HE STILL BROWN-BAGS IT
MIT'S NEW NOBEL LAUREATE ALSO STILL RELENTLESSLY BATTLING FOR
HIS CAUSES

Author: By David L. Chandler, Globe Staff

Date: Monday, October 29, 1990
Page: 41
Section: HEALTH AND SCIENCE

"It unhinges everything," a harried but energetic Kendall said in his office last week. But if the myriad distractions of the attention lavished on him mean more recognition for the causes he has been espousing for two decades as chairman of the Cambridge-based Union of Concerned Scientists, he suggests, it will have been well worth it.

Amid constant interruptions by well-wishers ringing his phone and knocking on the door of his small, cluttered fifth-floor office, he spoke at length about some of the dangers he sees facing this planet and what should be done about them.

Long identified as a leading critic of Ronald Reagan's star wars missile defense plan and of the nuclear power industry, Kendall and the nonprofit scientists' group he co-founded are now focusing on the remaining post-cold war nuclear threats and the dangers of rising global temperatures.

Kendall, who was born in Boston 63 years ago to a wealthy old New England family and lives on a huge family compound in Sharon, has not yet decided what he will do with his one-third share of the $700,000 Nobel Prize money, awarded for experiments in the late 1960s in which he and his co-workers discovered the quark, the smallest known unit of matter.

Not that he needs the money. He and a brother inherited a multimillion- dollar fortune from the sale of the Kendall Co., a health supplies company his father founded in 1903 and best known for its Curad bandages and Curity disposable diapers. Kendall used the inheritance to set up a charitable foundation.

But Kendall's family of old-line Boston brahmins is not related to Kendall Square in Cambridge, a few blocks from his office, he says, but he had to check to make sure. He carefully read the historical information on the walls of the Kendall Square subway station and was unable to find any connection.

In addition to his physics classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his ongoing work with the UCS, Kendall keeps up an active agenda in research. He is part of an international team designing experiments to be performed on the multibillion-dollar Superconducting Supercollider, or SSC, when it is completed at the end of this decade.

And while his new stature as a Nobel laureate may add credence to Kendall's warnings about dangers facing the planet, it doesn't seem to have gone to his head. He still answers his own phone and carries his lunch to work in a brown paper bag.

He is genteel and soft-spoken, but his intense blue eyes flash with frustration as he talks about what he sees as the Bush administration's unjustifiable failure to act decisively on the issue of global warming, a phenomenon that most scientists believe will result from the burning of fossil
fuels.

"What is so striking and poignant," Kendall says, "is that our government won't even take steps which are otherwise beneficial and which would be the first lead-in to controlling the greenhouse effect. There are many things we should have been doing anyway, even if there were no greenhouse effect," to help to stave off warming, "and we aren't even doing that. So it seems to be quite bleak; I know many people, scientists, who are quite discouraged. . ."

"We are seeing now killer hurricanes at increased frequency, and each succeeding year seems to be hotter than the last," he notes. While this doesn't prove the greenhouse effect, "it's all consistent. . . It sure isn't going the other way."

In light of the warning signs, Kendall says, we should be "searching with enormous vigor as a nation to improve the efficiency of energy use, and there still remains great potential for doing that." Improved efficiency is "like
finding money in the street." Improving the efficiency of everything from cars to light bulbs is "extremely cost effective, and it reduces the pollutant load in the atmosphere and in the surface waters and in the ground."

Making cars and other vehicles more fuel-efficient, he adds, also "reduces our dependence on just those things that are bringing us into conflict in the Middle East." Efficiency improvements "can be spectacularly successful and have everything going for them. They have almost no dark side, which is unique in technical enterprises in our society."

In addition, "I think the government has shortchanged the alternate, benign energy sources," he says. Cutting back on energy research was "a planned program during the Reagan years, and it's continuing. It's cruel,
because it costs very little to develop these things."

Photovoltaic power, for example -- harnessing sunlight with solar cells could have been made commercially competitive in the Reagan years "if they hadn't strangled the baby in the crib, intentionally."

If the greenhouse effect is confirmed in coming years, additional, more costly measures may be needed, he says. But if we fail to take strong steps to reduce the warming, "it has the capacity to do extensive damage. I mean, it can mutilate the biosphere, it can mutilate our living space in ways which we virtually can't cope with properly."

Kendall is left cold, however, by one measure that has been touted by some of his MIT colleagues, among others, as a way to combat the greenhouse effect: the revival of nuclear power with new, "inherently safe" power reactors.

"The UCS has looked into this, and we've issued a report on the prospects," he says, "and we find that there's more sizzle than steak."

To him, the fundamental problem is the way nuclear energy has been regulated. "We have had a flawed regulatory structure, and the people that operate the plants have not been sufficiently careful, and any future nuclear program needs an 'inherently safe' Nuclear Regulatory Commission much more than it needs inherently safe reactors."

Even if the reactors were safe, he cautions, there remains the problem of disposing of radioactive waste. "It remains a major stone in the shoe that has to be resolved," he says. "It's a big issue with the general public, and I think rightly so."

Nuclear reactors of any kind may also add to the problem of nuclear weapons proliferation, which Kendall views as a concern even as the cold war winds down. "I mean, just contemplate what would happen if Iraq had nuclear weapons at the time she moved into Kuwait," he says. "That is just a grim thought. We're going to see nuclear weapons in the hands of Middle East countries probably in the next five or 10 years, and it's going to be a grim day."

He is also concerned about the possibility of an accidental launch of nuclear missiles by one of the superpowers. (He and a colleague have written an article on that issue for the December Scientific American.)

"An accident could just have catastrophic proportions," he says. "People have the idea that an accidental missile launch would be just one missile going up, but the way things are organized it would very likely be 50 or 100 missiles, with 100 or 200 warheads. And that rates as a substantial accident. I have to stress that the chance of this is very small, by everyone's understanding. Nevertheless, the danger is not just theoretical. "We have had failed computer chips which have initiated real nuclear alerts."

To help reduce this risk, "I think there are many things that ought to be done. There are a number if hardware improvements and there are also procedural improvements. I think that they ought to not have so much stuff on alert. I think we ought to back off the hair triggers."

Fighting the prevailing tide on many issues, as Kendall has done over the years, can be frustrating when government policies often seem to be harder to turn around than a fully-loaded supertanker. But he does seem to have had a significant impact in at least one area: the slow demise of Star Wars.

"It's definitely dying," Kendall says. In the latest budget plans, the program has been severely curtailed from the funding level Bush had sought.

"The UCS, I think, had the lead role in the opposition to star wars, and we are so credited by many in the Congress," he says. "It ultimately became quite understood that it was flawed."

He hopes the recognition that goes with the Nobel Prize may help him and the organization make further inroads. "It's just nice to sense that this would perhaps go even better in the future, because the problems have not by any means gone away."

CHANDL;10/25 NIGRO ;10/30,10:45 KENDAL29