BLIND TO REALITY

...Instead, he lumps together into a single "control" classification the diverse positions of Leo Szilard, Linus Pauling, Eugene Rabinowitch, David Inglis, the Federation of American Scientists, the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, the Pugwash Conferences, and all others whose positions he wishes to dismiss without analysis...

...He attempts to paint a picture of the American scene in which "American scientists, at least in the area of national policy toward nuclear weapons, have become full partners with politicians, administrators, and military officers in the formulation of policy...

...But he does not give one example of a scientist who publicly supported the government's policy of denial and deceit in the year that followed that explosion...

...Robert Gilpin's answer is a conditional pro-suicide, and he presents' the history of those segments of the American scientific community which concur in varying degrees...

...He makes no mention of the disagreements which existed with this interpretation even at that time, nor of the fact that explosions in salt have been found to produce seismic effects not two and a half times smaller than those in rock as had been previously claimed, but rather two and a half times larger...

...Yet even within the confines of the positions he examines—"infinite deterrence" (Edward Teller) and "finite deterrence" (Hans Bethe, Oppenheimer)—Gilpin's selective omissions and distortions are frequent...

...Senate Internal Security Committee, which he designates as a "very critical study...

...Apparently oblivious to American political and economic realities, he writes that Philip Morrison, Harlow Shapley, Linus Pauling, and the pacifist Society for Social Responsibility in Science were "held in check" by "the intransigence of Stalin, the obvious need for the U.S...

...By similarly selecting only those dogs that bark at the ap propriate time, one might also estab lish that barking produces the sun rise...

...He simply states flatly that new data from underground explosions demonstrated that the test detection systems were "far inferior" to those assumed by the Geneva Conference of Scientists...

...The moral of Gilpin's tale is that blindness to these realities exists among many, including the author of this tale...

...Now that Stalin is dead, our weapons more diversified, and Oppenheimer out of government, are the checks to their acquisition of power removed...

...Senate document number 123, Eighty-sixth Congress, though this is nothing more than a reprint of a paper prepared by the National Planning Association, which he does not mention...

...Reviewed by William C. Davidon Tn a rephrasing of Hamlet's ques-tion, the president of the Federation of American Scientists asked during the 1946 controversy over international control of nuclear weapons, "Are you pro- or anti-suicide...

...Then follows a sequence of innuendoes inferring that these scientists were in some manner a limited group, and that their data were questionable...

...There is, however, an excellent history available by J. Rotblatt, published by Taylor and Francis Ltd., London...

...He asserts there is no history of the Pug-wash movement, and refers the reader to an insidious report by the U.S...

...His long discussion of the H-bomb controversy is based largely on the report of the Atomic Energy Commission hearings "In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer...

...In contrast, when he is grasping for facts supporting his biases, the author dispenses with qualifications...

...Gilpin gives, for example, as a reference for a statement by James Fisk, U.S...

...He does say that "the findings resulting from the chemical and physical analysis of fish convinced many scientists that the AEC and its chairman (Strauss) were trying to hide the dangerous nature of the atomic arms race from the American people...

...Even in Gilpin's own field of political science, his eagerness to build his case at the cost of integrity is evident...

...to diversify its weapons program, and the influence of Robert Oppenheimer...

...military policy...

...Footnotes are profuse, and provide a scholarly appearance, but they often refer to secondary sources, are frequently incomplete, and sometimes inaccurate...

...Gilpin refers to advice given literary critics by D. H. Lawrence to distinguish between the "author's moral," what he states is his purpose, and the "tale's moral," what is in fact the lesson to be drawn...

...The author makes no attempt to develop seriously the positions of those scientists who are in basic disagreement with U.S...

...We are being led to disaster by men acting within a political, economic, and military system that is failing to meet the radically changing needs and potentialities of our day...

...Scientists have participated in the making of policy, but the determination of which scientists these are, and when they are listened to, rests with others...

...Yet he omits an account, contained in these same hearings, of the efforts by Vannevar Bush (wartime director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development) to oppose the first H-bomb test and to get the United States to seek an H-bomb test ban with the Soviet Union in 1952, before any such tests had been made...

...This book also makes no mention of the vigorous opposition by a sizable part of the scientific community to the appointment of Lewis L. Strauss as Secretary of Commerce— opposition based in large part on the actions and decisions of Strauss when he was a member and chairman of the AEC...

...The closest Gilpin comes to revealing these attitudes is in his discussion of the aftermath of the heavily contaminating fission-fusion-fission "Bravo" explosion of March, 1954...

...While at one point he speaks approvingly of "the American threat that it will employ nuclear weapons to defend its political commitments such as those with respect to Berlin," this threat is ignored and the nomenclature changed when he says "the threat of nuclear blackmail, as the word has observed in the Berlin crises, has been an established tactic of Russian policy...