Abstract
A number of significant figures in the arms control, global security, and scientific communities died during the past year. Below, the Bulletin remembers a few of the friends we lost.
Ruth Salzman Adams, 81
In a peer group populated by men, Adams pioneered a role for women with her brains, guile–and tobacco pipe. Intimidated by no one, she became a leader in the male-dominated worlds of science and arms control as both a longtime editor of the Bulletin and an integral member of Pugwash. Her wit and intelligence left an indelible mark.
“I don't think she ever recognized the idea that women were somehow secondary to men in anything,” Bulletin Board Chair Victor Rabinowitch told the Los Angeles Times. (More memories of Adams can be found in the May/June and July/August 2005 issues of the Bulletin.)
Robert Bacher, 99
A seminal figure in the halcyon days of nuclear physics, Bacher played a historic role in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in New Mexico. In a nearby ranch house, he assembled the core of the Trinity bomb and then drove it to the Alamogordo test site. After the war, Bacher cemented his legacy at the California Institute of Technology, which he helped build into a preeminent scientific academy. “ [He was responsible] for making Caltech physics what it is today,” commented physics professor Robert Christy. (A more in-depth remembrance can be found in the March/April 2005 Bulletin.)
Hans Bethe, 98
Never regretful of his time working on the Manhattan Project, Bethe nonetheless carefully weighed the moral implications of the weapons work that followed. His opinions often influenced others who were unsure whether the pursuit for bigger, more destructive weapons was ethical. Bethe used his reputation as a measured voice of reason to push for important arms control initiatives, such as the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty. As close colleague Victor Weisskopf once commented about Bethe, “His sense of duty toward society is so deeply ingrained that he isn't even aware of its being a sacrifice.”
H. Bentley Glass, 98
Equal parts intellectual rabble-rouser, social commentator, and biologist, Glass transcended science. On subjects as disparate as nuclear testing and race relations, he defended his staunch views and polarizing positions with panache, passion, and solid science. Of all his pronouncements, none permeated the cultural lexicon more than his 1962 prediction that cockroaches would be the sole survivors of nuclear war.
Bob Hunter, 63
Hunter led by example. Often with little more than a rubber dinghy and a cunning grasp of how to manipulate the media, he brought environmental activism to the forefront. In 1971, then a counterculture columnist at the Vancouver Sun, Hunter accompanied 11 men protesting a U.S. nuclear test in the Aleutian Islands from a fishing boat. The line between journalist and activist quickly blurred, as Hunter's spirited reports stirred a public uneasy about nuclear testing. The test went as scheduled, but the nervy protest spawned Greenpeace. “There are a lot of us who could be called [Greenpeace] co-founders,” activist Paul Watson told the Toronto Star, “but I would describe Bob as the founding father.”
Philip Morrison, 89
For the latter half of the twentieth century, science had no greater pitchman than former Manhattan Project scientist Morrison. Unlike most of his brethren, Morrison understood how to make science accessible, combining eloquence with a common-man approach that resonated with the lay public. From his MIT classroom to his famed six-part 1987 PBS series The Ring of Truth, Morrison won science countless fans. “You must go listen to Professor Morrison teach classical mechanics,” an excited student told one of Morrison's colleagues in 1970. “It is like poetry.” (See also “Philip Morrison: A Spherically Curious Mind,” at thebulletin.org.)
Joseph Rotblat, 06
The 1955 Einstein-Russell Manifesto bore Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein's names, but Rotblat served as its greatest champion. To Rotblat, it was a timeless call to action that he would evoke throughout the ensuing decades in an attempt to convince the world to lay down its arms. He heeded his own advice, using the manifesto as inspiration to help found Pugwash, which added a rational dialogue to the tense, often irrational Cold War era. “So long as there is a risk of nuclear war,” Rotblat reasoned, “that risk is finite, and so long as that risk is finite, it can be reduced.” (For an extended tribute, visit thebulletin.org. Please see also Rotblat's final letter to the Bulletin, p. 5.)
Theodore Taylor, 79
As Taylor sat in Moscow's Red Square as an older man, he wept. He had spent the 1950s as a nuclear weaponeer, scheming to obliterate Moscow and its city center. Years later he came to feel that his crowning scientific achievements–miniature nuclear weapons with comic-book names and devastating force–had been dangerously misguided. “I don't think it was essentially wrong to call the work at Los Alamos scientific work,” he told photographer Robert Del Tredici in 1986. “But it's not trying in some objective way to search for the truth about how nature works.” (For more on Taylor, see the January/February 2005 Bulletin.)