The Little Kernel

...Only Reubin Askew opposed a nuclear freeze, and only George McGov-ern favored a unilateral reduction of nuclear weapons...

...Increasingly now, we find that we are a republic of place-bound citizens in desperate search of planetary solutions...

...Among other things, he predicted that in the wakeofnuclearwarthe earth would experience a sharp drop in temperature, a partial destruction of its ozone layer and a virtual halt to photosynthesis in plant life...

...Gary Hart, jumping into the gender gap, praised the women in the audience for deploring war...

...The nuclear-free movement was not helped by an editorial endorsement appearing in Izvestia...

...The statute that voters decided not to pass on November 8 stipulated that "No person, corporation, university, laboratory, institution or other entity shall, within the City of Cambridge, engage in work the purpose of which is the research, development, testing, evaluation, production, maintenance, storage, transportation, and/or disposal of nuclear weapons or the components of nuclear weapons...

...Government funding, she said, controls scientific policy...

...Scientists feared that the law could be applied in ways that might restrict academic freedom...

...Teller said one thing that I shall not soon forget:" I do not think that nuclear war necessarily means the end of the human race...

...Still, anyone who has seen Sagan's wasteland slides, or who has listened to Teller's tales of a tolerable nuclear catastrophe, can readily see the point of cleaning up the neighborhood...

...The survival of Homo Sapiens, in other words, cannot be excluded...

...George Wald, a biology professor and Nobel Laureate, went out of his way to respond to Bok...

...It was the business interests, in any case, who sounded the loudest complaints...

...Ernest Hollings maintained that the best way to get disarmament "is to elect me President...

...This is one city attempting to save the rest of the world," announced a partisan of the nuclear ban at a City Council meeting one week before the referen-dum...

...We'd simply leave...

...Walter Mondale said he favored nuclear disarmament even when, as Jimmy Carter's Vice President, he sometimes seemed to lean the other way...

...He is not particularly overweight, yet his slouching presence reflects ineffable heaviness, a brooding quality that is not easily dismissed...

...Once again all seats were filled and most faces were solemn...

...Nosooner had Sagan, theghost of Nuclear Future, departed than the ghosts of Nuclear Past materialized in the persons of Edward Teller, "Father of the Hydrogen Bomb," and Hans Bethe, the H-bomb's reluctant uncle...

...Science is understanding, and what understanding do you reach if you are making a more destructive weapon...

...Bethe is small and parsimonious in manner...

...The lesson here may be that if you are going to plunge into global issues, you will have to accept the global political consequences...

...Mobilization for Survival, meanwhile, was collecting $23,000...

...hespeaks softly and carries big syllogisms...

...But Cambridge is McGovem country...

...What we are discussing here is a technology that does not now exist...

...Sagan brought along 90 slides to accompany his song of Cassandra...

...he asked in an interview with the Harvard Crimson...

...Teller spoke to the crowd-and sometimes played for laughs, as when he said to Bethe: "Hans, I value your opinion more than that of any single person in this room, but not necessarily more than the opinion of everyone here collectively...

...It would go on somewhere else...

...Not surprisingly, each side accused the other of drawing support from alien or unsavory sources...

...Carb was said to have brought in a political consultant from the West, a big gun from Idaho, and to have received most of its money from a sagging nuclear industry nationwide...

...The Babel of scientific and political voices, broadcast in a variety of moods and accents, formed a fittingly confused backdrop to the main event in Cambridge this year-a November 8 referendum asking voters to decide whether or not to ban all nuclear research within city limits...

...Exemptions would be granted for "the research and application of nuclear medicine" and for "basic research, the primary purpose of which is not to work toward the development of nuclear weapons...

...The kind of protection they offered-thechancetotakea symbolic stand against the nuclear inertia that both surrounds us and propels us toward the unthinkable-cannot compete with the daily protections we crave, cherish or fear to lose, namely the freedom to follow our noses and feather our nests...

...Teller took the affirmative, claiming that a space-based laser defense system could be "80 per cent perfect," and would thus be " far better than nothing...

