SCIENTISTS URGED TO BALK AT 'STAR WARS'
Author: Associated Press
Date: Sunday, November 17, 1985
Page: 28
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
A Nobel laureate from Harvard University and two physics professors said
yesterday that universities must refuse to help develop the ''star wars"
space-based defense system because it won't work and will only escalate the
arms race.
"I find it hard to describe to people how far out and crazy it is. It's
like trying to shoot down bullets with bullets," said Edward Purcell, who
received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1952.
"It really is a question of arms control or arms race," he added. "I think
it's very important to keep space a region free from military competition."
Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, told reporters he knew of very few computer
specialists who would say star wars, or the Strategic Defense Initiative,
would work.
He said scientists have a choice: they can follow the "German example" and
say that politics is none of their business, "or do we examine what we do and
decide on its morality?"
"We as teachers and professors have responsibility for the moral as well
as the technical education of our students," he said.
Gary Goldstein, an associate professor of physics at Tufts University,
cosponsored a resolution approved by the Tufts faculty senate that said
faculty participation in SDI wars was inappropriate and that the university
should refuse research funds for the system.
"Such SDI weapons research, which ultimately must be secret and involve
security clearance, runs counter to the norms of a free and open university
and circumvents the time-honored system of peer review of scientific
research," he said.
Goldstein said more than 2,000 faculty members and senior researchers at
universities nationwide have signed a pledge to refuse to participate in SDI
research.
"The SDI system is objectionable on technical, political and moral
grounds," he said at the news conference at MIT. "It's goal of total
population defense is a technical impossibility. It is astronomically
expensive and politically destabilizing, bringing the world closer to nuclear
devastation."
Goldstein, in addressing several dozen students and others at a rally
after the news conference, said developing the star wars system would involve
more researchers than the effort to create the first atomic bomb during World
War II.
"The mobilization of people on a scale beyond the Manhattan Project is
under way," he said.
Weizenbaum said the belief that star wars would be only a defensive system
is a myth.
"The sytstem would certainly have the capacity, if it worked, to blind the
Russian military" by destroying Soviet satellites, he said. "That's an
offensive capacity."
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