Archived Newsletters

January 1994 Newsletter

Volume 23, Number 1 Jan 1994

In This Issue

Letters

How Do We Know?: Marc Ross
Radioactive Waste: Igor Alexeff
Making Physics Self-Supporting: Edward B. Montgomery

Articles

Symposium On Perception of Risk and the Future of Nuclear Power

Perception of Risk and the Future of Nuclear Power: Paul Slovic
Fears, Fantasies and Fallout: Spencer Weart
Public Perceptions of Nuclear Power: Richard Wilson
Contrasts Between Technical Analysis and Public Expectations: Robert L. Goble

Elections

Candidate Statements

Reviews

Genius in the Shadows, by William Lanouette, David Hafemeister
Arms Races, Arms Control and the History of the Cold War, by Patrick Glynn, David Hafemeister
Science Funding: Politics and Porkbarrel, by Joseph P. Martin, Allan Walstad

News

Book and Other Reviews Needed!
Subunit Statistics and Membership Database
Old Physical Reviews Needed!
OTA Congressional Fellowship Program 1994-95!
Minutes of the Forum's Executive Committee Meeting
Join the Forum!

Comment

Open Letter to US Senator Daniel K. Akaka: Donald N. Langenberg and Burton Richter
Statement on Termination of the Superconducting Supercollider: APS Executive Board

How Do We Know?

Regarding the last section of the editorial comment "How Do We Know?" (July 1993): I believe that physics and other natural sciences have been successful most of all because of improvements in observational techniques. Of course, testing by experience and critical thinking, and especially the symbiosis of theory and experiment, are sound notions; but they are not enough to distinguish physics from a quasi-science like economics. We physicists are distinguished by our extraordinary efforts to improve the methods of observation. The social sciences have made slow and fitful progress partly because they have more complex subject matter, but also because they have been seduced by the ease and glory of theorizing, often being satisfied with casual personal observations or with systematic but uninspired observations to support the theorizing.

Marc Ross
The Harrison M. Randall Laboratory of Physics
The University of Michigan
500 East University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1120

Radioactive Waste

As a nuclear physicist with experience in nuclear fission (Westinghouse) and nuclear fusion (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), I often wonder about why there is a great uproar about radioactive waste disposal. In a nuclear power plant, the most radioactive element by far is the operating reactor core. The activity of all other wastes is trivial by comparison. Therefore, why not simply contain the wastes of a reactor at the site of the operating reactor? Security and monitoring are already on site. If a new reactor replaces a decommissioned reactor on-site (the sites have been already approved), the old reactor can be monitored along with the new one.

I get the impression that the idea is to dispose of our operating reactors permanently in underground sites rather than to continually upgrade and improve them.

Igor Alexeff
Professor of Electrical Engineering
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37996-2100

Making Physics Self-Supporting

This letter is motivated by Professor Rotwarth's letter (April 1993), and the irresponsibility and hypocrisy of Congress regarding the Superconducting Supercollider.

Particularly since World War II, science in our nation has been an anomaly. In a nation noted for its entrepreneurial freedom science has been directed and its policies determined by the military, politicians, and pressures for profits. While the applications of science have provided the basis for most of our economy, science has not received a proportionate share of the rewards. Science must depend on political policy makers, war-makers and profiteers for its support. We are beggars.

The hypocrisy of Congress in killing the SSC after funding its startup is a perfect example of the government's incompetence in things scientific. At the same time, hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted on pork-barrel funding. This cynical arrogance should be rewarded by finding ways to support science independently and in proportion to its contribution to the economy.

This can be done relatively simply, but it won't be easy. The reward for putting science on a self-supporting basis, however, more than justifies the effort. Science, free to follow its own directions, may even be the dynamic ingredient that can save civilization.

Science can support itself through creation of one or more for-profit venture capital corporations with one major common goal: the accumulation of capital for the support of science. Many successful venture-capital firms have flourished since World War II. These provide models for strategies that can allow science to free itself from pursuits driven by war, politics, or the need for profits.

While various kinds of venture firms can be envisioned that will suit this purpose, all should include certain features. The accumulation of capital to support science is most essential. Directors, managers, money sources, scientists, and projects must be of the highest calibre. Early stages must have strategies to make the most money, progress, and accomplishment with the least effort. Rewards must be equitable for participants while allowing reasonable accrual of funds to allow support of increasingly larger projects.

There will be many problems, such as inter-science priorities, different value judgments, and conflicts over radical and conservative ideas. Still, the continuation of our present policy structure for science has steered science in ways that are inadequate for the future, and because political decisions are so fraught with error they may even jeopardize mankind.

One of the earliest post-World War II venture firms might still be one of the best examples to study. That is the American Research and Development Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 1946 with a capitalization of $46,000. The 16 April 1956 Chemical & Engineering News chronicles the corporation's first ten years, giving insight into their struggle for success. Moody's 1972 Bank and Finance Manual gives a later look at the growth of this company just before it was bought out by one of the companies it founded. A list of many companies whose stock it still held was impressive. Its greatest financial success was the Digital Equipment Corporation stock, worth over $350 million at an original cost of $64,000. The cost of all company stock held at that time was $25 million and had a market value of $410 million.

It takes little imagination to read into these records the efforts necessary for successes. But science, freed from the present yoke, is more than worth the effort.

Edward B. Montgomery
6720 Greenwich Lane
Dallas, Texas 75230

Perception of Risk and the Future of Nuclear Power

Paul Slovic

Scientists and policy makers were slow to recognize the importance of public attitudes and perceptions in shaping the fate of nuclear power. In 1976, Alvin Weinberg observed:

"As I compare the issues we perceived during the infancy of nuclear energy with those that have emerged during its maturity, the public perception and acceptance of nuclear energy appears to be the question that we missed rather badly..... This issue has emerged as the most critical question concerning the future of nuclear energy (1)."

Seventeen years later, the problem of public acceptance is even more critical. Either the problem is damn tough or we haven't been working hard enough to solve it (I suspect that both assertions are true). Public support for nuclear power has declined for a decade and a half, driven by a number of powerful forces and events. In March 1979, the movie The China Syndrome premiered, dramatizing the worst-case predictions of the earliest risk-assessment studies. Two weeks later, Three Mile Island (TMI) made the movie appear prophetic. Succeeding years have brought us Chernobyl and other major technological disasters, most notably Bhopal and the Challenger accident. The public has drawn a common message from these accidents--that nuclear (and other) complex technology is unsafe, that expertise is inadequate, and that government and industry cannot be trusted to manage nuclear power safely. These dramatic accidents and the distrust they have spawned have been reinforced by numerous chronic problems involving radiation, such as the discovery of significant radon concentrations in many homes, the continuing battles over the siting of facilities to store or dispose of nuclear wastes, and the disclosures of serious environmental contamination emanating from nuclear weapons facilities at Hanford, Fernald, Rocky Flats, and Savannah River.

Psychometric Studies of Risk Perception
The nature and determinants of public attitudes and perceptions regarding nuclear power have been the focus of considerable research. The psychometric approach to studying risk perception (2) assumes that hazards can be characterized in terms of numerous characteristics or dimensions, analogous to the personality traits that characterize people. Nuclear power has a special distinction in the perception literature--it is, to date, the technological hazard with the most negative and most problematic constellation of traits. It stands apart in having qualities that make it fearsome and hard to manage socially and politically.

The mapping of nuclear power's "personality" began in the mid-1970s with a series of psychometric studies designed to determine why people were very concerned about some hazards and not others, and why these concerns often differed from experts' assessments of risk. An early study assessed perceived risk of death (for the US as a whole) from 30 activities and technologies. Three groups of lay people and a small group of risk assessment professionals took part in the study. The results demonstrated great concern regarding nuclear power (it had the highest perceived risk for two of the lay groups) and great disparity between the perceptions of lay people and the perceptions of experts (who placed nuclear power 20th from the top of the list of 30 hazards).

Some have argued that public concern about nuclear power reflects a concern about radiation risk in general, but the groups of lay people in this study rated another radiation technology, medical x-rays, rather low in risk (17th-24th) and the experts rated it relatively high (7th). Apparently it was not radiation per se that was a concern to these people, but radiation as one may get exposed to it through the technology of nuclear power.

