Scientists Must Help Stop the Arms Race

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking" wrote Albert Einstein in 1946. A new book, Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking (Walker and Co., 1988), attempts to change those modes of thinking. The Beyond War Foundation, a nonprofit educational group, brought together dozens of scholars from Western nations and the Soviet Union to discuss the politics, science and ethics of nuclear disarmament. In this excerpt from the book, which is also being publish

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Over the last 411 years we have seen the world’a nuclear arsenals grow to immense proportions. In destructive power, they are equivalent to 1 million Hiroshimas. Our planet itself has finally become too small for them. Apart from their sheer might, the intelligence and the deadly accuracy of these weapons have grown to an extraordinary extent. The Goliath of the bomb has joined forces with the David of microelectronics.

There is talk of expanding armaments into the realm of outer space, as if the sea and land of our globe were not enough. Detailed technical, scientific and military analyses of this latest move have shown its fallacy. While the technical content of these analyses may be beyond the average person, the landing of a Cessna in the heart of Moscow by a lone West German pilot in May 1987 shows in common sense terms the futility of a perfect aerospace ...

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  • Sergei Kapitza

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