checks, including applicants for AEC fellowships. In 1950 an FBI investigation of Albert Einstein was opened, to find out whether he might be a communist or Soviet agent.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the wartime scientific head of the Manhattan Project, is

Leslie R. Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1940s. often called the “father of the atomic bomb” for his wartime role. But he provoked Source: SCARC Holdings, the ire of many politicians with his outspoken opinions, and his security clearance Oregon State University Libraries. was revoked after a much-publicized hearing in 1954.

As early as 1947, the Justice Department considered prosecuting Leo Szilard for violating the outdated 1799 Logan Act, which “prohibited private citizens’ correspondence with a foreign government [the Soviet Union] on a subject of dispute between it and the United States.” Ironically, Szilard was — perhaps more than anyone — responsible for getting America to develop the atomic bomb that expedited Japan’s capitulation and gave the United States immense military superiority over the Soviet Union after World War II. Upon being threatened by the Justice Department, Szilard made an appeal to scientific societies, where he invoked “the principle of the lesser evil,” reminding them how German scientists gradually caved to Hitler’s purge of Jews.

Intensive HUAC focus was on Hollywood, perceived as a shaper of public thought, but other targets were government workers, college professors, artists, musicians, gays, and Jews. During 1947, HUAC victimized the “Hollywood Ten,” a group of screenwriters and directors. Targets were asked to “take the pledge”: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” Many who refused on principle were blacklisted by movie producers.

On 1 November 1945, the loosely organized Federation of Atomic Scientists in Chicago had become the Federation of American Scientists. That same year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was established by scientists, engineers, Screenshot from the , Legacy of the Hollywood Blacklist (1987), and other professionals of the Manhattan Project who consisting of protestors opposing the 1950 jailing of the Hollywood Ten. feared the horrible effects of these new weapons and devoted themselves to warning the public about the consequences. Those early activists also worried about military secrecy, dreading that leaders without the full and knowledgeable consent of their citizens might draw their countries into increasingly dangerous confrontations.

The early history of FAS was described by its first Chairperson, Willy Higinbotham, thanks to his daughter, Julie Schletter. [Please see the Spring 2015 issue of the Public Interest Report for in-depth coverage, available on fas.org.]

Alamogordo. Having witnessed the first nuclear test at Alamogordo, Higinbotham decided to help prevent a .

Almost everyone in Los Alamos was involved in constructing the weapon or designing and installing measurement instruments for the test, with his group ... involved in the latter. Because of a last-minute call from Oppie [Scientific Director J. Robert Oppenheimer], Higinbothm was invited to the test site. He reports only remembering Edward Teller as one of the others in “our select group.”

It was clear that the bomb worked as predicted.... Now I had to face the existence of nuclear weapons. It was a paralyzing realization.... All I could think of was that the Soviet Union would surely develop nuclear weapons and might blow us off the map. [A] bomb, such as the one I had seen, would wipe out any city.

The best defense against bombers in Europe had been to shoot down ten percent of the attackers. I came to believe that attacking the US with nuclear weapons would not make sense even to an evil man like Stalin. (In my mind) at least the US did not seem to be threatened.

Protests by Scientists. Higinbotham wrote about his experience at Los Alamos in organizing scientists in favor of international control of atomic energy:

When General Groves said that we could keep the secret for 15 years, and Congressmen told scientists to design a defense, we held a big meeting and started to draft a [protest] statement for the public.

Strangely, I don’t remember many discussions of the implications of nuclear weapons at Los Alamos before the end of the war.... Scientists at Oak Ridge and Chicago were organizing and we began to hear from them.

The first large meeting was attended by about sixty people on August 20th [1945]. All agreed that we should form an organization and the question of whether it should consider scientists’ welfare as well as the social implications of nuclear energy, was discussed. Recommendations for the future of this project and of atomic power are being made. Before the next meeting had been held, it was clear to everyone that the international control of atomic energy was the vital issue and should be the only issue with which the organization was concerned.

The meeting on August 30th was attended by about five hundred individuals. They overwhelmingly approved a motion:

We hereby form an organization of scientists, called temporarily, the Association of Los Alamos Scientists (ALAS). The object of this organization is to promote the attainment and use of scientific and technological advances in the best interests of humanity. We recognize that scientists, by virtue of their special knowledge, have, in certain spheres, special social responsibilities beyond their obligations as individual citizens. Except for Edward Teller, we all agreed that the message was that (1) there is no secret (scientists anywhere could figure out how to make atomic weapons now that we had demonstrated that they are possible). In addition, (2) there is no defense that can prevent great devastation by atomic weapons, and (3) we must have “world control.”

FAS Goals. Willy was elected the first chairman of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) in January 1946. Five questions immediately became the center of FAS attention: What would the atomic bomb do in the event of another war? What defense would be possible? How long would it take for any other country to produce an atomic bomb?

What would be the effect of an atomic arms race on science and technology? Assuming that international control of the bomb is agreed upon, is such control technically feasible?

Dave Inglis. The nominal leader of our Argonne lunchtime discussion group had been recruited for the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, to help build the first atomic bomb. After the war, Dave joined Argonne as a theorist in the Physics Division. He became an advocate of because of the growing concern about the ongoing spread of atomic weapons around the world. In the late 1950s, he became chairperson of FAS, and pleaded in public and on Capitol Hill for a controlled worldwide ban of nuclear weapons.

The Chicago FAS chapter migrated to suburban Argonne as its members commuted when nuclear-reactor activities originally at the University of Chicago started to expand and flourish at the new laboratory site. One of the first prominent issues that the Argonne scientists discussed and vocalized was the proposed siting of anti-ballistic missile installations near cities, like in the Chicago suburbs where some of the members lived.

Because the Argonne group consisted of who had worked in the Manhattan Project, as well others who shared concern about nuclear weapons being exploded over or near cities, members were able to present and explain those messages to the public. The Argonne group was heavily involved in defeat of that U.S. government ABM siting plan. Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson, APS Meeting (1963).

was chairman of FAS from 1962-63. Fifty-year-old memories are hopelessly unreliable and historically worthless. I Fortunately, my mother preserved the letters that I wrote to her describing events as they happened. The letters are reliable and give glimpses of history undistorted by hindsight. Instead of trying to recall fading memories, I decided to quote directly from the letters. Here are two extracts. The first describes an FAS Council meeting in 1961 before I became chairman. The second describes conversations in 1962 after I became chairman.

[Letter from Princeton, February 12, 1961]. The exciting day was Saturday February 4 when we had our big blizzard. I had two meetings in New York that day. In the morning I was chairman of a session of the American Physical Society. And in the afternoon we had a Council meeting of FAS, the political organization which tries to push the government into doing reasonable things where nuclear weapons are concerned... I came full of curiosity and determined to make my voice heard.

The meeting started predictably with a discussion of the Test Ban. Many of them spoke suggesting ways and means of getting the public more enthusiastic about the Test Ban... At this point I decided to speak up. I said they could do whatever they liked about the Test Ban but that I considered they were wasting a completely disproportionate amount of effort on it. I said that to me the general problems of disarmament and the use of the existing weapons seemed hundreds of times more important than any...test-ban. So they did then move on to talk about disarmament. They talked a long time and in the end agreed to pass a long resolution pointing out the desirability of general disarmament... At this point I again made a speech saying that I was quite unsatisfied with vague generalities, and that I considered FAS ought to be discussing some real proposal to change drastically the existing international dangers. They replied, “Well, what do you have in mind for us to do?” And I said, rather on the spur of the moment, not having anything prepared, “Let us see first of all whether this council can agree or disagree with the following statement: We urge the government to decide and publicly declare as its permanent policy that the USA shall not use nuclear weapons of any kind under any circumstances except in response to the use of nuclear weapons by others. We urge that the military plans and deployments of the USA and its allies be brought as rapidly as possible into a condition consistent with the over-all policy of not using nuclear weapons first.”