In an attempt to go beneath the surface of these global judgments, respondents were also asked to rate nuclear power, x-rays, and other hazards on a number of dimensions or attributes presumed relevant to perception and acceptance of risk. These ratings showed that nuclear power had the dubious distinction of scoring at or near the extreme negative end for most of the characteristics. Its risks were seen as involuntary, unknown to those exposed or to science, uncontrollable, unfamiliar, catastrophic, severe (fatal), and dreaded. Medical x-rays, in contrast, had a much more benign profile. Nuclear power's perceived benefits were also assessed and were found to be extremely low. These results have since been replicated with many different populations in numerous countries.

Perceptions of risk associated with nuclear waste and its management are similarly negative (3). When asked to state whatever images or associations came to mind when they heard the words "underground nuclear waste storage facility," a representative sample of Americans could hardly think of anything that was not frightening or problematic. The disposal of nuclear wastes is a technology that experts believe can be managed safely and effectively. The discrepancy between this view and the perceptions of the public is indeed startling.

The perception of nuclear power as a catastrophic technology was studied in depth by Slovic, Lichtenstein, and Fischhoff (4). They found that, even before the TMI accident, people expected nuclear-power accidents to lead to disasters of immense proportions. When asked to describe the consequences of a "typical reactor accident," people's scenarios resembled scenarios of the aftermath of nuclear war. Replication of these studies after the accident found even more extreme "mages of disaster. The fact that the earliest technical risk assessments for nuclear power plants portrayed worst-case scenarios of tens of thousands of deaths and devastation over geographic areas the size of Pennsylvania likely contributed to such extreme images. These early projections received enormous publicity, as in the movie The China Syndrome.

Origins of Nuclear Fears
The origins of fears about nuclear energy appear deeply rooted in our social and cultural consciousness. Weart (5) argues that modern thinking about nuclear energy employs beliefs and symbols that have been associated for centuries with the concept of transmutation--the passage through destruction to rebirth. In the early 20th century, transmutation images became centered on radioactivity, which was associated with "uncanny rays that brought hideous death or miraculous new life; with mad scientists and their ambiguous monsters; with cosmic secrets of life and death; --and with weapons great enough to destroy the world--" (5).

But this concept of transmutation has a duality that is hardly evident in the imagery associated with nuclear power and nuclear wastes. Why has the evil overwhelmed the good? The answer undoubtedly involves the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which linked this belief structure to reality. The sprouting of nuclear power in the aftermath of the atomic bombing led Smith (6) to observe: "Nuclear energy was conceived in secrecy, born in war, and first revealed to the world in horror. No matter how much proponents try to separate the peaceful from the weapons atom, the connection is firmly embedded in the minds of the public."

Signal Value
During the past decade, research has also shown that individual risk perceptions and cognitions, interacting with social and institutional forces, can trigger massive social, political, and economic impacts. A theory aimed at describing how psychological, social, cultural, and political factors interact to amplify risk and produce ripple effects has been presented by Kasperson et al. (7). An important element of this theory is the assumption that the perceived seriousness of an accident or other unfortunate event, the media coverage it gets, and the long-range costs and other higher-order impacts on the responsible company, industry, or agency are determined, in part, by what the event signals or portends. Signal value reflects the perception that the event provides new information about the likelihood of similar or more destructive future mishaps.

The informativeness or signal value of an event, and thus its potential social impact, appears to be systematically related to the characteristics of the hazard. An accident such as a train wreck that takes many lives may produce relatively little social disturbance beyond the victims' families and friends, if it is part of a familiar system. However, a small accident in an unfamiliar system, such as a nuclear reactor, may have immense social consequences if perceived as a harbinger of further, and possibly catastrophic, mishaps.

The concept of accidents as signals helps explain society's strong response to problems involving nuclear power and nuclear wastes. Because these nuclear hazards are seen as poorly understood and catastrophic, accidents anywhere may be seen as omens of future disasters everywhere, and thus produce large social impacts.

A Crisis of Confidence
The research described above demonstrates extreme negative perceptions and attitudes associated with nuclear power. This degree of negativity is remarkable in light of the confidence most technical analysis have regarding the safety of nuclear technology. Chauncey Starr (8), has argued that "acceptance of any risk is more dependent on public confidence in risk management than on the quantitative estimates of risk --." Public fears and opposition to nuclear waste disposal plans can be seen as a crisis in confidence, a profound breakdown of trust in the scientific, governmental, and industrial managers of nuclear technologies.

Viewing the nuclear-waste problem as one of distrust in risk management gives additional insights into its difficulty. Social psychological studies have validated folk wisdom by demonstrating that trust is quickly lost and slowly regained (9). A single act of embezzlement is enough to convince us that our accountant is untrustworthy. Subsequent opportunities to embezzle that are not taken do little to reduce the distrust.

Thus, it is apparent that the odds are stacked against nuclear power. The nature of any low-probability/high-consequence threat is such that adverse events appear to demonstrate the dangerousness of nuclear technology but demonstrations of safety require a very long time, free of damaging incidents or incidents perceived as damaging. As noted earlier, the high signal value associated with nuclear power mishaps assures that any significant problem, anywhere in the world, will be brought to the public's attention, continually eroding trust.

The Future of Nuclear Power
What are the chances for a rebirth of nuclear power, driven by new reactor designs, heightened awareness of the need for nuclear power, and growing awareness of the risks associated with other sources of energy? Certainly an increased perception of benefit or need will increase public tolerance, if not acceptance, of nuclear risks. Society's tolerance of nuclear weapons testifies to this fact. However, in the absence of revolutionary changes in the ways that risks are managed in our society, it is not likely that public trust, confidence, and acceptance can easily be regained. For example, although the consensus opinion of technical experts asserts that nuclear wastes can be sequestered with essentially no chance of any member of the public receiving a non-stochastic dose of radiation (10), public perceptions do not reflect this view. Why will the public be more likely to believe that the new generation of reactors are inherently safe? Weinberg (10) argues that special-interest environmental groups (skeptical elites) could turn the tide of public opinion by siding with nuclear power as a solution to the greenhouse problem. It appears likely, however, that environmentalists will embrace conservation and energy efficiency rather than nuclear power (11).What are the chances for a rebirth of nuclear power, driven by new reactor designs, heightened awareness of the need for nuclear power, and growing awareness of the risks associated with other sources of energy? Certainly an increased perception of benefit or need will increase public tolerance, if not acceptance, of nuclear risks. Society's tolerance of nuclear weapons testifies to this fact. However, in the absence of revolutionary changes in the ways that risks are managed in our society, it is not likely that public trust, confidence, and acceptance can easily be regained. For example, although the consensus opinion of technical experts asserts that nuclear wastes can be sequestered with essentially no chance of any member of the public receiving a non-stochastic dose of radiation (10), public perceptions do not reflect this view. Why will the public be more likely to believe that the new generation of reactors are inherently safe? Weinberg (10) argues that special-interest environmental groups (skeptical elites) could turn the tide of public opinion by siding with nuclear power as a solution to the greenhouse problem. It appears likely, however, that environmentalists will embrace conservation and energy efficiency rather than nuclear power (11).

In conclusion, before we spend billions of dollars pursuing a path that is destined for failure, we should pause to confront the problem of trust. Restoration and preservation of trust in risk management needs to be given top priority. A solution to the problem of trust is not immediately apparent. The problem goes beyond the nuclear industry; for instance, the chemical industry is similarly troubled. The problem is not due to public ignorance or irrationality, but is deeply rooted in individual psychology and in the adversarial nature of our social, institutional, legal, and political systems of risk management (12). Public relations efforts won't create trust. Aggressive and competent government regulation, coupled with increased public involvement, oversight, and control, and a "trouble free" performance record, might.

We can be sure, however, that without a serious effort to address the problem of trust, neither public acceptance nor a rebirth of civilian nuclear power in the United States will be achieved.

