The Memoir of an Insider's Insider

MAKING WEAPONS, TALKING PEACE A Physicist’s Odyssey from Hiroshima to Geneva. Herbert F. York. Basic Books, New York, 1987. 392 pp. $22.95. The most curious thing about Making Weapons, Talking Peace is the title itself; here we have strong implications of duplicity on the part of an unnamed culprit (the United States?, the Soviet Union?) whom the author intends to expose for wearing a peaceful mask while covertly engaged in war-like machinations. Happily, the book is nothing of the sort. Rather it is the memoir of an insider’s insider, Herbert York, whose career has taken him from nuclear weaponeering during World War II to the negotiating table in Geneva. York started off his journey as a physicist engaged in the production of uranium-235 for the first atomic bomb, initially at Ernest Lawrence’s Berkeley cyclotron, then at Oak Ridge. In 1952, on a surprisingly offhand request from Lawrence, he became first director of Lawrence Livermore Lab, the nation’s second weapons laboratory. From there he went on to assume an almost bewildering number of government posts, including member of the Air Force Science Advisory Board, Security Resources Panel and the President’s Science Advisory Committee; chief scientist of the Advanced Research Projects Agency and first director of Defense Research and Engineering, various deanships, professorships and chancellorships at the University of California at San Diego; and finally U.S. negotiator for comprehensive test-ban treaty with the Soviets. Few people witnessed the establishment of these institutions at York’s close range and the book will become required reading for those interested in the bureaucratization of American science and the evolution of U.S. defense policy. As an insider York has many tales to tell. His sections on John von Neumann, Nick Christofilos, the missile gap and the U-2 incident each deserve a chapter and we can only regret the yuppifled 1980s demand for short books. In an important correction to foildore readers will learn that Eisenhower, not Kennedy, was responsible for the great missile buildup of the early 1960s. They will learn that “Star Wars’4 is merely the latest of many similar proposals and won’t work for the same reasons the others wouldn’t have worked 30 years ago. York recounts all his tales in an informal, unassuming and unpretentious manner, in marked contrast to at least one other recent volume in the Sloan Foundation series. This is both the book’s greatest strength and a minor weakness. It is the greatest strength because one cannot doubt the good will and veracity of this man; a minor weakness because he is sometimes so self-effacing that the chronicle becomes less an autobiography than a bureaucrat’s recitation of committee names and members—undoubtedly of interest to future historians but not to the general reader. York’s narrative reticence is most prevalent in the first half of the book where he recounts factually his role in the great expansion of U.S. nuclear arsenals during the 1950s. Either he did not meditate deeply on the matter at the time (Lawrence discouraged his protégés from political thought) or does not wish to share with us his motivations. A given weapons system was accepted or rejected on the bais of its technical and tactical merits, not for any more general considerations. Only in chapter nine, “Reflection and Transition,” does York begin to analyze seriously what happened during the previous decade. And from this point his analysis is instructive throughout. But be warned to the end he remains a rationalist and an arms controller, not a dissident or a protester. York opens the last chapter with the words, “I have always been aware that the nuclear arms race has a moral, or ethical, dimension, but it has never been entirely clear to me how to incorporate that fact into personal or collective behavior.” This will not give much sustenance to peace activists who are expecting the dramatic moral outbursts of Kennan and Myrdal to bolster their cause. York’s path is quieter; yet his testimony, often solicited by Congress, should be of equal use to anyone who values reasoned argument. Rothman, a physicist, is most recently associated with the Center for Relativity, The University of Texas, Austin, 78712.

The Memoir of an Insider's Insider

MAKING WEAPONS, TALKING PEACE

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