I was rather taken aback by the response to this. It was overwhelming. I had myself been feeling for some time that our greatest danger at present comes not from having nuclear weapons but from being committed to using them in stupid and disastrous ways. To most of the council this seemed to be quite a new idea. Not one of them spoke seriously against my proposal. In the end it was voted on and carried unanimously... It remains to be seen what impression this action of FAS will make upon the public. It could conceivably be important. Of course FAS is not as influential as it would wish to be. But we do have good connections with people in high places.

[Excerpt from public announcement of FAS council resolution] “We are aware that weighty arguments can and will be brought against our position. The present policy of deploying troops and ships armed with tactical nuclear weapons, without any publicly announced doctrine to govern the use of these weapons, has much to be said for it. Above all, the present policy has worked. It has preserved some kind of peace, and it has successfully defended Western Europe and Formosa, for the last ten years. We are proposing to abandon what has in the past been our chief shield against aggression in these areas. We are proposing to destroy the beneficent power which nuclear weapons have had to prevent non-nuclear wars from starting. Opponents of our resolution can rightly say that we advocate moving from a situation of proved short-term stability into a new region of precarious equilibrium and unknown risk. Our answer to these arguments cannot be brief or simple. Basically, we believe that our nuclear shield in Europe will become ineffective, that our nuclear deterrence of non-nuclear war will become illusory, as the next few years go by. In these circumstances the most dangerous policy will be to continue to behave as if the shield and the deterrent were still adequate. Purely from the military point of view, we shall be in a far stronger position in five years’ time if we now publicly admit our need for a non-nuclear fighting power. If we officially abandon the crumbling shield of nuclear defense in Europe, there is a reasonable chance that we shall have the courage and the will to create an effective non-nuclear shield in its place. This is the meaning of the second sentence in the FAS resolution.”

I struggled back to Princeton through massive snow-drifts and arrived home at 3 a.m. For several days after the council meeting, the New York newspapers were filled with stories and pictures of the record-breaking blizzard. Not a word about FAS or about No First Use. We never succeeded in igniting a serious national debate about No First Use. Fifty years later, I still see a commitment to a No First Use policy as a crucial first step toward a saner world.

[Letter from Princeton, April 26, 1962]. It has been a remarkable experience to be chairman of FAS. We are such a small group of people (2000 members altogether) and we are mostly concerned with FAS only in our spare moments. So it is astonishing to discover how seriously the people high in the government take our opinions. My chairmanship seems to be a key to open all doors. In three days I have been in turn to talk with the second-in-command of the Space Agency, the second-in-command of the Disarmament Agency, and Mr. Reuther the boss of the United Automobile Workers. All three interviews were arranged by our man in Washington, Mr. Daniel Singer, who is the organizer of our activities. Chairmen come and go but Mr. Singer remains. The reason why we have such an influence is mainly that we have used our influence wisely in the past. For example, last year FAS put effective pressure on Congress by convincing a number of Congressmen to establish the Disarmament Agency. Naturally the people who are now running the Disarmament Agency are grateful to us.

I saw the Space Agency people mainly to appeal to them to put more money and effort into University research and student fellowships... With the Disarmament Agency man (Frank Long) I talked mainly to arrange to work in his organization during the summer in the most effective way... The most impressive by far of these gentlemen is Walter Reuther... He is a phenomenally successful union leader with 1250000 men in his union, and at the same time an intellectual and a social philosopher with all kinds of ideas for the reform of society.... He had a very big part in getting Kennedy elected president (the UAW put all its muscle behind Kennedy’s campaign) and he now is able to talk to Kennedy with great freedom. He also spent two years in his youth building a car factory in Russia. The Russians bought the tools from the Ford Company and Reuther went over to teach the Russians how to operate them. He has strong views about Russia and gave Khrushchev a bad time when Khrushchev was invited to supper with the union leaders in 1960.

Reuther is now deeply concerned about disarmament, understands that disarmament is essential, and is trying to get the government to make plans ready so that disarmament can be done without throwing half his men out of work. Reuther is convinced that this can be done if only the government is not afraid to face up to the size of the problem. We agreed on certain measures of collaboration so that his union can act as a channel for some of our information. Altogether, very encouraging.

After my term as FAS chairman ended in 1963, I spent another summer at the Disarmament Agency and took part in two historic events, testifying for FAS at the Senate hearings in favor of ratification of the Test-Ban Treaty, and marching with Martin Luther King to the Lincoln Memorial to hear him tell us of his dream for the future. I left the office of chairman in the capable hands of my friend Robert Wilson, with feelings of pride for my modest contribution to its message. I was lucky to be chairman at one of the high points of American history, with no premonition of the disasters soon to come in , Memphis, and Vietnam.

Daniel Singer

am sharing some memories of the period 1960-1970 when I served as FAS General Counsel. I start by echoing I Freeman Dyson’s caution that 50-year old memories are unreliable. For anyone interested in FAS history, visit http://fas.org/publications/public-interest-reports/ for a complete record of FAS Newsletters, beginning with the first publication on March 1, 1946. It’s a great trip down memory lane.

I first learned about FAS in late 1958 when my wife, Dr. Maxine Singer, a molecular biologist employed by NIH, shared with colleagues her concerns about a range of science-related public issues. I was then a young lawyer in the small DC office of a larger NY-based general practice firm; the DC office had substantial experience representing, among many other clients, American Indian tribes in matters before Federal agencies and on Capitol Hill.

At that time, FAS volunteers published a newsletter 8-10 times a year to keep its members (approximately 2000) informed about matters of concern to scientists – e.g., radiation hazards, nuclear weapons, passport denials, government secrecy, loyalty oaths, and civil liberties for scientists – in anticipation that scientists would take direct policy to influence governmental action. For several years, the FAS Newsletter was assembled on our dining room table and, willy-nilly, I became part of the process.

Recall, if you can, that in December 1953, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, chaired by Admiral , withdrew the security clearance of J. Robert Oppenheimer. In late 1945, the clearance was formally revoked after a hearing. Oppenheimer was a distinguished physicist who was then the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study and chair of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee. During World War II, he was the Scientific Director of the Manhattan Project and was in every way a major force behind America’s successful wartime effort to build the atom bomb.

Members of the Atomic Energy Commission, April 26, 1954. Extracted from “U.S. Ponders a Scientist’s Past,” Life magazine. Source: SCARC Holdings, Oregon State University Libraries.

In November 1958, President Eisenhower nominated Strauss, to the dismay and outrage of FAS members and many others, to be the interim Secretary of Commerce. When Senate confirmation hearings were held the following spring, several FAS leaders testified against confirming Strauss. In June of 1959, by a vote of 46-49, the full Senate declined to confirm Strauss. [For a detailed history, see “Green, The Oppenheimer Case: A Study in the Abuse of Law,” 33 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1977.]

That political triumph persuaded the FAS leadership that FAS needed enhanced representation in DC. In 1960, FAS retained my law firm and I became the FAS General Counsel. One of my tasks was to arrange appointments with Congressional staff and Executive Branch officials for FAS leaders visiting in Washington. The small, separate FAS office was closed and all membership and administrative functions were thereupon transferred to my law office.

By 1960, the test ban treaty and creation of an Arms Control and Disarmament Agency had been added to the FAS agenda and the Kennedy-Nixon presidential campaign was underway. In addition to providing administrative support for all FAS activities relating to membership, dues collection, Council meetings, officer elections, chapter support, and relations with other like-minded organizations (e.g., SANE), we organized a series of breakfast briefings by FAS members to inform Members of Congress and Congressional staffers about, and stress the need for, an official focus for arms control activity – an idea that found support among both Democrats and Republicans. Shortly before the 1960 election, such an agency was created by Executive Order within the State Department and was continued after Kennedy’s inauguration. Among Kennedy’s first White House appointments was MIT professor, Jerome Wiesner, as his Science Advisor. Wiesner was instrumental in responding positively to quiet efforts by FAS and others to organize an official apology to Oppenheimer for the AEC’s humiliating 1953 withdrawal of Oppenheimer’s access to any classified information. Those efforts proved successful when Kennedy, in mid-1963 (prior to his assassination), announced that Oppenheimer would receive the Fermi Award. The Award was presented by President Johnson in December 1963 in a small White House ceremony. The December 1963 FAS Newsletter reported:

Fermi Award to Oppenheimer Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer received the , the AEC’s highest honor, from President Johnson at a White House ceremony on . In presenting the $50,000 award, the President praised Dr. Oppenheimer as a “leader” who by his example had set “high standards of 0achievement” for the nation. The presentation came just ten years from the date of President Eisenhower’s order suspending Dr. Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Those present at the ceremony included members of the AEC, Congressmen, past winners of the Fermi award, and a representative of FAS.