A.M. Weinberg, American Scientists Vol. 64, 16-24 (1976).
P. Slovic, Science Vol. 236, 280-285 (1987).
P. Slovic, M. Layman and J. Flynn, Environment , April 1991, 6-11, 28-30.
P. Slovic, S. Lichtenstein and B. Fischhoff, in Energy Risk Management, edited by G. Goodman and W. Rowe (Academic, London, 1979), 223-245.
S.A. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1988), 42.
K.R. Smith, Energy Environment Monitor Vol. 4, No. 1, 61-70 (1988).
R.E. Kasperson, O. Renn, P. Slovic, H. Brown, J. Emel, R. Goble, J. Kasperson and S. Ratick, Risk Analysis Vol. 8, 177-187 (1988).
C. Starr, Risk Analysis Vol. 5, 97-102 (1985).
J. Rothbart and B. Park, J of Personality and Social Psychology Vol. 50, 131-142 (1986).
A.M. Weinberg, in Proc of Waste Management '89 (University of Arizona, Dept of Nuclear and Energy Engineering, 1989).
J. Beyea, Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy Vol. 5, No. 3, 90-92 (1990).
P. Slovic, Perceived Risk, Trust, and Democracy: A Systems Perspective, Rpt No. 93-3 (Decision Research, Eugene, Oregon, 1993).

The author is at Decision Research, 1201 Oak Street, Eugene, OR 97401. This paper is based on an article by the same title published in Proceedings of the First MIT International Conference on the Next Generation of Nuclear Power Technology, 1991, edited by M. Golay. Preparation of this manuscript was supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Fears, Fantasies and Fallout

Spencer Weart

[This article is reprinted, by permission, from The New Scientist, 28 November 1992.]

The team that started up the first nuclear chain reaction, 50 years ago, was as nervous as if it was supervising the birth of Frankenstein's monster. If something went wrong in the primitive reactor pile as the control rod was gradually removed, simply replacing it would have reversed the process. As scientists they knew this--they had done the calculations to prove it. Yet one of them rigged up an additional neutron-absorbent rod to go in at the touch of a button. A second scientist added another rod, which would drop in automatically in case of trouble. A third hung a rod overhead by a rope, and stationed a reliable colleague alongside with an ax. Not satisfied, still another scientist organized a "suicide squad," with buckets of neutron-absorbent solution, ready to soak the pile and ruin it at the first sign of danger.

Was such caution beyond reason? In 1942 it was already clear that a nuclear reaction could "run away," overheating catastrophically and throwing out radioactive gas and dust that would endanger health for centuries. So there were sound reasons to fear nuclear energy. Yet there must be some point at which caution becomes excessive; people always mix irrational fears with their rational ones. Controlling the first chain reaction actually turned out, as everyone had calculated, to be as straightforward as tuning a radio.

Ever since nuclear energy was discovered at the turn of the century, it has touched a uniquely sensitive nerve. It has somehow become a source of more dread, and of more vehement and effective opposition, than any other technology. The scientists in 1942 already knew quite a lot about nuclear hazards. Besides their theoretical calculations, they had a generation of direct experience with the medical effects of radioactivity. These suggested nothing exceptionally frightening. What spurred the deepest anxieties was another heritage, far more ancient and laden with emotion.

Within a year of the discovery of nuclear energy, one of the pioneers, Frederick Soddy, the British chemist, had announced that the energy locked within atoms was so great that the Earth must be seen as a storehouse full of explosives. A man who could unleash this energy, he said, "could destroy the Earth if he chose." There was nothing new about the idea of an end to the world--Armageddon is a primal human concept. What was relatively new at the turn of the century was the idea that it could be brought on not by some act of God, nor by some cosmic catastrophe beyond human control, but by a group of people--even a single person. Journalists and science-fiction authors fueled the fear, warning that a careless nuclear experimenter could destroy the planet. In 1929, a writer for The New York Times suggested that not just the Earth but the entire Universe could be accidentally fired "like a train of gunpowder."

Scientists such as Ernest Rutherford, the British physicists, annoyed by the sensationalism suggesting that (as he put it) "some fool in a laboratory might blow up the universe unawares," tried to explain that the idea was scientific nonsense: if the world were so unstable, it would have disintegrated long since. But Rutherford was not successful: the notion of nuclear catastrophe had a fascination all its own.

Nor was it new to hear people exclaim that science was going too far. Almost all cultures have worried about men and women who poke unwisely into the great secrets of nature: first witches, sorcerers and alchemists, then such fictional figures as Faust and later Frankenstein. Now it was the turn of the mad scientist.

A typical example of this new stereotype appeared in The Invisible Ray, a 1936 film starring Boris Karloff. He played a scientist who tampered (as his mother warned him) "with secrets we are not meant to probe." The scientists devised a "radium ray projector," capable of blasting cities or curing people's illnesses, a sort of magic wand. He meant to use it only for good, but got a dose of his own weird radiation and began to glow in the dark. Having gone murderously insane, he crept about killing people with a touch of his hand.

The association of a new force with weapons was inevitable. Even before the First World War, physicists were speculating about nuclear arms. The phrase "atomic bomb" was first used by H.G. Wells, in a 1913 novel about a cataclysmic world war, The World Set Free. However, he also predicted a golden age that would come afterwards, the result of atomic bombs so terrible that they would mandate universal peace, while atomic energy would create a new Utopian society. This was in close accord with a very old structure myth: In the tales of many cultures, Armageddon in turn leads to the Millennium, a time of peace and happiness.

The hopes for nuclear energy were just as grandiose as the fears. After the First World War, newspapers saw nuclear science as a wonderful enterprise, leading toward an earthly paradise. By 1930, there were about 100 patent medicines on the market whose active ingredient was radium. Pastes, tonics, pills and suppositories promised to cure everything from warts to baldness. Mineral springs were proud of the radioactive content of their waters--something most of them do not advertise now.

The public was aware that nuclear radiation had a harmful side. Newspapers reported all the main problems: sterility, genetic mutations and cancer. Yet the news was also full of similar risks from other things, such as household chemicals. In the hands of competent doctors, people said, radiation would save far more lives than it would ever take.

Divine Madness
But away from this optimism, there was still an undercurrent of fear about radioactivity, fueled by science fiction stories and horror movies. This undercurrent was tapped in 1945 when the US dropped the first nuclear bomb. People's responses were guided by the images already in their heads. As soon as President Truman revealed that an "atomic bomb" had been used, journalists began to talk of doomsday, hellfire and cosmic secrets. "For all we know," intoned an NBC radio commentator, "we have created a Frankenstein." By this time physicists were beginning to understand that nuclear forces are neither more nor less cosmic than more familiar electrical forces. Yet most people believed that there was something supremely mysterious, almost divine, in any manifestation of nuclear energy.

With the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons came to symbolize all the horrors of modern technological warfare. For the first time, the idea of destroying civilization and the world became a technical reality, which people found hard to consider objectively. There is evidence that most people preferred to ignore the awful thoughts. At first they were glad to leave decisions to the experts. But in the late 1950s the undercurrent of fear began to emerge as a spur to public action.

Fallout from bomb tests became a major issue after gray radioactive ash from a hydrogen bomb test in 1954 covered and killed a Japanese fisherman, leading to vehement protests worldwide. Mothers began to worry about giving their children fresh milk, because it could be contaminated by strontium-90 from bomb tests. Something new was happening. Radioactivity was no longer seen as a mixture of white and black magic. It seemed only harmful, an ultimate pollutant.

People's anxiety took visible form in many popular films, such as Them! and Godzilla, about monsters created or released by radioactivity--giant ants, crabs, spiders, squids, even grasshoppers. These creatures were updated versions of the magician's demon and the mad scientist's creation, the monsters that always served as warnings (as the movies said explicitly) against those who "Went Too Far", who tried to grasp more than is proper. The implicit risk was authority, with its craving for power. The leaders of the protests against nuclear fallout understood this, and stated plainly that their main fight was against overweening military and political authority.

It made sense to protest against the spread of radioactive dust, but the protest leaders admitted that fallout was chiefly a stalking-horse for the greater problem of nuclear war itself. So long as nuclear weapons might destroy civilization, the word "nuclear" would carry a burden of fear, anger and distrust.

There was another aspect of nuclear energy that could not be shoved under the rug: civilian nuclear reactors were going into operation at many sites, with the first entirely commercial reactor starting up at Shippingport, Pennsylvania in 1957. Ever since 1942, scientists have demanded elaborate precautions against reactor explosions; two decades later, the imagery and language of monstrous and polluting damage, first inspired by nuclear weapons, transferred to the civilian nuclear industry. For example, radioactive wastes stir greater anxieties, and have provoked more devoted opposition, than any other industrial hazard. Polls show that the public sees nuclear waste as a far more difficult problem than most technical experts do, with a wider divergence than on any other issue. Yet the image of radiation as the most apocalyptic pollution was only part of a still larger picture. Now that thousands of nuclear weapons were hanging over everyone's head, modern technology no longer sounded entirely wonderful. What was most dreaded was the unknown, and nuclear technology seemed supremely mysterious.

