EITHER-OR
Snow, Sir Charles P.
either — or by SIR CHARLES P. SNOW This article is adapted from a brilliant but little publicized address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science recently. Sir Charles Percy...
...We know that for a dozen or more states, it will only take perhaps six years, perhaps fewer...
...I still think so, without qualification...
...But that is another challenge...
...Unless we are abnormally weak or abnormally wicked men, this knowledge is bound to shape our actions...
...The discovery of atomic fission broke up the world of international physics...
...Most scientists thought then that Nazism was as near absolute evil as a human society can manage...
...This has killed a beautiful subject," said Mark Oli-phant, the father-figure of Australian physics, in 1945, after the bombs had dropped...
...I believe that there is a spring of moral action in the scientific activity which is at least as strong as the search for truth...
...Through accident, or folly, or madness—but the motives don't matter...
...We all know that, if the human species does solve that one, there will be consequences which are themselves problems...
...I am not going to conceal from you that this course involves certain risks...
...Scientists know certain things in a fashion more immediate and more certain than those who don't comprehend what science is...
...We know that...
...To themselves, no more honorable and Godfearing body of men could conceivably exist...
...I mean, we have all the resources to help half the world live as long as we do, and eat enough...
...It may be—scientists who are better men than I am often take this attitude, and I have tried to represent it faithfully in one of my books— that this is a moral price which, in certain circumstances, has to be paid...
...No effort has been made to edit the speech from spoken to written style.—The Editors...
...I don't want to be misunderstood...
...Sir Charles Percy Snow is a distinguished British scientist better known to readers of his novels as C. P. Snow...
...After all, a challenge is not, as the word is coming to be used, an excuse for slinking off and doing nothing...
...It is part of our minds...
...If you doubt that, read William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich...
...Therefore I respect, and to a large extent share, the moral attitudes of those scientists who devoted themselves to making the bomb...
...Yet in the name of obedience they were party to, and assisted in, the most wicked large-scale actions in the history of the world...
...Do you wonder that we sometimes feel ashamed of ourselves, as we look out through that plateglass...
...I tell you that, not being a very bold man, or one who finds it congenial to stand alone, away from his colleagues...
...For we genuinely know the risks...
...That is the "either...
...Is there any tougher ground for them to stand on...
...It may do worse than make them unpopular...
...The name of this spring is knowledge...
...Perhaps it can give us guts strong enough for the jobs in hand...
...That is the foundation of their morality...
...For scientists know, and again with the certainty of scientific knowledge, that we possess every scientific fact we need to transform the physical life of half the world—and transform it within the span of people now living...
...I speak with feeling here...
...It is a duty which seems to me to come from the moral nature of the scientific activity itself...
...Scientists have to question and if necessary to rebel...
...It is unobtainable, though there are other bargains that the United States could probably secure...
...We know, with the certainty of statistical truth, that if enough of these weapons are made— by enough different states—some of them are going to blow up...
...It is the plain duty of scientists to explain this "either-or...
...We can't expect many scientists to do it...
...So can obedience, carried to the limit...
...Between a risk and a certainty, a sane man does not hesitate...
...Or at least, it does matter to you and me, but it must not count in the face of the risks...
...I also know what for me was the moral trap...
...Within, at the most, six years, China and several other states will have a stock of nuclear bombs...
...We are faced with an "either-or," and we haven't much time...
...We are sitting like people in a smart and cozy restaurant, and we are eating comfortably, looking out of the window into the streets...
...A good deal of the international community of science remains in other fields—in great areas of biology, for example...
...Just as we know that you in this country, and to a slightly less extent we in ours, have been almost unimaginably lucky...
...and the U.S.S.R...
...Down on the pavement are people who are looking up at us: people who by chance have different colored skins from ours, and are rather hungry...
...The German officer corps were brought up in the most rigorous code of obedience...
...I think I know the virtues, which are very great, of the men who live that disciplined life...
...We can work out the number of scientific and engineering personnel it needs for a nation-state to equip itself with fission and fusion bombs...
...I see no evidence that scientific work on weapons of maximum destruction has been in any intellectual respect different from other scientific work...
...I, too, had got onto an escalator...
...We also know most of us are familiar with statistics and the nature of odds...
...On the one side, therefore, we have a finite risk...