During the 1960s, FAS maintained its interest in keeping lines of communication open between U.S. and Soviet scientists; FAS members were deeply engaged in the Pugwash conferences and in assuring that U.S. scientists could communicate readily about science and science-related matters with colleagues abroad. The list of FAS worries, both at home and internationally, included long-range missiles and anti-ballistic missile defense, tactical nuclear weapons, CBW, and accidental wars. And on the horizon were issues related to newly-appreciated powers of scientists in biological sciences. At the December 1968 annual meeting of the AAAS in Dallas, FAS put together a day-long symposium entitled “Genetic Technology – Some Public Considerations.”

By the mid-1960s, FAS was sufficiently stable (both in terms of membership and finances) so that in November 1969, FAS began a search for a full-time Executive Director who would revitalize the organization – increasing the membership and broadening its agenda. On July 1, 1970, Jeremy J. Stone assumed that position, consolidated operations in a new office on Capitol Hill, and helped keep FAS focused on its original mission – to assess and advise concerning “the impact of science on national and world affairs.”

Jeremy J. Stone

hen, in 1970, I descended from the FAS Executive Committee to become the chief executive officer, FAS W had 1,000 members and an annual budget of $7,000 per year. The organization was very near death. During my 30 year tenure, FAS became a famous, creative, and productive organization.

In arms control, our ideas were presented at three Washington-Moscow Summits: Carter and Brezhnev; Reagan and Gorbachev; and Clinton and Premier Stepashin (as described later below).

To further improve U.S.-Soviet relations, we catalyzed 26 Congressional delegations to visit Moscow and played a key role in catalyzing CIA-KGB cooperation in matters of common concern, such as and non-proliferation.

In nuclear policy, we developed the legal case that presidential first use of nuclear weapons without Congressional authorization was unlawful. We found a way to lobby the World Court in its case on the legality of the use of nuclear weapons, which helped to produce a kind of “Delphic tie.”

Early on, we released a critique of the Congressional testimony of Dr. John Foster, Director of Defense, Research and Engineering in the Pentagon, who had argued that there was an “R&D gap” that favored the Soviet Union. Signed by four high FAS officials with Defense Department experience, our rejoinder received much press, as well as a Herblock Cartoon, and prompted an investigation by the R&D Subcommittee of Senate Armed Services.

The Nixon Administration, through its office of dirty tricks, launched a counterattack led by Charles Colson. He persuaded columnist Joseph Alsop to smear me in the 600 newspapers of the LA Times syndicate. The smear took the form of outing me as the son of left-wing journalist I.F. Stone and said I was attacking Johnny Foster “because the Russians wanted to get him out of the way.”

I survived the attack only because 75 percent of scientists are liberals, and my members and officials really did not care what Alsop said. The whole episode resembled the real life movie Fair Game in which Vice President Cheney’s office outed Joseph Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent, driving them both out of town in retaliation for Wilson’s criticism of President George W. Bush. But it did put me on Nixon’s “enemy list” as the youngest of about 20 famous and noteworthy academics.

In human rights, we were successful in pressuring U.S. scientific societies, including the National Academy of Sciences, to create committees on human rights of colleagues abroad. In particular, we defended the human rights of scientists in the Soviet Union, including those of winner for peace, , through five of his hunger strikes.

In domestic legal issues, we stopped an illegal CIA mail-opening operation and persuaded a judge of a way to prevent prior restraint of the press in a case involving hydrogen bomb secrets.

In high level domestic politics, we catalyzed the resolution of a conflict between and whether he had to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. We also produced a famous letter from John Dean to me that forced President Nixon to let John Dean testify. A Washington Post editorial called our effort a “footnote in history.”

In a press release, we were the first to announce ’s interest in astrology.

For an environmental issue, at the request of , we investigated and defused urgent predictions of two famous scientists that an East Coast earthquake was impending. This work is described in my memoir Every Man Should Try: Adventures of a Public Interest Activist (PublicAffairs, 1999). In his introduction of the Russian edition of this book, the famed Russian Academician Evgeny P. Velikhov wrote:

Jeremy’s effectiveness has really been impressive. He led only a very small organization [i.e., Federation of American Scientists], whose professional staff grew from one to only a half-dozen over thirty years. Yet he is able to show, in these Chapters about his own efforts, that he could compete—in influencing the political life of his own country and of the whole world—with the most powerful governmental entities and with non-governmental organizations whose budgets were many times higher than his own.

The former head of the State Department Policy Planning Committee, Morton Halperin, commented, “Jeremy's influence has been as great as that of all but the most senior figures in government.” During this period, FAS came to have a budget of about $1.4 million in today’s dollars (still small compared to many other organizations), but it had the sponsorship of about 100 famous officials, including 57 Nobel Prize winners.

At the beginning, critics whispered that FAS was just “Jeremy and a telephone” because I operated out of a one-room office and made a business of rounding up famous FAS sponsors and/or the FAS executive committee to sign off on my petitions and testimony. In fact, this was my modus operandi throughout the next 30 years.

During this period, I wrote most of the 300 monthly newsletters and addressed diverse subjects of science and society. But I secured experts to endorse my editorials on concrete actions and left my name off the newsletter. I testified before Congress twenty-five times, mostly before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but also the Senate and House Armed Services Committee and some others. Membership FAS Staff Photo, April 1987. peaked at only about 5,000 through petitions sent through direct mail but it didn’t seem to .

In the 1980s, we recruited a small but capable staff, including John Pike on technical issues of global security, Steve Aftergood on Secrecy, David Albright on non-proliferation, and Lora Lumpe on arms sales. Their substantial achievements await their own books and are not included here. We purchased a few adjacent Capitol Hill townhouses to provide them with offices and to anchor the organization’s finances.

In the sixties, during five annual summer trips to the Soviet Union before joining FAS, my wife, B.J., and I had pioneered the effort of lobbying Moscow to start official talks with the United States on an ABM Treaty – a treaty idea I developed at the Hudson Institute in 1963. This became the most important treaty of the Cold War and we defended it for three decades. When Ronald Reagan proposed Star Wars, John Pike became the most visible opponent of Reagan’s plan (which threatened the continuance of the treaty). Scientific Exchange with China and Peaceful Unification with . In 1972, a major accomplishment was taking the first scientific delegation to China, a month after Nixon, and catalyzing the return of Chinese scientists to America in a quiet important negotiation in Beijing. In 1996, we invented a new approach to unifying Taiwan with the Mainland that was applauded in both Beijing and Taipei.

Vienna Summit Proposal. In June, 1979, President Carter secretly presented our SALT III proposal, entitled Shrink SALT II, to President Leonid Brezhnev at the Summit.

Geneva Summit Proposal. In 1985, our bear-hug strategy for keeping disarmament going in the face of Russian fears of the Reagan Star Wars program was proposed by Reagan at the . We had earlier sold the strategy to the Russian leadership in a Moscow briefing. The idea was that both sides would engage in major reductions of intercontinental ballistic missiles subject to neither violating the ABM Treaty. Strobe Talbott, in The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace, reports on how we advanced this proposal in both Moscow and Washington.