Image Problem
Nuclear experts, constrained by government rules of secrecy, could not shake off the aura of sorceress powers--and perhaps did not quite want to. Industrial and governmental officials got a reputation for haughtily brushing aside public concerns as ill-informed nonsense. The critics began to call the nuclear industry arrogant, secretive, heartless and dangerous. Nuclear energy began to stand for all the problems of modern bureaucracy and industrial power. People opposed nuclear reactors as a way of opposing all complex centralized power, including military, industrial and bureaucratic authority in general.

By now nuclear energy carries quite a burden. It is associated with images of weird polluting rays and mad scientists, the destruction inherent in modern war, with everything people dislike about technology, with impersonal and manipulative authorities, and behind that, always, with an ancient tradition of cosmic and secret forces of life and death. Such negative associations have become inseparable from the most seemingly rational discussion. For example, in 1989, three years after the Chernobyl accident, the government of Taiwan launched an elaborate and expensive "risk communication" program to promote public support for building a new reactor. Surveys showed that if the program made any difference, it was to increase public worries about reactors rather than alleviate them. Simply to be reminded of nuclear energy's power, even in the most reassuring context, was to become more anxious.

These strong, negative associations conceal an opportunity: If they can be dealt with, everyone will make progress toward handling feelings about science, technology and modern social authority in general. Hopes and fears must be respected and problems of reactors and weapons tackled. There must be a step-by-step improvement in the systems for power production and military security, nuclear and non-nuclear, in all their complex effects. It will take a long time to win confidence through truly safe practices, but it can be done.

It will be fruitless to work through some authority claiming to be rational and infallible--a set of scientists and bureaucrats who decide what is best for everyone. The only solution will come when the people who expect to benefit from a technology routinely respect the rights of the people who might be hurt by it. A familiar example is levying a fee on people who use mildly radioactive materials and must dispose of the waste, then giving the money to people who live near the proposed waste repository--money they can use, if they like, to hire their own experts and radiation monitors. In the long run, the way to a solution is to give everyone a share of power and a stake in the outcome. Dread of our future can only be removed when everyone has a part in helping to determine how we will share the benefits, and the risks, of whatever technology we must use.

The author is director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics in New York. He is the author of Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Harvard University Press, 1988).

Public Perceptions of Nuclear Power

Symposium on Perception of Risk and the Future of Nuclear Power: Confronting the Crisis of Public Confidence in Science and Technology

Physics and Society presents here papers based on the four talks given at the invited session on Risk and Nuclear Power, held at the APS meeting in Washington, DC, on 14 April 1993.

Some Observations from Experience

Richard Wilson

The Fear of Radiation
To the embattled nuclear energy advocate the world seems a contrary place. A nuclear burner is simple. A physicist can understand it. This contrasts with the process of combustion of fossil fuels which I still find hard to understand in detail. Effects of radiation on people can be estimated somewhat better than the effects of other pollutants. In ordinary operation a power plant does almost nothing to public health. Accidents of course can happen. The worldwide effect of burning fossil fuels is so large that it equals the effect of the accident at Chernobyl in a single year. A nuclear plant is less unsightly than a fossil-fuel one, and some people prefer them to windmills. To the advocate, nuclear energy seems to offer an unlimited, environmentally benign source of energy to pull mankind out of poverty forever. Why is this not generally accepted? Is it because the public does not understand? To some extent this is true, and I address this next.

At its beginning just after the Second World War, scientists first insisted that nuclear matters be under civilian rather than under military control, and by 1960 had succeeded in declassifying most nuclear power information so that it could proceed in a completely open and transparent manner. This has happened to few technologies before. There are more public hearings and opportunities for public comment than in earlier technologies. This makes it peculiarly sensitive to the problems of openness; for those in search of something to do, it becomes the technology most easy to attack.

Bernie Cohen has explored some of the consequent misrepresentation by the press. Alarmist and incorrect stories about the effects of radiation on people often merit 30 articles on the major pages of major newspapers. A technically correct rebuttal often is on a minor page of one paper only. It is self-evident that newspaper editors want to sell newspapers. But why does this happen more to nuclear matters than to others, and why do we let it happen?

After the accident at Three Mile Island none of the major newspapers seemed to be able to keep their units straight. Rems and millirems per hour were thrown about with abandon. In contrast, the press releases from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) were informative and accurate. When reporting to the Governor of Massachusetts as Chairman of a special task force to study what Massachusetts should do, I recommended that in all future accidents the newspapers be requested to print the official press releases verbatim--and comment afterwards what they will. As I was making this recommendation at our press conference, the TV cameras switched off and the reporters walked out. Why are they unwilling to do this part of their job of conveying information to the citizenry? I do not know.

Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons
In 1945, nuclear scientists insisted that nuclear fission should be under civilian and not military control. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) had both military and civilian applications. When public opposition to nuclear armament became strong in 1970, the civilian program was attacked also as being a mere "justification" for the military one. The old-fashioned liberal Democratic position was that nuclear power was good; expansion of nuclear arms was bad. Yet extremists on both sides seemed to deliberately confuse the two. I suspect Edward Teller, on one side, wanted the nuclear power community to support the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the management of the Union of Concerned Scientists on the other found that it was easier to get support and funding to oppose a power plant than to stop a bomb.

That the position of liberal Democrats had changed was enunciated in a letter to the New York Times by Bethe and Seaborg in September 1988. They were unsuccessfully trying to change the position of the Democratic Presidential Candidate, Michael Dukakis. Can we return to the old position with the new Democratic government? I believe that we can if the "nuclear industry," utilities, manufacturers, regulators, and even academics, address the issue head on. I argue the importance of this by a risk comparison.

The probability of nuclear war is still large--comparable to the risk of a nuclear power accident although it has certainly diminished since glasnost and perestroika, and elsewhere I commented on the positive effect of the Chernobyl accident in reducing this probability. The consequences are also far worse. Therefore we must be concerned about anything that gives even a small increase in that risk. If the existence of nuclear electric power is connected to the risk of proliferation of nuclear weapons and through that to the risk of nuclear war, nuclear power could well be considered unacceptable.

Here I make a challenge. How can we get the world-wide network of commercial nuclear power to help stop proliferation of nuclear weapons and hence reduce the risk of nuclear war? If this can be done, and to the extent that it can be done, nuclear power should be supported by all peace-lovers.

The world nuclear industry did not behave well in the 1970s and the public has reason to be suspicious. I outline some of the contributors to nuclear proliferation:

In 1965 the French sold a heavy-water reactor to Israel. It is believed that this has been used for making plutonium for bombs.
In the 1960s the Canadians sold heavy-water reactors to Taiwan and India, and these were used to make plutonium for bombs.
In 1975 the French agreed to sell a plutonium-processing plant to Pakistan. Yet among the reasons for canceling the order was an insistence by the Shah of Iran that this be stopped as a condition for getting an order for two nuclear power plants.
In 1973 the Germans agreed to sell a reprocessing plant to Brazil.
It is reported that in 1973 the Germans helped South Africa with their isotope separation.

In 1946, nuclear physicists and others returning from the war did not want the atomic bomb to be under military control, and insisted upon a civilian AEC to oversee all uses of nuclear fission. This decision, however useful it may have been in controlling military excesses, laid deep problems for peaceful uses. For many years, military uses of nuclear energy, and with them military habits of secrecy, influenced the commission. A myth arose that bombs and nuclear power stations are inseparable, even though most power station engineers know less than many bright undergraduates about how to make a bomb, and no nation has ever used a nuclear power program in the quest for nuclear weapons. This mixing has led to official secrecy and a confusion of thought eagerly exploited by a few anti-nuclear scientists.

There is no doubt that the system and the people who are knowledgeable about a nuclear fuel cycle can be used to plan and build a fuel cycle for bomb making. But such people can also prevent clandestine bomb-making. This is a vital issue which needs far more discussion then I can give here.

The Cost of Nuclear Energy
The public has shown repeatedly that they do not want to spend money. They might still support nuclear energy if it were cheap. In 1970 it was competitive with coal, oil and gas generation, and cheaper in some locations. Now it seems to be expensive. In order to understand what the cost might be in the future, it is therefore important to understand what has changed to make the cost increase. Unfortunately this is not easy.

