The decades after Mike saw a rapid rise in the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons. Great Britain joined the nuclear club in 1952, France in 1960, China in 1964, India in 1974, Pakistan in 1998, and North Korea in 2006.{16} Israel has so far not publicly acknowledged having nuclear weapons but is believed to have had them since the 1970s.{17} Iran has so far not publicly acknowledged its intent to acquire them. South Africa had a nuclear weapons program that it terminated,{18} and Libya decided against proceeding, even when it had the means within its grasp.{19} Stockpiled nuclear weapons worldwide are estimated to have grown to a maximum of more than 63,000 in the mid-1980s and shrunk gradually after that to a currently estimated 17,000.{20} The number of Hiroshimas still lying in wait remains unimaginably large.
In 2008, in a speech in Berlin, Presidential candidate Barack Obama urged all countries to adopt a policy of nuclear disarmament, with the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.{21} So far his country (and mine) has not publicly adopted such a policy, nor has any other nuclear power. The only nations to have gone on record in favor of eliminating all nuclear weapons are eight that call themselves the New Agenda Coalition[90] and that do not themselves possess nuclear weapons.{22}
Zero is indeed the correct target number. Perhaps in your lifetime, young reader. Not in mine.
Epilogue
The Vietnam War changed my view of my own country.
Could the United States be trusted to behave intelligently and ethically in the international sphere? I began to doubt. I had joined the H-bomb effort in part because of a conviction that great power in American hands would be used to preserve peace, not to make war—specifically, that the world would be a safer place if the United States got the H bomb before the Soviets did. Now I began to wonder: Is my country, after all, no better than any other? Is it, in a sense, even worse than some because of its willingness to spread death and destruction in the name of preserving freedom?
The anticommunist hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950s was a sad chapter in American history. It destroyed some careers and was a mighty embarrassment to this country. But it shed no blood. It did not involve the raw exercise of power. I made my own small statements of opposition to that outbreak of insanity by participating in the work of the Scientists Committee on Loyalty Problems and by resisting the signing of loyalty oaths (once by only delaying the signing, once by indeed refusing to sign).
The Vietnam War was different—insanity at a different level. By the mid-1960s some of my academic colleagues and a great many young people across the country had become very audible and visible opponents of the war. My opposition, as I approached my fortieth birthday, was far more muted—at first little more than a show of solidarity by trading in my broadcloth shirt for a blue work shirt and letting my hair grow a little longer. I well remember my first participation in an anti-war demonstration. It was in the fall of 1965, or perhaps the spring of 1966. I joined a group of Quakers lined up along a highway in Costa Mesa, California in the early evening. I stood there holding a burning candle—others had signs as well as candles—as we sought to communicate silently with passing motorists. To a true activist, my participation was a very modest effort indeed. To me, at the time, it seemed like a large step, a daring public display.
Soon thereafter, some of my faculty colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, collected enough contributions to fund one trip to Washington. I was selected as the spokesperson to make the anti-war case to our Representative in Congress. So off I went. James Utt[91] welcomed me cordially enough in his spacious office and listened politely, after first asking, “Where is the rest of your delegation?” My impact was, I’m sure, close to zero, but perhaps not exactly zero. I had to console myself with that thought.
I made a couple of trips back to the East on other business in the following year, and took advantage of those trips to take part in other public anti-war demonstrations, one in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, one in Washington, D.C. I made no speeches and carried no signs. I just lent my physical presence to a cause I now believed in, and I felt more comfortable, less “daring,” than in that first Costa Mesa vigil.
Oddly, I was once tear-gassed in a demonstration in which I had no part. I was on the Berkeley campus for a meeting—probably in 1967—and was swept up in a horde of mostly students running pell mell from an onslaught of tear gas spread by local or campus police. By that time, causes had been mingled in campus demonstrations. I didn’t know whether this one was on behalf of minority rights or women’s rights, or in opposition to the war or to the practice of grading student performance.
As my very modest activism increased, and my opposition to the Vietnam war grew stronger. I decided that I wanted nothing further to do with weapons work or secret work of any kind. It wasn’t that I regretted my participation in the H-bomb program. I took part in it for what seemed to be good reasons at the time, and I never felt afterwards that I had made a “mistake” in joining the effort. As I reported in Chapter 3, I felt that it would be a good thing if the United States acquired an H bomb before the Soviet Union did. I thought of the United States then as a moral nation that could be trusted with weapons of nearly unlimited destructive power and the Soviet Union as a nation that could not be trusted. My faith in the morality of the United States was now seriously fraying, but nothing had happened to make the Soviet Union seem more trustworthy. I remained convinced that it was indeed a good thing that the United States had been the first to achieve a thermonuclear explosion. In the decade-and-a-half since Mike, the world had been a little safer, I felt sure, than it might otherwise have been.
In the summer of 1968 I found myself back in Los Alamos, a wonderful place to live[92] and a wonderful place to work. This time I was engaged in unclassified research on nuclear structure, no different from my university-based research and free of any secrecy requirements. My decision to do no more weapons work or other secret work had no immediate practical consequences, since I was not being asked to do such work that summer and did not expect to be invited to do so in the foreseeable future. Yet I had the gnawing feeling that my decision was potentially reversible if I didn’t announce it publicly in some way.
That opportunity came part way through the summer. Los Alamos had a sizable contingent of scientists and others who shared my antiwar sentiments, and we met now and then to talk about what, if anything, we could do to hasten the end of the war. Around mid-summer a regional meeting to address how scientists might have some influence on the decision makers and war-makers in Washington was scheduled for Cloudcroft in southern New Mexico. I attended the small gathering of no more that fifty people and gave a talk. I no longer remember what I had to say or why I was invited to speak. I remember only that I took advantage of the opportunity to state in public that the ongoing war had so strongly affected me that I had decided to do no more weapons work or other classified work. Then I breathed a sigh of relief. With those few words to that small audience, I had made my public statement.
91
Utt, representing the conservative district in Southern California where I lived and where UC Irvine was established, was notable for his consistent opposition to civil rights legislation and to America’s membership in the United Nations. (He was, however, politically a bit to the left of his successor, the John Birch Society activist John Schmitz.)