Washington Summit Proposal. In 1999, we persuaded Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, during a meeting in Moscow, to offer the U.S. the right to build a small ABM in return for at 1,000 strategic missiles. This proposal was designed to eliminate first strike threats. Our slogan was: “Truncate the Sword and the Shield Becomes Harmless.” Stepashin secured his Government’s approval and offered this to President Clinton in a private meeting in the Oval office. Clinton turned it down, saying “Vice President Gore is running for President and he doesn’t want any trouble.” The Administration suppressed the fact that this dramatic proposal had been offered.

Resolving the Cambodian . To prevent the return of the genocidal in , we revealed, in a New York Times op-ed, “Secret U.S. War in Cambodia,” that the CIA was running a secret war against the Government (which included the Khmer Rouge forces). By persuading Senator Alan Cranston to open hearings on Cambodia, we defeated an effort by Congressman Stephen Solarz to arm the Cambodian insurgents, which would have drawn us militarily into another Indochinese war.

After securing international agreement from Russia, , and China, we induced the four Cambodian factions to work together to end the civil war in a novel way. We then invited Premier Hun Sen of Cambodia to Washington, as a guest of FAS, where he managed to secure $250,000,000 from Congress to fund the Cambodian election that eventually settled the war.

Working to Save Peru from Sendero Luminoso. Two years were spent working to secure the arrest of Sendero Luminoso’s Abimael Guzman who was trying to destroy Peru in order to save it. We campaigned to persuade U.S. intelligence to help Peruvian intelligence, despite some strange CIA apprehensions that it would violate the rule against assassination. On a trip to Lima, we learned that Guzman could not leave the country and was traveling in a green limousine with frosted windows. But it was British intelligence, using his brand of cigarettes, who finally tracked him down. With his arrest, the Sendero Luminoso movement collapsed.

Seeking to Deter the Sale of North Korea’s Fissionable Material. After visiting North Korea in 1991, we helped to spread the accurate idea, through Moscow and Beijing intermediaries, to Pyongyang that the West could identify their uranium and if North Korea were to sell it.

Failing to Avoid the Balkan War Between Serbia and Kosovo. We tried to prevent the subsequent NATO war in the Balkans by proposing, years before, a detailed treaty and rationalization of how the Kosovo Albanians could rent Kosovo from the Serbs. Although we tried to persuade both sides to agree to the treaty, it ultimately failed.

Scientific and Political Exchange with Iran. During the regime of President Khatami, we catalyzed an exchange agreement between the National Academy of Science (NAS) and the Iranian Academy of Sciences on peaceful issues of science. We did this by taking the first scientific delegation to Iran in two decades and bringing back an Iranian delegation which we shared, for a day, with NAS where agreement was reached.

The End of the Cold War. In February 1989, I urged support for President Gorbachev in a New York Times op-ed, “Let's Do All We Can Do for Gorbachev.” This op-ed was quoted at length in the historic New York Times editorial of April 2, 1989, entitled, “The Cold War is Over.”

In my 65th year, I left FAS and started Catalytic Diplomacy, a tiny 501c3 organization designed to continue my work without administrative responsibilities. 2000-2006 became the most exciting period of my life and it revealed, happily, that I could be effective, at least at that age and stage, without a protective umbrella of famous scientists. The achievements of Catalytic Diplomacy are described in a second life memoir, Catalytic Diplomacy: Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. (A 100-page summary of all my activities during the half-century period 1962-2014, can be accessed at http://catalytic-diplomacy.org/summary.php.)

On my resignation, John Pike left immediately to start GlobalSecurity.org. Earlier, David Albright had left to start the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS). Of my staff projects, only Steve Aftergood's excellent Project on Government Secrecy remains at FAS. FAS continues with my former staffer, Dr. Charles Ferguson, an energetic and dedicated physicist, as president.

Though FAS is a small organization, its record shows that it can magnify the voice of science in Washington and it can move quickly and effectively. I was privileged: to have revived it; to have had it as a vehicle for my ideas; and to have directed its activities for that crucial 30- year period that saw the triumph of some nuclear arms control and the termination of the Cold War.

Cover of Atomic War! comic book, Volume 1 Number 2. Canton, Ohion: Junior Books. December 1952. Source: SCARC Holdings, Oregon State University Libraries. Frank von Hippel

hen, at Jeremy Stone’s instigation, I was elected chair of the Federation of American Scientists in 1979, I W had no idea what an adventure that I was about to embark upon. This adventure was triggered by President Reagan taking office in 1981 and resulted in FAS making significant contributions to ending the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race and the Cold War.

This was not the President Reagan we remember now as the partner of in ending the Cold War. This was a president who had been convinced by the Committee on the Present Danger1 that the United States was falling behind in the nuclear arms race and was in mortal danger of a Soviet first nuclear strike. Reagan appointed 33 members of the Committee to high-level positions in his administration, including those of National Security Advisor, Secretary of State, Director of the CIA, and numerous senior positions in the Department of Defense. Under this leadership, the Reagan Administration proposed a U.S. nuclear buildup that would deploy almost 10,000 new ballistic missile and cruise missile nuclear warheads, accurate enough to attack Soviet ballistic missiles in their hardened silos.

1 For a history of the Committee on the Present Danger see, for example, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Committee_on_the_Present_Danger Thus, it was clear that the Reagan Administration was responding to fears of a first strike by acquiring enhanced capabilities for a first strike against the Soviet Union.2

This move to resume the nuclear arms race was disturbing after the period of détente with the Soviet Union under Presidents Nixon and Ford, but the public image of the Soviet Union as a status quo power had already been shaken by the Soviet invasion of in 1979.

Public alarm escalated further when it became apparent that some of the new Reagan Administration officials shared a belief that they had been attributing to the Soviet Union: that it If there are enough shovels to go would be possible to fight and survive a nuclear war. T.K. Jones, around, everybody’s going to make it. the Reagan Administration’s Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for strategic and theater nuclear forces, famously said, “If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.”

This cavalier attitude toward nuclear war galvanized a major grassroots movement that called for a “freeze” of the nuclear arms race. An estimated one million people came out to support this idea at a single demonstration in Central Park, New York in June 1982. That November, citizens in nine states, the District of Columbia, and 37 cities and counties voted for a Freeze in referenda. In Europe, a similar movement rose up against the deployment of a new generation of Soviet and U.S. nuclear missiles in Eastern and Western Europe.

FAS, under Stone’s leadership, rose to the occasion and worked with Senator Edward Kennedy to try to get establishment support for the Freeze movement – including by holding its own hearings on the idea. I looked for an analytic contribution that I could make and decided to work with my colleague, Hal Feiveson, on the verification of a halt to the production of highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium for weapons.3 We have been analyzing and advising on stopping production of fissile materials ever since.4

In March 1983, President Reagan shifted from his advocacy of a nuclear buildup to a call for the nation’s scientists to join in a Strategic Defense Initiative (quickly dubbed by critics as “Star Wars”) that would render nuclear missiles “impotent and obsolete” by creating a space-based missile defense system. A few months later, FAS received a letter from a group of Soviet Academicians that asked whether FAS had changed its views on the desirability and feasibility of ballistic missile defense. Stone wrote back that, no, we had not.

2 Harold Feiveson and Frank von Hippel, “The Freeze and The Counterforce Race,” Physics Today, January 1983, pp. 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46-49, reprinted in Frank von Hippel, Citizen Scientist (American Institute of Physics, Masters of Series, 1991; Simon and Schuster paperback, 1991; now Springer). 3 Harold Feiveson and Frank von Hippel, “Cutting Off the Production of for Nuclear Weapons,” Federation of American Scientists Public Interest Report, June 1982, pp. 10, 11. 4 Harold Feiveson, Alexander Glaser, Zia Mian and Frank von Hippel, Unmaking the Bomb: A Fissile Material Approach to Nuclear Disarmament and Nonproliferation (MIT Press, 2014). The Soviet response was an invitation to Moscow. Four of us accepted the invitation to visit over Thanksgiving weekend of that year: Jeremy, John Holdren (then Vice Chair of FAS, now President Obama’s Science Advisor), John Pike, an FAS staffer who had become a leading critic of ballistic missile defense, and me.