In 1970 the busbar cost was 0.55 cents/kwh from Connecticut Yankee, and 0.828 cents/kwh from Yankee Rowe, although there was some federal subsidy for construction. By 1980 this had all changed. Some environmentalists were actively opposing nuclear energy, and costs had escalated.

Far more insidious has been a steady increase in "Operations and Maintenance" (0&M) costs. Leading nuclear scientists told the nuclear industry at the beginning of this last decade that "if you operate the nuclear power plants safely for the next 20 years, all will be well." They were overly optimistic and ignored the effect of increasing costs. Several events in the last year bring to our attention the effects of ignoring operating costs. For example, before 1970 the cost of operating Yankee Rowe was mainly pay-back of the "loan" or charge against capital. The 1970 cost of 0.82 cents/kwh is equivalent to a little over 2 cents/kwh in 1992 dollars. The construction cost must have gone down; utility company practice has been to charge the construction cost early; moreover inflation must have diluted the payments. But the operating costs went up; this has been due to safety improvements demanded by the NRC and also to an increase in O&M. A clue comes in the staffing of the plant. The number of employees went up threefold over this time. I do not have a further breakdown but it has been claimed that a large part of the increase in employees was due to increase in the number of security guards, which may or may not have been accompanied by an increase in security. This runs counter to all previous experience. One expects that cost will come down as the new technology is learnt! The costs of most technologies have followed a "learning curve"; with nuclear power we seem to have a "forgetting curve"! A learning curve is evident in subsets of the nuclear data; the later nuclear power plants built by Duke Power cost less than the earlier ones. But superimposed is an overall societal increase of cost.

I can see only one main reason for the cost increase: There has been a change in the perception of the need for expenditure on safety, which is the main determinant of cost.

Various alternate possibilities have been suggested:

Public Utilities Commissions (PUCs) and the NRC have insisted on expensive equipment and staff additions without regard to cost. It is unclear whether this increased cost led to improved safety.
Licensing delays led to an increase in construction costs because of interest charged on capital during the construction period especially since interest rates have increased because of inflation since 1970.
Even more important than delays themselves is the huge dislocation caused by an "off and on" approach to regulation. It becomes almost impossible to schedule the arrival of crucial equipment, of skilled workers from a distance, and so forth. The ability of a regulator to force a small costly delay has become a weapon, augmented at times by an apparent vindictiveness of a frustrated regulator.

The delays in turn have been due in part to increased licensing requirements; part is from public opposition, and part may be due to construction by less competent utility companies. There is a wide variation in these cost increases, sometimes but not always associated with public opposition.

Reversing the Trend
It is generally accepted that nuclear power in the United States is in deep trouble and that the industry will die unless something is done. However, there is less general acceptance of the reasons for this state of affairs, and even less consensus on whether it is desirable to revive it. Assuming that we wish to do so, what can be done to reverse the trend, and in particular how can public opinion be brought to bear?

I believe that the present situation has been brought about by a minority of adamant nuclear opponents, and that all parts of the nuclear industry have been lily-livered and failed to do what is right. Let me start with the regulatory structure.

When the NRC started, it inherited a ruling from the old AEC on control of levels of radioactivity. In this, the Commissioners ruled on the meaning of ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) in radiation protection. After hearing form all parties, they ruled that radiation doses must be reduced if this could be done at a cost of $1,000 per man-rem. This was a number larger than suggested by any person or organization at the hearing. Somewhat later, the NRC developed a set of safety goals to guide its regulation. Among them is that the risk to anyone in the public be not more than 1% of the risk of comparable activities. By the nature of the discussion it is clear that these risks should not be calculated in a realistic way. Yet the Commission has not often used this number of $1,000/man-rem or the safety goals in its regulation and, when it has, has allowed the staff to use such a pessimistic ("conservative") approach to calculating risks that the number does not represent a real risk at all. I suggest that the Commission immediately take steps to use their safety goals and to calculate risks realistically.

In 1990 the Commission proposed for public comment a "Below Regulatory Concern" statement that they would not regulate anything which could be calculated to produce a dose of less than 10 mrem per year. When this was opposed by a vocal political program, the NRC in a typical display of timidity withdrew the proposal. They did not wait to see whether there was support from the scientists and the public. They could have kept the proposal and immediately held a generic public hearing, like the marathon public hearings for the emergency core cooling systems and ALARA held by the AEC in 1982. The courts behaved better. The arguments for Below Regulatory Concern were used in a petition for summary judgment in the Rancho Seco case a month after the NRC proposed the rule. This has been upheld in the appeals court. I therefore believe that the NRC could have easily withstood challenges in the Congress or in the courts. By their vacillation, the NRC is seen by the public (probably correctly) as not knowing what it is doing. This pleases nobody. Some people go even as far as to say that the NRC is the most anti-nuclear organization that they know of! The NRC should reintroduce the Below Regulatory Concern rule at once and show the public the courage which the public pay them for.

In discussions of waste disposal generally, we should steadily and strongly push for similar actions both by the EPA and the NRC. For example, we are spending some billions of dollars on waste disposal. Those spending the money might well be required to show that they are reducing radiation exposure by one man-rem per thousand dollars spent.

This sounds like a demand for government action rather than a discussion of public perception. But I argue that the very inconsistency of the EPA and NRC policy and actions are a considerable cause of the lack of confidence by the public in the regulatory process, and a cause of an unfavorable public perception.

We may not accomplish these ends in our confused country. But I am urging these ideas on my friends in the countries of the Pacific Rim and have reason to believe that they may be brighter and more courageous than we are. This might be seen as one more example of why the next century will be an "oriental century." The resurgence of nuclear power may come from the Orient. Let us also hope that if and when it is again economically and environmentally attractive for the USA, our country will follow close behind. Otherwise our economy will inevitably decline and we will become an undeveloping country.

The author is Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University and Director of the NE Regional Center of the National Institute for Global Environmental Change (NIGEC). This is an abbreviated version of the paper presented at the symposium.

How Nuclear Power Controversies Become Amplified: Contrasts Between Technical Analysis and Public Expectations

Robert L. Goble

It is by now an old story in the US that technical analyses pertaining to nuclear power which were intended to reassure or reduce the concerns of an anxious public have led instead to increased anxiety and concern. Numerous examples can be found in discussions of reactor siting, of health effects from routine releases from reactors, of emergency planning for reactor accidents, and of radioactive waste management. Some of these stories have had a long run in the public debate.

A prominent example is the development and citing of probabilistic risk assessments dating from the Reactor Safety Study or, as it is frequently called, the Rasmussen report (1). The original intent was to incorporate probabilities into any discussion of nuclear accidents so that the public would not be obsessed with extremely unlikely worst-case possibilities. The effect was to heighten public awareness of accident possibilities and to promote concern and discussion about what to do about them. The continuing saga of high-level waste disposal assessments is another example. It offers a stark contrast between a technical community convinced that radioactive waste management is a straightforward and solvable problem and a public which views the thought of a radioactive waste repository with fear and revulsion (2). Each new assessment appears only to extend the gulf between these perceptions.

This phenomenon--the mismatch between the intent of analyses and their effects--asks to be explained. The question is usually posed: "Why does the public think and behave in ways we don't expect?" For those who like to confront crises in public confidence, there is a related question: How can we change their thinking and their behavior?

These are questions about social behavior and it is a good idea to consult social scientists such as Paul Slovic and Spencer Weart before relying on such simple hypotheses as: The public is ignorant and/or the public is misled by irresponsible journalists and anti-nuclear agitators.

Physicists Are Different
An alternative question, which I would like to pose today, is: Why do physicists and other technical people think and behave in ways that the public finds inappropriate and/or difficult to understand? As a follow up, I ask: Could the public be right about this?"

There is plenty of evidence that physicists are different from representative members of the public. One piece of evidence is the repeated misunderstandings which are my subject. Further evidence comes from opinion surveys, such as those discussed by Paul Slovic. For instance, here is an interesting survey question (the respondent can strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree): "When the risk is very small, it is okay for society to impose that risk on individuals without their consent." Physicists significantly more often agree or strongly agree with this sentence than do members of the public (3).

Here is my simple hypothesis (analogous to simple hypotheses about the public) about how physicists and other scientific experts compare with members of the general public: Physicists tend more to wish to resolve controversies and tend to want to do so using methods of science.

