“Space Weapons: Good for Us or Bad?”
Richard L. Garwin, Ph.D.
Physicist, nuclear scientist, recipient of the National Medal of Science and Enrico Fermi Award, and member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Seventh Annual Lynford Lecture
Remarks by Jeffrey H. Lynford
November 2004
Senator Clinton, Councilmember de Blasio, President Chang, Professors Chudnovsky, fellow trustees, faculty, students and honored guests:
Once a year in the Fall, my wife, Tondra, and I become students again, here in Dibner Auditorium, and annually, we invite public officials to come and participate with us in this event. At this time we want to express our appreciation to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and City Councilmember Bill de Blasio for making a special effort to be here. From our personal knowledge, we know how tirelessly these two elected officials toil on the behalf of all New Yorkers, and their appearance here today is a vote of confidence in Polytechnic's mission to produce the "best and the brightest" engineers of the 21st century.
It has been said that the nuclear age arrived at precisely 0529 hours on July 16th, 1945 in a blinding white light and a mushroom cloud at the Trinity testing site on the White Sands Proving Grounds, five miles from Alamogordo, New Mexico. Upon witnessing the destructive force of the first atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Supervising Scientist of the Manhattan Project, said, "Now I am Shiva, the destroyer of worlds." Shiva is the Hindu god of death, and clearly Dr. Oppenheimer was being prescient about potential negative applications of nuclear technology.
Fast forward nearly 60 years to 10:30 pm on September 30th, 2004; we are on the campus of Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio; it is the first Bush-Kerry debate and each candidate is asked what, he believes, will be the number one international issue confronting the next president of the United States. Amazingly, they concur: The risks associated with continuing nuclear proliferation!
Today we have with us Dr. Richard L. Garwin, an eminent experimental physicist who has been working on these risks for the better part of the past five decades. He has been an active participant in both peaceful and military applications of atomic energy, from thermonuclear weapons defense to advanced medical devices such as MRIs, magnetic resonance imagers.
Dr. Garwin's collected writings, patents, discoveries and inventions define a lifetime dedicated to answering the question: Can mankind harness nucelar energy for beneficial uses, rather than for destructive ones?
In addition to working in the hard sciences and engineering, Dr. Garwin has been deeply involved in the public policy debates surrounding the aforementioned applications as a faculty member of Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia Universities, as an expert advisor to various branches of our federal government, and as a member of various prestigious independent non-governmental organizations.
When Dr. Garwin received The Enrico Fermi Award from Senator Clinton's husband, President Clinton, in 1997, its citation read:
"For his exceptional contributions to the fundamental physics of condensed matter, elementary particles, and fields; for his remarkable ability to analyze and integrate concepts from many fields into innovative practical engineering-applications; for his numerous contributions to the national defense; and for his steadfast and principled participation in the formulation of national security policy."
The President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, has stated, "Dick Garwin is a national resource. He possesses a truly original, creative intellect wrapped inside a caring humanist."
In Dr. Garwin's latest book, Megawtts and Megatons: The Future of Nuclear Power and Nuclear Weapons, he attempts to frame a public debate on the appropriate civilian uses of atoimc energy to generate electricity, by offering three observations:
- In terms of global warming, atomic energy is a far better choice than fossil fuels because there are no carbon dioxide emissions;
- The world's oceans contain more than four billion tons of uranium, one-thousand times greater than existing land resources, and that extracting this material could be economically feasible; and
- Recent developments in commercial reactor techology have made them much safer, and we should encourage central governments to redouble their efforts to make them even more dependable.
Not everyone in this room may agree with these observations, but they certainly articulate a basis for an informed, and hopefully rational, dialogue. And so it may be with Dr. Garwin's conclusions today about space weaponry.
This leads me to my main point, which is the ability of our democratic society to debate issues of controversy without fear or favor; and the importance of universities such as Polytechnic to encourage such discussions on their campuses.
No group of political leaders should be able to censor, distort, or manipulate scientific findings for partisan ends, no matter whether the topic is global warming, stem cell research, the disposition of nuclear waste, or space weaponry.
Currently, the Union of Concerned Scientists has collected over 4,000 signatures on a petition to protest the misuse of science to further factional or biased agendas. Dr. Garwin has added his signature, and thus his voice and public reputation, to this petition. Poly students should learn not only from Dr. Garwin's pioneering efforts in applied research and engineering, but also from his fine example of public service and intellectual integrity.
I would like to conclude by sharing with you a short selection from a speech made by Winston Churchill in Liverpool in 1901, because it has for me a certain resonance and relevance relating to today's activities:
"We live in an age of great events and little men, and if we are not to become the slaves of our own systems or sink oppressed among the mechanism we ourselves created, it will only be by the bold efforts of originality, by repeated experiments, and by the dispassionate consideration of the results of sustained and unflinching thought."
Ladies and gentlemen, I now turn the podium over to Councilmember Bill de Blasio.