In Moscow, we were greeted by the leadership of the Soviet Committee for Peace and Against the Nuclear Threat, chaired by Evgeny Velikhov, the head of the Soviet Union’s fusion program and Vice Chair of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The Committee’s Deputy Chairs were Roald Sagdeev, the head of the Academy’s Space Research Institute; Sergei Kapitza, a physicist who had become famous in the Soviet Union as the host of a TV science program; and Andrei Kokoshin, the Deputy Director of the Academy’s Institute on the U.S. and . We brainstormed with this group on how to end the nuclear arms race.5 A year and a half later we learned that Velikhov and Sagdeev were also brainstorming with Mikhail Gorbachev, who became General Secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985.

Gorbachev’s first initiative to halt the nuclear arms race was to declare a unilateral Soviet moratorium on nuclear testing in August 1985. The Reagan Administration refused to join in the moratorium and suggested that the Soviets were still testing at low yields. In October 1985, Velikhov suggested to me that we find some seismologists willing to monitor the Soviet test site in Kazakhstan. I invited three groups to meet with Velikhov at the Soviet Academy’s headquarters in May 1986. One of the groups, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) declared itself ready and, under Tom Cochran and with the help of seismologist Charles Archambeau, had seismologists from UC on the ground in Kazakhstan two months later. The sudden Soviet openness to in-country monitoring convinced Congress that the verification problems of an underground nuclear test ban could be dealt with. This eventually resulted in the Hatfield-Exon-Mitchell amendment to the Fiscal Year 1993 Energy and Water Appropriations bill that resulted in the end of U.S. nuclear testing in 1992.

One of Stone’s most ardent campaigns during this period was Frank von Hippel and Andrei Sakharov discuss the possibility of cutting U.S. to free Andrei Sakharov from his exile in Gorky (now Nizhny and Soviet nuclear forces (without changing the basic war fighting approaches of the two) in Sakharov’s apartment, just after his release from seven years of Novgorod) where Sakharov had been banished, out of reach internal exile in Gorky, January 1987.

5 Frank von Hippel, “The Committee of Soviet Scientists Against the Nuclear Threat,” Federation of American Scientists Public Interest Report, January 1984, pp. 1‑4. See also the more recent retrospective, Frank von Hippel, “Gorbachev’s unofficial arms-control advisers,” Physics Today, September 2013, pp. 41-47. of foreigners, in 1980, after denouncing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Now, with Velikhov as a captive audience, Stone redoubled his efforts – and his determination paid off. In December 1986, Gorbachev allowed Sakharov to return to his apartment in Moscow.

In Moscow that January, Velikhov organized simultaneous conferences on nuclear disarmament of scientists, religious leaders, writers, actors, medical doctors, and business people. Stone, Pike, and I participated in the scientists’ conference, as did Sakharov. During a visit with the Sakharovs the evening before, Sakharov and Stone agreed to urge Gorbachev to ignore Reagan’s Star Wars program, due to it likely collapsing under its own weight, and take advantage of Reagan’s willingness to negotiate deep cuts in offensive nuclear weapons (what later became the START and Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaties [INF]). Velikhov asked me to address Gorbachev on behalf of the scientists’ conference. I emphasized deep cuts and the removal of offensive forces along the inter-German border.6 One reason why I was given such a prominent role may have been the name of our organization, the Federation of American Scientists, which can conjure up much more than the small albeit important NGO that we know FAS to actually be.

In July 1987, I joined in a letter to Gorbachev with three Western European members of a Pugwash working group that had for years been promoting the idea of non-offensive defense. The Federation of American Kokoshin had been promoting similar ideas in Moscow, but he felt the need Scientists can conjure up much for foreign support.7 Kokoshin had urged me to include these ideas in my more than the small albeit speech to Gorbachev. Gorbachev replied to our letter in November 1987, important NGO that we know FAS to actually be. stating that “You approach this in conceptual and practical terms which might well provide the basis of a solution to the problem.”8 In December 1988, at the United Nations, Gorbachev announced that 5,000 Soviet tanks would be unilaterally withdrawn from East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and . This laid the basis for the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe under which the reduced its forces to approximate numerical parity with NATO with strict regional limits to prevent massing at the inter-bloc boundary.

In February 1987, the Federation of American Scientists and the Committee of Soviet Scientists entered into an “Agreement to Carry Out a Joint Scientific Study of the Feasibility of Implementing and Maintaining Disarmament.” The primary focus of the study was on detecting warheads and verifying their elimination – something that the Bush Sr. Administration had previously claimed was impossible when asked during the Senate ratification hearings “why only missiles, but no warheads” were being destroyed under the INF Treaty.

6 “A U.S. Scientist Addresses Gorbachev, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,” May 1987, pp. 12-13, reprinted in Frank von Hippel, Citizen Scientist, op. cit. 7 Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War ( Press, 1999) chapter 14. 8 “Analysts Address Gorbachev” (with a response from Gorbachev) in Federation of American Scientists. Public Interest Report. February 1988, pp. 14-15. The bulk of the analytical work was done by Steve Fetter of the University of Maryland and Robert Mozley of Stanford on the U.S. side and by Stanislav Rodionov and Oleg Prilutsky from Sagdeev’s institute on the Soviet side. The result was a pioneering analysis on warhead verification and a spectacular demonstration of the detection of gamma and neutron radiation from an actual Soviet warhead on a cruiser in July 1989 by a U.S. team organized by Tom Cochran and a Soviet team from Velikhov’s Kurchatov Institute.9

During this period, another issue arose. In 1988, the Soviet Union lost radio contact with a low-earth-orbit, nuclear- reactor-powered satellite, Cosmos-1900, which began to spiral down into the earth’s atmosphere. Just before reentry, its controllers managed to boost the reactor into a higher, long-lived orbit where its radioactive inventory could decay safely.

A concern at the time was that reactors with much higher power might be launched to power the space-based beam weapons that had been promoted as a part of the Reagan Administration’s Strategic Defense. Sagdeev suggested a joint study on space reactor arms control. The resulting report proposed a number of possible limitations on orbiting reactors, ranging from a ban in low-earth orbit to a renewable total ban for 15 years. Dan Hirsch, Steve Aftergood, David Hafemeister, and Joel Primack played major roles on the FAS side of the study and Prilutsky and Rodionov on the Soviet side.10

My engagement with FAS as chairman of either the lobbying arm or the tax exempt arm continued until 2003, with a two-year break during 1984-86 while John Holdren was chairman and again during 1993-1994 while I was in the White House.11

FAS, in partnership with Velikhov’s Committee of Soviet Scientists, made vital contributions to ending the U.S.- Soviet nuclear arms race and the Cold War. The political conditions that made this possible were created by the grassroots Nuclear Weapons Freeze Movement in the United States and the fortuitous appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. I regret that we weren’t able to make more significant cuts in nuclear weapons and take U.S. and Soviet missiles off alert with the end of the Cold War. FAS and other NGOs committed to nuclear disarmament must be prepared should such a window of political opportunity open up again.

9 Reversing the Arms Race: How to Achieve and Verify Deep Reductions in the Nuclear Arsenals, Frank von Hippel and Roald Sagdeev, eds (Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1990); S.T. Belyaev et al, “The Use of Helicopter-borne Neutron Detectors to Detect Nuclear Warheads in the USSR-US Black Sea Experiment,” Science & Global Security Vol. 1 (1990) pp. 328-333; and Steve Fetter et al, “Measurements of Gamma Rays from a Soviet Cruise Missile,” Science, 18 May 1990, pp. 828-834. 10 Six articles on “Space Reactor Arms Control” in a special section of Science & Global Security, Vol. 1, Nos. 1-2 (1989). 11 Frank von Hippel, “Working in the White House on Nuclear Nonproliferation and Arms Control: A Personal Report,” F.A.S. Public Interest Report 48, #2, March/April 1995, pp. 1, 3-8. Richard L. Garwin

Richard L. Garwin, 1987.

upporting and expanding on Frank von Hippel’s cogent and exciting narrative of some of the great S accomplishments of the Federation of American Scientists, I detail below two endeavors, at least one of which may have had far-reaching impact.