The implications of this comparison can be explored by considering where the focus might be placed in the survey question. A member of the public might well skim over the first phrase, "When the risk is very small --", which sounds technical, and go on to the rest of the sentence, "--it is okay for society to impose that risk on individuals without their consent". This raises immediate concerns: one needs to face up to the possibility of irreconcilable conflict between individual interests and societal interests; that means making choices about values and social mechanisms; and such choices may well be informed by memories of past experience when risk language was part of the discussion --how well was the process of imposing risks handled by society?

A physicists, in contrast, might focus on the first phase, "When the risk is very small --". It refers to scientific analysis; it suggests taking the limit of zero risk (and physicists enjoy taking limits--that is why we invented calculus); and it offers the hope that the social difficulties raised in the second phrase should disappear in that limit.

Thinking of this sort has spawned the idea of "acceptable risks" or "below regulatory concern," and has been an important stimulus to useful analysis. However, when presented with such analysis in its naked form, members of the public might simply add it to their experience as another example of what they were worried about in the first place, technicians skimming over social complexities at their expense.

Table 1, adapted from a table by the German social psychologist H. P. Peters (4), offers a richer description of differences between physics (and other experts) and members of the public than is given by my simple hypothesis.

Table 1. Differences in the worldview of nuclear policy experts and laypeople

Approach used by experts	Approach used by laypeople
Narrow scientific problem definitions	Open problem definitions
Complex scientific models	Simple scientific models
Naive social model	Complex social model
Precise scientific terminology	Imprecise terminology
Proceed from evidence to claims	Don't separate values and evidence
Cost-benefit value perspective	Multifaceted value perspective

A Physicist's "Mind Set"
The differences, in either a simple or complex characterization, can be thought of as representing a physicist's "mind set." Technical presentations on nuclear power issues for the past decades exhibit four characteristic manifestations of this mind set that sometimes lead to severe problems in communication with the public, giving, in effect, misleading or confusing advice. These are the recurrent tendencies:

Excessive optimism about technological capabilities and excessive confidence in technical answers. An on-going example has been the high-level radioactive waste assessment program. It has been plagued by promising, in the words of the National Research Council, "unattainable levels of safety" under a rigid schedule that "is unrealistic, given the inherent uncertainties of this unprecedented activity" (2).
Treatment of a partial answer to a question as if it were the whole answer. An interesting example has been the long delays in including "external initiators" in probablistic risk assessments for nuclear power plants, while many experts have quoted the partial numbers as estimates of the number of people who might be killed by nuclear power.
Redefinition of a question, without securing consensus on the redefinition. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon has been the scientific definition of "risks" from nuclear power. Particularly likely to be confusing are characterizations in terms of "numbers of deaths per year" or "days of lost life expectancy."
Making claims outside one's area of expertise. Here I could cite a long and depressing litany. It will suffice to remind you of how many hasty assertions have been made about radiation epidemiology.

It is important to keep in mind that each of these tendencies is a "virtue" in the pursuit of science, and ones which we attempt to instill in our graduate students. Thus, a belief in problem-solving and a willingness to venture outside the immediate boundaries of knowledge are essential motivation in research. The effort to find those parts or aspects of a physics question which are measurable has been the impulse behind experimental physics, and the redefinition of questions has been the hallmark of theoretical advances.

But scientific virtues may become pathologies in the area of public policy. Thus each of these tendencies provokes a public response. Excessive optimism and confidence provokes the response "you promised." A partial answer provokes the response "you forgot" or (worse) "you are hiding" Redefinition of a question provokes the response "I don't understand--you are trying to fool me." Making claims outside one's area of expertise, provokes the response "scientists never agree about anything."

Can communication between physicists and the public be improved? We must not forget why these tendencies correspond to scientific virtues, and we do not want to give up doing science. Nuclear power risk assessments, for instance, were a brave venture and have contributed immeasurably to our understanding of nuclear technology. But we also must not forget that there are very serious limits to a scientific approach to public policy.

There are key social-science insights to assimilate: Public fears and distrust are serious and stem from real experience which has included broken promises and false impressions. Responsive technical analysis must deal with issues and questions as they are framed by the public. Some policy differences are not resolvable by science, so that technical fixes are not always regarded as helpful. Communication is best regarded as dialogue rather than instruction. Here are two approaches the physics community might take in attempting to improve its communication with the public on nuclear power:

Recommend corrective policies. A vigorous effort to recommend a comprehensive package of sensible major policy shifts in areas deemed critical by the public might shake up the present situation. The four critical areas are: (1) radioactive waste disposal, where the need is to address near term planning as well as long term storage; (2) nuclear safety, where a coherent treatment of new and old reactors and of emergency planning is needed; (3) clean up of DOE facilities, where adequate public oversight mechanisms are needed; (4) nuclear disarmament, where are US weapons policy, nuclear proliferation, and possible incidents stemming from the trade in nuclear materials, are at issue. Note that while the last two items are not in the domain of nuclear power, they are inextricably attached to public concerns about nuclear power. For this approach to have a chance of making a difference, the package has to cover all four items, to advocate real change in the way things are now done, and to encourage explicit ongoing mechanisms for responding to public concerns.

Recognize our limitations. Both experts and lay people blur together facts, knowledge, guesses, values, and desires about nuclear power and policy. We physicists could try to distinguish: (1) what we know as physicists--technical analysis for which there is true consensus; (2) what are critical technical issues for which expertise in other fields is called for; (3) what we believe because of our special experience and interest in nuclear technology; (4) beliefs where physicists genuinely disagree with each other; (5) critically, on what issues is it inappropriate for physicists to claim special standing.

I would leave you with two final questions: Are these two approaches compatible? Can we make either of them work in practice?

Acknowledgments: I thank Miriam Forman for trying the interesting experiment of setting up a dialogue between physicists and social scientists. I also acknowledge my department to two physicists and two social scientists, C. Hohenemser, R. Socolow, R. Kasperson, P. Slovic. They have shaped my views on nuclear power issues over the years; however, none of them should be blamed for the particular perspective presented here.

Reactor Safety Study, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington DC, 1975
Paul Slovic, James Flinn, and Mark Layman, Science Vol 254, 1603-1607 (1991)
H. Jenkins-Smith et al. Politics and Scientific Expertise: Scientists, Risk Perception, and Nuclear Waste Policy (1993)
Hans Peters PR Magazin September 1992, 39-50

The author is at the Physics Department, Program on Environment, Technology, and Society, Clark University, Worcester, MA 01610

Elections of the Forum on Physics and Society

We present here the backgrounds and statements of the candidates for the offices of theForum on Physics and Society. Election ballots will soon be mailed to all Forum members.

Edward Gerjuoy, Vice-Chair
Professor of physics emeritus, University of Pittsburgh, and "of counsel" (in effect, a consultant) to a Pittsburgh law firm, primarily on environmental law topics. Fellow of the APS and of the AAAS. Long-term Forum member who in past years has served the APS as chair of CIFS and as chair of POPA. Also a present member of the Board of Directors of the Pittsburgh Chapter of the ACLU and a former chair of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Health Physics Division Advisory Committee. Earned a J.D. degree in 1977, and thereafter was admitted to the Pennsylvania and California Bars. In this second career, Gerjuoy has been editor-in-chief of the American Bar Association Jurimetrics Journal of Law, Science and Technology, and a member of the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board, a gubernatorial appointment. He divides his research time between atomic collision theory and issues of joint interest to lawyers and scientists, such as how to improve the courtroom handling of scientific evidence, a subject on which he delivered an invited paper at the APS 1993 Washington meeting.

Statement: Unfortunately the collapse of the Soviet Union has not diminished the problems besetting physics and society. These problems include, to mention only a few: the growing threat of nuclear proliferation into unstable third world countries; numerous environmental concerns such as global warming, the decline of the ozone layer, contamination of the world's ground water, etc., etc.; and this nation's increasing disenchantment with science in general and physics in particular, manifested in a dearth of physics majors, the lack of jobs for those majors who survive to obtain physics Ph.D.'s, and the near-total absence of scientific literacy in all three branches of our government, for example in our judicial system.

In the past the Forum has admirably illuminated many such problems, to the benefit of its members. I will work to carry on these illuminations, of course, but will also strive to have their light reach more of our non-physicist fellow citizens, an endeavor in which the Forum has not been as successful to date as might have been hoped. Increasing efforts also should be made to bring the subjects and contents of Forum programs to the attention of our political leaders, a difficult task to accomplish in view of the time constraints on most politicians and their staffs. I will seek to foster these endeavors in cooperation with the APS officers and Council, as well as with other APS entities concerned with public policy, such as POPA.

