Italian Physicists and the Bomb: Edoardo Amaldi’s Network for Arms Control and Peace during the Cold War

Abstract

This article investigates the contribution of the Italian physicist Edoardo Amaldi to the anti-nuclear peace movement at national and international level. Amaldi (1908–89) was one of the leading nuclear physicists of the twentieth century. He grew up in the extraordinary environment of the ‘Via Panisperna Boys’, a group of young physicists active in Rome during the late 1920s and 1930s, under Enrico Fermi’s leadership. Yet Amaldi was not only a renowned academic but also an avid supporter of the movement against the nuclear arms race. He advocated the peaceful and industrial use of nuclear energy and tenaciously opposed its military exploitation. The only Italian invited to the first Pugwash meeting in 1957, he soon played a leading role in the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and other similar events throughout his life. During the 1970s and 1980s, Amaldi – and many others among his colleagues – campaigned for a different security policy based on détente and broad transnational dialogue across the Cold War blocs. This essay focuses on some practical initiatives of the Italian community of physicists, underlying the political and civil use of their scientific expertise.