The first was the initiative of FAS Director (and later President) Jeremy J. Stone who, in 1971, wrote the president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to introduce FAS and to begin some kind of dialogue. The story is well told in Stone’s memoir:1

Improving US Relations with China A. Catalyzing Scientific Exchange; … In the Spring of 1971, I wrote Chinese Academy of Sciences president Guo Moruo about sending a delegation to China. My wife, B. J., had already been learning Chinese. Guo Moruo said our request was being considered “positively.” Two months later, President Nixon went to China—a momentous breakthrough. We wrote again and, within eight days, received a visa. It turned out that “positively” did not mean affirmatively! But when Premier found out we had been inadvertently misled, he ordered our entry.

1 http://catalytic-diplomacy.org/miscPDFs/Defending-Civilization-Using-Catalytic-Ideas-Jeremy-Stone.pdf. Thus, weeks after the Nixon visit to China, Jeremy and his wife BJ were in China with Jerome A. Cohen, who has persisted for the last four decades in a dedicated campaign for legal rights in China. As Chairman of FAS, Marvin S. (Murph) Goldberger and his wife Mildred were there, too. Murph was a leading theoretical particle physicist in the1950s, a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee and of its Strategic Military Panel; in 1971 he was professor of Physics at Princeton and was later to head Caltech and then the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.

At the time, I was a member of the (National Academy of Sciences’) Committee on Scholarly Communications with the People’s Republic of China. We soon learned of the world travels of a delegation of Chinese scientists who were investigating environmental affairs and remediation in other countries, and both NAS and FAS worked vigorously and enthusiastically to bring the delegation to the United States. After reasonably favorable responses were received, there was a vigorous competition between the two organizations as to which one would be the formal host of the visit. As an official of both, I helped to settle this competition by being more involved than I normally FAS and Princeton University researchers meet with Chinese delegation at Princeton, 1999: From left to right: Jeremy J. Stone, Charles D. Ferguson, Frank von Hippel, Li Bin, Hu would have been in the visit, which included meeting Side, Hal Feiveson, Hui Zhang, Hu Side's interpreter, and Oleg Bukharin. the delegation in Washington and encouraging IBM to host its week in New York, with visits to academic institutions, as well as industrial research centers.

Jeremy writes:

Five months after our visit, the first Chinese delegation arrived— after two decades of isolation from America. It announced at each stop that it was visiting at the invitation of NAS and FAS. We gave the farewell banquet in San Francisco. The Chinese called us the “pioneers.” So this was successful.

Those involved in hosting the Chinese Scientists delegation were invited by the PRC to make a return visit to China, and “leading members” of the delegation could bring their spouse. My colleagues decided that a leading member was the president of some organization, which I was not, so I wrote to those issuing the invitation that I would be delighted to visit China at a later time when I could bring my wife. Early in 1974, the invitation came from the China Electronics Society and Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament, co-sponsors of our one month visit, which involved my speaking many times on computers and on experiments to detect gravitational radiations, and once on nuclear weapons and arms control. The March/April 1994 PIR2 leads with the story, “Arms Control in South Asia-- Four Civilizations Gently Collide at Arms Control Conference.” The meeting was first proposed in mid-1993 at the initiative of Frank von Hippel, Chairman of the FAS Fund, the policy research and education arm of FAS. Frank had been told by Indian colleagues that they were interested in meeting with the Chinese; they were explicitly not interested in getting together with the Pakistanis, but Frank felt that it was essential to bring together representatives from China, India, and also Pakistan.

When Frank entered the Clinton Administration as Assistant Director for National Security Affairs in OSTP, FAS President Jeremy J. Stone assumed the responsibility of planning the conference with the essential involvement of Shen Dingli, Professor at Fudan University, who had trained at Princeton under von Hippel. So the conference went forward with five participants each from the United States, China, India, and Pakistan.

By the time the conference took place, I was FAS Vice Chairman and Chairman of the FAS Fund; the delegation consisted of Jeremy J. Stone and Jerome Holton representing FAS, myself, Frank von Hippel, and Stephen P. Cohen – an expert on both India and Pakistan and who was also a former member of the State Department Policy Planning staff.

The cited PIR has a full description of the conference, which was arduous, substantive, record breaking, and of uncertain impact. Frank von Hippel calls it “a great disappointment,” but Shen Dingli points out that “after the Shanghai round of the four-nation talk, three more rounds were held in Goa (1995), Rawalpindi (1996), and Virginia (1998). Though these dialogues did not succeeded in preventing India and Pakistan from testing nuclear weapons in 1998, they started a culture of addressing the control of nuclear weapons and their spread among concerned Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, and American people. They have also helped develop Chinese communities of nuclear arms control and nonproliferation to engage with their Indian and Pakistani counterparts.” Other initiatives were surely involved, such as that of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control (CISAC) of the National Academy of Sciences, which has met regularly with a counterpart group of Chinese Scientists since 1988.

Neither the 1971-72 FAS initiative nor the 1994 Shanghai conference was simple, but they both illustrated what an inspired, independent organization with long involvement in the field can do with the aid of networking.

Perhaps such approaches are more difficult now, with increasing bureaucracy on all sides and with increasing efforts to limit communication and free expression, but that is good reason to increase the effort to make progress on the control and elimination of the most destructive weapons in the world, and the protection of civilization against conflict.

2 http://fas.org/faspir/pir0494.html. B. Cameron Reed

n late 1945, a group of scientists who had been involved with the Manhattan Project felt it was their civic duty to I help inform the public and political leaders of both the potential benefits and dangers of nuclear energy. To facilitate this important work, they established the Federation of Atomic Scientists, which soon became the Federation of American Scientists. Over the years, FAS has evolved into a model non-governmental organization that plays a leading role in providing scientifically-sound, non-partisan analyses of nuclear and broader security issues. I have long admired FAS and was therefore deeply honored when President Charles D. Ferguson asked if I would be interested in preparing a brief essay for a special edition of the PIR that FAS has evolved into a model non- would commemorate the organization’s 70th anniversary. governmental organization that plays A period of mild apprehension then followed: What could I say on a leading role in providing the relationship between science and society that had not been said a scientifically-sound, non-partisan thousand times before? As it happened, Charles’ request arrived just analyses of nuclear and broader security issues. after the early-August anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. The 2015 anniversary was particularly notable because 70 years is the approximate average human lifespan and media and online coverage of the event seemed richer than usual. My reflections on this coverage became the inspiration for this essay.

I was distressed to find that most of the reporting I saw seemed to concentrate on two main themes. First were the renewed calls for the Japanese government to apologize for atrocities committed by the forces of their country during the war. The response was a lengthy statement from the Prime Minister of Japan that described the historical circumstances of the war, but never included a real acknowledgement of responsibility. A back-and-forth game of

hollow rhetoric over an apology is pointless; such a gesture would now be (at best) only symbolic, as any surviving victims of Japanese aggression or their descendants could not expect any sort of meaningful compensation.

Second was the notion, often implicit but sometimes explicit, that America was guilty of a monstrous moral transgression by having used the bombs. However, the coverage tended to be thin on the complicated realities of the historical context. By August 1945, the Japanese were essentially defeated and sending out peace feelers, but the operational fact was that they were continuing to fight on in the hope of securing more favorable surrender terms as Americans grew weary of the war. The atomic bombings may not have ended the war, but they surely helped to end it, thereby sparing the lives of thousands of Japanese citizens who would otherwise have been lost had island-conquering campaigns and conventional and firebombing raids on that country’s cities continued – let alone what might have happened had a ground invasion occurred. President Truman and his advisors faced horrific decisions and had to keep in mind the eventual postwar strategic situation. Let us not also forget that Truman’s fundamental humanity manifested itself when he ordered a halt to any more atomic bombings after the destruction of Nagasaki. There is likely not one of us who did not live through those times who can ever internalize of such decisions, the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the gut-wrenching anxiety of a Marine aboard a troopship awaiting his invasion

orders, the overwhelming worry of his family back home, or the subsequent lifelong soul-searching of a Los Alamos scientist, who by chance found himself spared from active service to play a role in the development of the most destructive weapons in human history.