In sum, I want the Forum to continue its important role of enabling the APS to examine and participate in public-policy disputes of interest to its members, but believe the entire nation would profit from making the special viewpoints physicists bring to those examinations more accessible to the wider non-physicist community.

Dietrich Schroeer, Vice-Chair
Professor of Physics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Schroeer's background includes a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the Ohio State University; a NATO postdoctoral fellowship at the Technical University in Munich; Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Deutsche Museum, Munich; Research Associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London; and Fellow of the APS. He has organized various symposia and short courses for the Forum, often together with the AAPT, on teaching physics-and-society courses, on the physics and technology of the nuclear arms race (AIP Proceedings #104 and #178), and other topics. He was Secretary/Treasurer and Vice-Chair and Chair of the Forum 1980-84 and 1986-1988 respectively. He has developed and taught various courses on the relationship between science and society, resulting in the textbooks Physics and Its Fifth Dimension; Society (Addison Wesley, 1972, AIP-US Steel Science Writing Award) and Science, Technology and the Nuclear Arms Race (Wiley, 1984). His current research is on arms races in conventional weapons, including studies of the transfer, dual use, and conversion of military technologies.

Statement: The primary role of the Forum on Physics and Society should be to help the physics community to understand and respond to the significant challenges it is now facing. The Forum should assist physicists to show that, in spite of the end of the nuclear era in weapons and electric power generation, they still have something to contribute to important public-policy debates, including those on energy issues. Even more dramatic challenges are the rising public questions about the value of science; the current employment problem is partly a result of these questions. Doubts are being raised among the public and physicists about the value of basic research, the usefulness of the tenure system, and the social wisdom of scientists. The Forum should stimulate and facilitate discussions of priorities within physics and between physics and other science, of the relative importance of basic and applied research, and of the input physicists can have into public-policy debates; but it should not impose any conclusions.

The Forum should emphasize three major functions. (1) Its primary goal should be to assist its members with self-education on physics-and-society issues through organized sessions at APS meetings, short courses and symposia, studies, and publications including the Forum Newsletter. (2) The Forum is the "home" within the APS of some physicists who are not obviously a part of one of the other divisions. It can be more supportive of these teachers, applied scientists, policy analysts, and administrators, and improve their integration into the physics community through the connections of the Forum with the Forums on Education and on the History of Physics, the APS Panel on Public Affairs, the APS Council, and the AAPT. It can legitimize activities in physics-and-society issues by giving recognition through speaking invitations, participation in studies, nomination as APS Fellows, and the Forum Awards. (3) The Forum can help physicists when they want to participate in public affairs on the basis of their technical expertise.

J. Greg Dash, Executive Committee
Greg Dash received a B.S. degree in Physics from the City College of New York in 1944, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1951. He worked at Los Alamos from 1951 to 1960, on unclassified research and weapons development. He has been a faculty member at the University of Washington since 1960, doing research in cryogenics, gamma-ray spectroscopy, and absorbed films and surface physics, and also publishing one book and editing another. He has been an AEC and a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the APS, and had visiting appointments in France and Israel. In 1989 he was awarded the APS Davisson-Germer Prize, and in 1991 an honorary doctorate from the University of Aix-Marseille. He has been active in science and public affairs since his student days, and is currently working on ground-freezing technology for the containment of hazardous wastes.

Statement: Environmental problems today are presenting society with serious and difficult threats, perhaps more dangerous than any that have ever been experienced. The control and disposal of nuclear and chemical weapons, the development of safe and renewable energy sources, the containment and disposal of hazardous wastes and the restoration of the environment are some of the more familiar. These problems are more refractory and complex than were faced in the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Physicists are needed to contribute to the solutions, and the Forum can help to explore how and where we can participate. To this end the Forum should continue to sponsor interdisciplinary symposia and workshops on specific scientific problems in the general area. In addition the Forum can take an important role in promoting our collective response as physicists. Examples of such discussion topics are: means of broadening private foundation and governmental agency support for environmental research, exploring employment opportunities for physicists in environmental science, and developing instructional materials for undergraduate courses.

Robert Ehrlich, Executive Committee
Professor at George Mason University since 1976. Previously was a member of the Physics Departments at SUNY New Paltz, (1970-76), Rutgers University (1966-70), and the University of Pennsylvania (1963-66). Ehrlich's physics research has been in experimental high-energy physics, following a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1964. He has written about teaching, and written and edited two books and held three conferences on issues concerning nuclear war and peace. In recent years he has also been involved in physics education, through public lectures, book-writing, creation of instructional films, and instructional software development (the CUPS Project).

Statement: My membership in the Forum reflects a belief, I suspect shared by most members, that physicists can offer important insights on the diagnosis and solution of some of society's problems. I also believe that the Forum needs to take an "early warning" approach to problems which society may not have fully recognized. The penchant of the media to focus on a particular crisis of the moment (or year) is well-known. But, since the most serious problems we face are long-standing, and sometimes out of fashion, we must help society to develop a balanced assessment of a wide array of global threats. One example of a possible not-fully-appreciated threat is the renewal of a full-fledged superpower nuclear rivalry, following the collapse of moderate forces in Russia, or following a nuclear arms race in Asia, leading to serious Japanese rearmament. Although it is appropriate that the Forum has broadened its previous narrow focus on arms control, it is also true that arms control should remain an important issue.

Another possible example of a not-yet-appreciated societal threat would be the significant rise of mysticism, as we approach the year 2000. The deplorable state of scientific literacy in the US is well-known, and the Forum should be involved in efforts that help the general public see science, and physics in particular, as positive solution-providers, rather than negative problem-creators. Finally, I would like to see the Forum be involved in efforts to help alleviate the current dismal employment prospects for physicists, and participate in studies that could help determine whether that situation is likely to be long-lasting.

Gerald L. Epstein, Executive Committee
Senior Analyst, Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, 1983-1989 and 1991-present. Project Director, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1989-1991. Developed course on arms control and nonproliferation, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, 1992. OTA Congressional Fellow, 1983-84. Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1984. Nominating Committee Chair, APS Forum on Physics and Society, 1992. Member of Forum study group on Energy, 1988-89. Currently directing studies of magnetic fusion energy (project director), antisatellite arms control, ballistic missile defense, and the defense technology base. Co-author of Beyond Spinoff: Military and Commercial Technologies in a Changing World.

Statement: The relationship between physics and society has entered a period of reassessment and evaluation. Policymakers are asking that research support to tied more explicitly to national goals. They warn that public funding sources cannot indefinitely keep up with an ever-growing physicist population. Scientific and technological megaprojects have surpassed the United States' willingness to pay for them, yet this country's ability to participate in true international collaboration (for example large-scale projects that may not be led by or sited within the US) remains to be proven. The Forum can and should contribute to these debates.

The Forum will also continue to participate in broader public policy issues that have significant technological components. It has almost become trite for Forum office seekers to advocate areas for Forum involvement, starting with arms control and disarmament but quickly extending to nonproliferation, global environment, economic competitiveness, and information technology, among others. Yet these contributions are important, in process as well as substance. Over the past two decades or so, a number of mechanisms have been institutionalized for physicists and other technical professionals to take part in such discussions. The Forum dates back to the early 1970s, with its publication Physics and Society entering its 23rd year in January. Several university graduate teaching and research programs in science and technology policy have emerged. Both the Congressional Science Fellowship program and the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment celebrated their twentieth anniversaries this past year, and both took the occasion to engage in some introspection. The Forum should take stock as well. In particular, it can perform a valuable service to both the physics and the policy communities, as well as optimize its own role, by reviewing its own activities and placing them in context with the many other mechanisms available for physicists to participate in policy debates.

Marc Sher, Executive Committee
Associate Professor of Physics, College of William and Mary. Senior Staff member of the CEBAF Theory Group. Ph.D. from University of Colorado in 1980. Postdoctoral positions at University of California at Santa Cruz, University of California at Irvine, and Washington University. Current research interests include high-energy theory, electroweak phenomenology, and cosmology. Director of Physics Program for the Governor's School for the Gifted in Science and Technology. Consultant for the Center for Gifted Education, supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education. Recent recipient of alumni teaching award.