...Harvard, as usual, has provided the polis as well as some of the fireworks...

...If passage of the referendum could not appreciably reduce the risk to life, to many it threatened a reduction in the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness...

...In October all seven Democratic candidates for President (predating the Age of Jackson) arrived in dark suits and striped ties to expatiate on nuclear disarmament before a packed house of un-accustomedly subdued academics .Their tameness may have had something to do with the fact that they were on camera-the show was being televised live -and also with their collective perception that the candidates for the most part were on target...

...It is hard to redeem a world crisscrossed by local jurisdictions...

...Bethe spoke to posterity...

...For good measure, he called the act "intolerably vague" and probably in violation of the First Amendment...

...Similarly, John Glenn endorsed negotiations with the Russians even though he voted against Salt II...

...Bethe, on the other hand, argued that "Star Warsv/ift not work...

...What we're doing now wouldn't stop," Draper's president, Joseph F. O'Connor, assured Cambridge voters before the referendum...

...In general, I tended to be impressed by what Bethe cautioned and what Teller projected...

...Only at Harvard could that have masqueraded as a joke...

...So we need not be surprised that this dowdy city of nearly 100,000 souls, some of them possessing marketable IQs, has lately been going nuts over nuclear questions ranging from outer space to inner conscience...

...In times like these, what we can do we must do...

...You can win a nuclear war for two weeks," declared Cornell's prolific guru of Physical Science, "until the Nuclear Winter sets in...

...logic is his constant companion...

...In a not too edifying alliance with labor unions fearing the loss of nuclear jobs, leading research firms like the Charles Stark Draper Laboratories created Citizens Against Research Bans (carb) and raised an estimated $200,000 to fight the good fight...

...The two septuagenarians, who had worked on the atom-bomb "Manhattan Project" during World War II, were a study in contrasts...

...What does academic freedom mean...

...In the opinion of a half-dozen spectators with whom I talked later that evening, McGovern won the debate...

...In this case all Satan needed was a haven across the Charles River...

...The ordinance for a "Nuclear Free Cambridge," on the ballot through the efforts of a citizens' group called Mobilization for Survival, was rejected by a 20 per cent margi n, but not before it had stirred passions that seemed heated even by Cambridge's overwrought standards...

...A few weeks later, while some of us were still searching for a kernel of truth, Carl Sagan showed up to warn us of the perils of a nuclear holocaust...

...Cambridge City Hall houses a "Peace Commission"?a clearinghouse for information on nuclear weapons...

...That is why the presidents of both major universities in town-harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-broke custom and publicly opposed the referendum...

...Teller looms large...

...It was a fair description of a community still intoxicated by Emerson, Thoreau and William James, one that has customarily viewed global salvation as a local responsibility...

...Besides, he observed, even if America could somehow develop a laser weapon capable of knocking out enemy missiles, the Soviets could counter by devising a protective laser-shield...

...The extinction of Homo Sapiens," he told us, "cannot be excluded...

...The debate wehadcometohear was titled "The Next Development in the Arms Race-weapons for Outer Space...

...Draper, a fixture on Technology Square near MIT, had much to lose from acity decreed nuclear-free...

...Alan Cranston pointed out that he was the first candidate to make peace a significant issue...

...Eighty-five per cent of its $140 million budget last year was used for nuclear research, including work on all the major missile systems-trident, Polaris, Poseidon, and MX...

...It is a dangerous precedent," declared Harvard's Derek Bok, "foralo-cal community, or any governmental body, to forbid particular kinds of research because they might lead to dangerous or undesirable consequences...

...Hetriumphed there in 1972byatwo-to-one margin, about the same ratio by which he lost in his hometown of Sioux Falls, South Dakota...

...It is easy to sympathize with the Mobilization for Survival folks in their losing cause, and to understand why they lost...

...The whole cycle, Bethe warned, "could only further the arms race...

...Another Harvard biologist, Ruth Hubbard, noted that "there is no unregulated research anywhere in the world...

...Not everyone at Harvard objected, however...

...Exemptions aside, in the view of many businessmen and professors the prohibition seemed too broad for comfort...