It is understandable that brief media stories will concentrate on dramatically different opinions instead of trying to dissect a complex set of circumstances. But such coverage does viewers and readers a serious disservice in that it reinforces a perception that the background events have no relevance for today’s world. After all, the war ended two generations ago, and weren’t most nuclear weapons decommissioned after the end of the Cold War? Nothing could be further from the truth. Seventy years on, a myriad of pressing issues that had their geneses in that time are in desperate need of informed debate.

At least another seven decades worth of issues lie before us. Even many well-informed persons are utterly unaware that thousands of nuclear weapons still exist. What are their rational roles in the military and deterrence policies of the major nuclear powers in a world of rapidly evolving and very asymmetric threats? How many such weapons are realistically needed to sustain such policies? What weapons modernization programs are justifiable, and which are simply products of entrenched bureaucracies and turf protection? Do national laboratories have the resources necessary to preserve historical knowledge and build new capabilities in areas such as nuclear forensics as existing weapons systems are retired and dismantled? Can the fissile materials involved be responsibly secured against theft and proliferation until they can be blended into reactor fuel? How can weapons-reduction and test-ban negotiations remain on track and on the radar of the public and political officials in the face of the inevitable international crises and mutual suspicions between nations that will spring up? Can growing and aspiring nuclear powers be convinced that reversing their weapons-development trajectories would in fact bring them better long-term security and liberate resources that could be used to benefit their citizens? Can public trust in the safety of nuclear power be restored? How should we deal with the thousands of tons of nuclear waste that have accumulated, a burden that will only grow as we come to rely more and more on greenhouse-gas-emission-free nuclear power? Do we have the will to stick to the long-term commitments of funds, resources, and effective oversight that will be necessary to remediate areas impacted by fissile-materials production facilities? These questions and many more cry out for public education based on factual information presented by informed experts who are capable of balancing considerations of

the various risks and benefits involved without advancing their own agendas. I encourage FAS to remain involved in such meritorious public service and members of the scientific community to contribute their knowledge and expertise to such efforts. The need is more important now than ever.

Richard Rhodes, author of the much-acclaimed book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, has optimistically asserted that we are now in the era of the “Twilight of the Bombs.”1 But after years of researching nuclear weapons in general and the Manhattan Project in particular, I must respectfully disagree. I believe that the situation is more akin to the afternoon of a long summer’s day. The light of nuclear weapons is still very much with us and events in countries such as Iran and North Korea show that it still commands a compelling allure. Much work remains to be done to fulfill Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s May 1945 vision of nuclear energy as “an assurance of future peace rather than a menace to civilization.” 2 There is quite literally a world of opportunities for a new generation of scientists, educators, commentators, and policymakers to support the mission of FAS in contributing to realizing Stimson’s dream. What more fitting way could there be to honor his generation and those who founded and have helped to sustain FAS for the last 70 years?

Certificate of Service issued in August 1945 to Harriet Mitteldorf née Morris, a founding member of FAS.

1 Rhodes, Richard. Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons (Vintage, New York, 2011). 2 Reed, B. Cameron. The History and Science of the Manhattan Project (Springer, , 2014) p. 375.

Allison Feldman

After finishing up his second MacArthur Foundation-sponsored research project on issues related to verifying a nuclear agreement with Iran, Christopher Bidwell, FAS Senior Fellow for Nonproliferation Law and Policy, and his team are now focused on a third project that will look at the increased role played by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in verifying compliance and noncompliance with nuclear nonproliferation obligations. Special attention will be paid to how the privacy rights of entities and individuals whose data are used to make a determination can be protected.

In a letter dated March 26, 2016, 35 Nobel Laureates from physics, chemistry, and medicine urged national leaders attending President Obama’s fourth and final Nuclear Security Summit on March 31st to reduce the risk of nuclear or radiological terrorism to near-zero in three sectors. The signees stressed that because terrorist threats “cross national boundaries,” they “require the concerted work of all nations to prevent… terrorist acts from happening.” They also “urge” world leaders “to devote the necessary resources to make further substantial progress in the coming years to real risk reduction in preventing nuclear and radiological terrorism.” The letter, written by Dr. Burton Richter, a Nobel Laureate in physics and the Paul Pigott Professor in the Physical Sciences at and Director Emeritus, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and Dr. Charles D. Ferguson, President of FAS, and list of signees is available online at: https://fas.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/nobel-laureates-letter-to-nss-march-20162.pdf.

To date, Japan’s peaceful nuclear energy use has taken the form of a nuclear fuel recycling policy that reprocesses spent fuel and effectively utilizes the plutonium retrieved in light water reactors (LWRs) and fast reactors (FRs). With the aim to complete recycling domestically, Japan has introduced key technology from abroad and has further developed its own technology and industry. However, Japan presently seems to have issues regarding its recycling policy and plutonium management and, because of recent increasing risks of terrorism and nuclear proliferation in the world, the international community seeks much more secure use of nuclear energy. Yusei Nagata, an FAS Research Fellow from MEXT, Japan, analyzes U.S. experts’ opinions and concerns about Japan’s problem and considers what Japan can (and should) do to solve it.. A full version of the report can be accessed online at: https://fas.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/03/japannukefuelrecyling_final.pdf.

In this study, Christopher Bidwell and Dr. Randall Murch explore the use of microbial forensics as a tool for creating a common base line for understanding biologically-triggered phenomena, as well as one that can promote mutual cooperation in addressing these phenomena. A particular focus is given to the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region, as it has been forced to deal with multiple instances of both naturally-occurring and man-made biological threats over the last 10 years. Although the institution of a microbial forensics capability in the MENA region (however robust) is still several years away, establishing credibility of the results offered by microbial forensic analysis performed by western states and/or made today in workshops and training have the ability to prepare the policy landscape for the day in which the source of a bio attack, either man-made or from , needs to be accurately attributed. A full version of the report can be accessed online at: http://fas.org/pub-reports/microbial-forensics- middle-east-north-africa/.

The threat from the manufacture, proliferation, and use of biological weapons (BW) is a high priority concern for the U.S. Government. As reflected in U.S. Government policy statements and budget allocations, deterrence through attribution (“determining who is responsible and culpable”) is the primary policy tool for dealing with these threats. According to those policy statements, one of the foundational elements of an attribution determination is the use of forensic science techniques, namely microbial forensics. In this report, Christopher Bidwell and Kishan Bhatt, an FAS summer research intern and undergraduate student studying public policy and global health at Princeton University, look beyond the science aspect of forensics and examine how the legal, policy, law enforcement, medical response, business, and media communities interact in a bioweapon’s attribution environment. The report further examines how scientifically based conclusions require credibility in these communities in order to have relevance in the decision making process about how to handle threats. The report can be found online at: http://fas.org/pub- reports/biological-weapons-and-forensic-science/.

