Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 63

28 February 1901—19 August 1994

Prophet of Sanity

After his death, the magazine New Scientist named Linus Pauling one of the greatest scientists of all time. But during his lifetime, particularly in 1962, when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his anti-nuclear weapons work, many people in the United States saw him as at best a Soviet stooge. A decade earlier, the State Department had refused him a passport because of his activism. Life magazine called the conferring of the Nobel Peace Prize a “weird insult [to the people of America] from Norway.” The Senate Internal Security Committee, the Senate equivalent of the House Un-American Activities Committee, blasted him as a mouthpiece for the “Communist peace offensive” against American military preparedness. And his own colleagues in the chemistry department at Caltech studiously avoided congratulating him.

But Pauling, who’d already won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into chemical bonding, was immune to Cold War–era paranoia. As he said in his 1962 Nobel lecture, he was convinced of two things: “The only sane policy for the world is that of abolishing war,” and it was the responsibility of the very scientific community that helped develop “terrible weapons” like those that destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima to take a lead in eliminating them. Pauling spoke from conviction but also from an uneasy conscience. Although he had declined to participate in the Manhattan Project during World War II, he did work on projects that had direct military application.

Due partly to the horrors of the world war and partly to the influence of his pacifist wife, Pauling became an outspoken advocate of nonviolence immediately after Germany and Japan surrendered. In 1946 he joined the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, an organization chaired by Albert Einstein devoted to the elimination of nuclear weapons. He was one of the distinguished signatories of the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto, a declaration cowritten by Einstein and British philosopher Bertrand Russell calling on the leaders of the world to seek nonviolent alternatives to international conflicts. In the late fifties he began agitating for a ban on above-ground nuclear testing, arguing that the radiation fallout was much more damaging to public health than government experts admitted.

The culmination of Pauling’s anti-nuclear work was his cooperation with a Missouri-based organization called Committee for Nuclear Information. Pauling collaborated with other scientists in what has come to be called the “Baby Tooth Study,” a long-term project that established indisputable links between nuclear testing and radiation poisoning by measuring levels of strontium-90, an element dispersed in above-ground testing, in the baby teeth of American children. The study frighteningly demonstrated that above-ground testing contaminated grasslands with strontium-90, which was then passed on to children through cow milk. It was a chilling conclusion and quickly led to a moratorium on open-atmosphere nuclear testing.