...All this began in the Hitler war...
...For scientists have a moral imperative to say what they know...
...Do you wonder that they don't like us all that much...
...With the discovery of fission, and with some technical breakthroughs in electronics, physicists became, almost overnight, the most important military resource a nation-state could call on...
...I suggest to you that there is...
...On the other side we have a certainty of disaster...
...It is very difficult to see what else they could have done...
...I am no anarchist...
...For instance, the population of the world will become embarrassingly large...
...All this we know...
...I am saying this as responsibly as I can...
...They are quite obvious, and no honest man is going to blink them...
...That doesn't matter...
...A challenge is something to be picked up...
...I went into official life at the beginning of the war, for the reasons my scientific friends began to make weapons...
...A large number of physicists became soldiers not in uniform...
...I am not saying that all rebellion is good...
...I am not suggesting that loyalty is not a prime virtue...
...Well, it is within our power to get started on that problem...
...but, to an extent, knowledge gives us guts...
...Most of us are timid...
...But there is a moral difference...
...It is this...
...But I am saying that loyalty can easily turn into conformity, and that conformity can often be a cloak for the timid and self-seeking...
...I had better take the most obvious example...
...Unless one was an unlimited pacifist, there was nothing else to do...
...I myself thought so...
...Even the best-informed of us always exaggerates these periods...
...The "or" is not a risk but a certainty...
...In spiritual and moral terms, I sometimes think he has...
...When scientists became soldiers they gave up something, so imperceptibly that they didn't realize it, of the full scientific life...
...Soldiers have to obey...
...The nuclear arms race between the U.S.A...
...Nevertheless, it is no good pretending that there is not a moral price...
...The same duty, though in a much more pleasant form, arises about the benevolent powers of science...
...More than likely, the moral and intellectual leadership of science will pass to biologists, and it is among them we shall find the Ruther-fords, Bohrs, and Francks of the next generation...
...What does matter is the nature of the statistical fact...
...Are we going to let it happen...
...And unlimited pacifism is a position which most of us cannot sustain...
...Other countries join in...
...not only continues, but accelerates...
...The official life in England is not quite so disciplined as a soldier's, but it is very nearly so...
...All that is missing is the will...
...So they have remained, in the advanced societies, ever since...
...Not intellectually...
...Many biologists are feeling the same liberation, the same joy at taking part in a magnanimous enterprise, as physicists felt in the Twenties...
...All this we know...
...We are morally impelled to...
...They have a much greater one than that, and one different in kind...
...It throws upon scientists a direct and personal responsibility...
...Either we accept a restriction of nuclear armaments...
...It is going to make them unpopular in their own nation-states...
...I was an official for twenty years...
...Scientists must not go that way...
...We know it in a more direct sense than any politician because it comes from our direct experience...
...There is no agreement on tests...
...I stayed in that life until a year ago, for the same reason that made my scientific friends turn into civilian soldiers...
...We know this, not as a journalistic fact at second-hand, but as a fact in our own experience...
...It is not the foundation of the scientific morality...
...It is not enough to say that scientists have a responsibility as citizens...
...Physicists have had a bitterer task...
...I can put the result in a sentence: I was coming to hide behind the institution, I was losing the power to say "no...
...That is the certainty...
...The United States is not going to get the 99.9 per cent "security" that it has been asking for...
...This is going to begin, just as a token, with an agreement on the stopping of nuclear tests...
...But when you get on to any kind of moral escalator, the trouble is to know whether you are ever going to be able to get off...
...Yet the duty to question is not much of a support when you are living in the middle of an organized society...
...There are going to be challenges to our intelligence and to our moral nature as long as man remains man...
...That being so, Nazism had to be fought, and since the Nazis might make fission bombs—which we thought possible until 1944, and which was a continual nightmare if one was remotely in the know—well then, we had to make them too...
...In intellectual terms, he has not turned out right...
...Only a very bold man, when he is a member of an organized society, can keep the power to say "No...
...When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find far more, and far more hideous, crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion...
...All physical scientists know that it is relatively easy to make plutonium...
...This we know, with the certainty of—what shall I call it?—engineering truth...
...Within, at the most, ten years, some of these bombs are going off...
Vol. 25 • February 1961 • No. 2