From the start of the development of the new $10 billion B61-12 guided nuclear bomb, FAS has been at the forefront of providing the public with factual information about the status and capabilities of the program. In November 2015, Hans Kristensen, Director of the FAS Nuclear Information Project, was featured in a PBS Newshour program about the weapon where former STRATCOM commander and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright confirmed FAS assessments that the increased accuracy of the B61-12 could make it a more usable weapon [http://fas.org/blogs/security/2015/11/b61-12_cartwright/]. In early 2016, FAS and NRDC used a government video of a B61-12 test drop to analyze the bomb’s increased accuracy and earth-penetrating capability [http://fas.org/blogs/security/2016/01/b61-12_earth-penetration/]. The analysis was used in a New York Times feature article, “As U.S. Modernizes Nuclear Weapons, ‘Smaller’ Leaves Some Uneasy.”1

The official entry of the term “climate change” in the latest revision of the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms reflects a growing awareness of the actual and potential impacts of climate change on military operations. Steven Aftergood, Director of the FAS Project on Government Secrecy, reported in Secrecy News that according to a Pentagon directive issued in January 2016, “The DoD must be able to adapt current and future operations to address the impacts of climate change in order to maintain an effective and efficient U.S. military.” Among other things, the new directive requires the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and the Director of National Intelligence to coordinate on “risks, potential impacts, considerations, vulnerabilities, and effects [on defense intelligence programs] of altered operating environments related to climate change and environmental monitoring.” In a report to Congress last year, the DoD said that “The Department of Defense sees climate change as a present security threat, not strictly a long-term risk.” Read Aftergood’s analysis in full here: http://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2016/01/dod-climate/.

1 Broad, William J., and David E. Sanger. “As U.S. Modernizes Nuclear Weapons, ‘Smaller’ Leaves Some Uneasy.” New York Times. January 11, 2016. Web. . The FAS Nuclear Information Project provided the public with important analysis about the mission and capabilities of the new nuclear air-launched cruise missile the Air Force is developing: the Long-Range Standoff missile (LRSO). The analysis was the first to highlight an overview of the mission government officials say the missile is needed for, a mission that includes a worrisome nuclear war-fighting role [http://fas.org/blogs/security/2015/10/lrso-mission/]. Hans Kristensen was also quick to point out that a new long-range conventional air-launched cruise missile being deployed by the Air Force could do much of the LRSO mission and he recommended canceling the LRSO, a measure which would save $20-$30 billion [http://fas.org/blogs/security/2015/12/lrso-jassm/].

FAS research on the status and modernization of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons was covered extensively in news media reports in connection with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s visit to Washington in October 2015. The FAS Nuclear Notebook, co-authored by Hans Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, FAS Senior Fellow for Nuclear Policy, published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, estimated that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal has grown by 20 weapons since 2011 to 130 warheads presently, including new tactical nuclear weapons. The research was used by in a background article, “U.S. Set to Sell Fighter Jets to Pakistan, Balancing Pressure on Nawaz Sharif,”2 and an editorial, “The Pakistan Nuclear Nightmare,”3 as well as by the Associated Press and Indian and Pakistani news media. The Nuclear Notebook can be accessed at: https://fas.org/blogs/security/2015/10/pakistan-notebook/.

Transparency is not ordinarily a trait that one associates with intelligence agencies. But the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released a transparency implementation plan that establishes guidelines for increasing public disclosure of information by and about U.S. intelligence. Based on a set of principles on transparency that were published earlier last year, the plan prioritizes the objectives of transparency and describes potential initiatives that could be undertaken. Thus, the plan aims “to provide more information about the IC’s governance framework; to provide more information about the IC’s mission and activities; to encourage public engagement [by intelligence agencies in social media and other venues]; and to institutionalize transparency policies and procedures.” FAS Secrecy News reports that the plan neither includes any specific commitments nor sets any deadlines for action. Moreover, it is naturally rooted in self-interest. Its purpose is explicitly “to earn and retain public trust” of U.S. intelligence agencies. Nonetheless, it has the potential to provide new grounds for challenging unnecessary secrecy and to advance a

2 Rosenberg, Matthew and David E. Sanger. “U.S. Set to Sell Fighter Jets to Pakistan, Balancing Pressure on Nawaz Sharif.” New York Times. October 21, 2015. Web. . 3 The Editorial Board. “The Pakistan Nuclear Nightmare.” New York Times. November 7, 2015. Web. . corresponding “cultural reform” in the intelligence community. Read Aftergood’s analysis here: http://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2015/10/transparency-plan/.

The number of people in the Department of Defense holding security clearances for access to classified information declined by 100,000 in the first six months of FY2015, recounts FAS Secrecy News. The latest available data show 3.8 million DoD employees and contractors with security clearances, down from 3.9 million earlier in 2015, and a steep 17.4 percent drop from 4.6 million two years ago. Furthermore, only 2.2 million of the 3.8 million cleared DoD personnel are actually “in access,” meaning that they have current access to classified information. Thus, further significant reductions in clearances would seem to be readily achievable by shedding those who are not currently “in access.” The total number of security-cleared persons government-wide is roughly 0.5 million higher than the number of DoD clearances, putting it at around 4.3 million, down from 5.1 million in 2013. The new DoD security clearance numbers were presented in the latest quarterly report on Insider Threat and Security Clearance Reform, FY2015 Quarter 3, September 2015. The reduction in security clearances is not simply a reflection of programmatic or budgetary changes – rather, it has been defined as a policy goal in its own right. A bloated security bureaucracy is harder to manage, more expensive, and more susceptible to catastrophic security failures than a properly streamlined system would be. The full post is available to view here: http://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2015/10/clearances-down/.

Today, your support is as important as ever...

Making a planned gift to FAS, either by including us in your estate plans or through gifts of stock, will enable you to support our mission and establish a legacy of commitment to peace and to the responsible use of science and technology.

Members of FAS’s Board of Trustees and Board of Experts are prominent figures in the scientific, academic, international security, business, and policymaking communities.

BOARD OF TRUSTEES BOARD OF EXPERTS

Charles D. Ferguson Rosina M. Bierbaum, Chair President Scott Sagan, Vice Chair

Gilman Louie Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, Stanford

Chair Partner, Alsop Louie Partners Alton Frye Presidential Senior Fellow Emeritus, the Council on Foreign Rosina M. Bierbaum* Relations Vice Chair Professor of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy; Lt. General Robert G. Gard, Jr. Professor of Environmental Health Sciences, University of Chairman, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation

EXECUTIVECOMMITTEE Michigan Martin Hellman Stephen P. Hamblen Professor Emeritus, Electrical Engineering, Stanford Secretary/Treasurer Lisa Gordon-Hagerty President of Fairview Builders, LLC President and Chief Executive Officer, LEG Inc.

Lawrence M. Krauss Rodney W. Nichols* Foundation Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration President Emeritus, New York Academy of Sciences and Physics Department, Jan Lodal* Martha Krebs Distinguished Fellow, the Atlantic Council Executive Director for Energy and Environmental Research Former Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Development, University of California at Davis Peter Thiel Jan Lodal Thiel Capital Rodney W. Nichols

Maxine L. Savitz

Member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)

Michael L. Telson Vice President, General Atomics Corporation

Valerie Thomas Anderson Interface Associate Professor of Natural Systems, Georgia Institute of Technology *Joint Appointment

Coming from a variety of scientific and academic backgrounds and with professional experience in government, environmental science, physics, nuclear engineering, law, and political science, FAS staff work to provide technical and skilled analysis on a variety of catastrophic threats to security and to serve the community of concerned citizens and experts striving to reduce these security risks.

Charles D. Ferguson, President Steven Aftergood, Director of the Government Secrecy Project Hans Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project Pia Ulrich, International Nuclear Policy Analyst Allison Feldman, Communications and Community Outreach Officer Kevin Feltz, Financial Controller and Office Manager

the FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS

Join us in our mission to impact security and science policy by educating policy makers, the press, and the public with nonpartisan, technical analysis.

Source: SCARC Holdings, Oregon State University Libraries.

FAS experts and affiliates are members of the FAS Network, comprised of leading specialists from the scientific, policy, and academic communities who tackle vexing security challenges that affect international security

Christopher Bidwell, Senior Fellow for Nonproliferation Law and Policy David Hafemeister, Visiting Scientist Martin Hellman, Adjunct Senior Fellow for Nuclear Risk Analysis Bruce MacDonald, Adjunct Senior Fellow for National Security Technology Jenifer Mackby, Senior Fellow for International Security Yusei Nagata, Research Fellow from MEXT, Japan Robert S. Norris, Senior Fellow for Nuclear Policy Paul Sullivan, Adjunct Senior Fellow for Future Global Resources Threats

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