Statement: The Forum sponsors workshops and publishes reports on a wide range of issues, from nuclear disarmament to global environmental change. Rather than give a vague and/or overly broad discussion of these issues, I would like to focus on two specific areas in which the Forum can make an important contribution.

Since the end of the Cold War, public and congressional perceptions of physics have changed dramatically. The Manhattan Project mystique has faded, and the public is demanding a return on its investment. The result has been an unprecedented attack on basic curiosity-driven research. The Mikulski amendment, which requested that the National Science Foundation devote 60% of its funds to technology-driven research, the recent death of the supercollider, and even the proposed name change to "National Science and Technology Foundation," all portend a potentially severe cutback in fundamental, basic research. The Forum can play an important role in communicating the benefits of basic research to the public and to Congress. Along with our colleagues in other scientific disciplines, we can discuss the numerous spinoffs and applications of fundamental research and the close relationship between university and industrial science. In the past, physicists have not been very effective in such communication, often oversimplifying and overstating the case (for example, justifying the SSC as a cancer research facility). I would like to see the Forum sponsor and publish studies, workshops, etc. which look at the benefits of basic research in all areas of physics.

Another issue which the Forum should address is the education of future physicists. The current problems of math and science education in this country are well known. Recently, a comprehensive report by the Department of Education pointed out that the "smartest students sit bored and unchallenged in classrooms." Cutbacks in programs for the gifted and talented, the drive toward heterogeneous grouping, the failure to identify talented minority students and other "at-risk gifted," all threaten the development of the next generation of physicists. During their elementary school years, most Ph.D. physicists were "gifted." Could the dearth of physicists of color be related to the failure to identify and nourish talented minority students during these years? The Forum could study the early education of physicists, and, perhaps in conjunction with the Department of Education, report on the impact of potential cutbacks in gifted education on the nation's scientific future?

Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb

William Lanouette with Bela Silard

587 pages, Scribner's, New York, 1992, $35, ISBN 0-684-19011-7

[This article is reprinted, with permission, from American Journal of Physics, September 1993.]

This delightful biography by Bill Lanouette brings Leo Szilard out of the shadows today: the time of the finale of the Cold War, a time foreseen by Szilard in his novelette, The Voice of the Dolphins. It is high time for a comprehensive look at Szilard, who was involved simultaneously in the first steps in building the original nuclear weapons and in the creation of international regimes to control the nuclear genie he had let out of the bottle. Lanouette's book does justice to the man who propelled the world across the nuclear Rubicon with the Einstein-Szilard letter to Roosevelt (p. 205): "Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future--. This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs--[which] might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory."

By obtaining a first access to Szilard's correspondence with his wife Trude, his brother Bela, and many others, Lanouette has been able to fully expose the two competing sides of Szilard's actions. The inherent conflict between building bombs and controlling bombs made Szilard's unique, somewhat frantic personality all the more chaotic. Lanouette shows that Szilard, the unemployed dreamer, was the creative force in the nuclear shadows of Einstein and Fermi, and also the instigator of today's arms control process. This is a humane book about Szilard the person, related through countless anecdotal stories; it is not a formal history of the Manhattan Project.

Szilard was an intuitive applied physicist whose thumb prints are on applied technologies (thermal reactors, breeder reactors, atom bombs, electromagnetic pumps, electron microscopes, and information theory) rather than on fundamental science. Lanouette shows that Szilard was politically very astute. He realized early on that Hitler could get the bomb and that a nuclear arms race would follow the first nuclear weapons. Szilard, driven by these political concerns, acted boldly: he secretly patented the nuclear chain reaction in 1934; he tried to get other physicists not to publish nuclear data, but after they published, he too published; he wrote three Einstein-Szilard letters (two to begin the Manhattan Project and one to slow it); he created much of the Franck report, which called for an initial demonstration explosion over Japan rather than city destruction; he lobbied Congress for civilian control of the atom and various other arms control matters; he helped organize the Federation of Atomic Scientists, the Pugwash meetings, and the Council for a Livable World; and he initiated the creation of the Salk Institute to study both science and its impacts.

Szilard was a most difficult person to work with. He overslept in the morning, then soaked for hours in the bath tub, only to arrive at work at noon with new suggestions for others to carry out. He didn't like to get his hands dirty, and he continually argued with the conventional wisdom of the day. With increasing anti-Semitic instability in Europe, his unpredictable personality became all the more frantic, but purposeful. Szilard, who couldn't be constrained to settle down until the last year of his life, always kept two packed bags, ready to hit the road. Szilard converted his frenetic energy into results. Lanouette argues that Szilard was the first to conceive of the bomb and among the first to initiate arms control because he was so contrary and difficult. His example implies that all large projects, such as the Strategic Defense Initiative, need contrary, but honest, nay sayers with social conscience to point out possible problems.

Genius in the Shadows answers many questions, such as: Who really conceptualized the December 1942 reactor in Chicago? Lanouette points out that it was Szilard, not Fermi, who first understood nuclear chain reactions and first designed the nuclear reactor. Lanouette states (p. 178) that "[Fermi] failed to recognize the importance of this news [of the fission process] and failed even to mention what he had heard to his Columbia colleagues. Fermi was so typically cautious, in fact, that as the grave consequences of fission became apparent to others around him, he repeatedly denied their significance." Fermi was clearly the group leaders, but Szilard was the creative prophet.

Who first conceptualized verifiable arms control agreements? A month after Hiroshima, Szilard addressed the Atomic Energy Control Conference. Lanouette writes (p. 283): "Szilard had the last word at the conference--and the first on record about the touchy topic of verification--when he said a necessary first step would be to 'guarantee immunity to scientists and engineers everywhere in the world in case they should report violations of the [arms-control] agreements'." Later Szilard recommended supplementing his immunity for whistleblowers with $1 million rewards. These ideas sound good today; wouldn't whistleblowers in Iraq, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa, and several other states have been useful? The special and challenge inspections of today's arms control treaties are further extensions of Szilard's suggestions of September 1945.

Because Szilard had the courage to work against the misuses of science, the American Physical Society and its Forum on Physics and Society have given the Szilard Award for "outstanding accomplishments by physicists in promoting the use of physics for the benefit of society in such areas as the environment, arms control, and science policy." Since 1974 the award has been given to many prominent physicists, including Richard Garwin, Hans Bethe, Wolfgang Panofsky, Andrei Sakharov, and Jack Gibbons. Upon receiving the Szilard Award, Gibbons, the former director of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the present Science Advisor to President Clinton, stated that "Szilard should be the patron saint of OTA!" Many of us fondly remember Trude Szilard, who joined in the early years in presenting the Szilard Award at the Washington APS meetings. More recently, the Szilard award has been enhanced by adding a sculpture of a dolphin which travels from winner to winner.

David Hafemeister California Polytechnic State University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93401

Closing Pandora's Box: Arms Races, Arms Control, and the History of the Cold War

Patrick Glynn

Basic Books, New York, 1992, 461 pages, $30, ISBN 0-465-09809-6

Was the nuclear arms race more an issue of technology or of political perceptions? Was it Newton or was it Freud? Patrick Glynn concludes that the arms race was both technical and political-psychological. Since the marginal utility of nuclear weapons rapidly diminishes with greater numbers of weapons, ultimately it was more political than technical. I agree with the author in that conclusion, but then we part company. Glynn's book clearly lays out the "might makes right" point of view and is a useful reference to understand the basis of the far right's opposition to arms control. Indeed, Closing Pandora's Box was recently described in a Washington Post book review as "the most cogent and informative history of the Cold War, of arms control and of US strategic policy to have emerged from the conservative mind." Despite being "imaginatively researched and elegantly written," the book's weakness, and the reason it fails to accurately present the development of nuclear arms, lies in the author's pre-established and unswerving belief in nuclear arms build-up as the best approach to nuclear arms elimination.

Glynn's main political thesis is that tough, noncompromising nations will prevent wars and end the nuclear arms race. Glynn asserts that arms races don't beget wars, but rather political firmness prevents them. He has strong horses in his stable with the failure of Chamberlain in Munich, and more recently the 1981 Reagan "zero option" for the INF Treaty which far surpassed the Nitze "walk in the woods." Any comparison of Munich and the winding down of the cold war will stretch credibility, particularly because of the differences made by Mikhail Gorbachev. Moreover, at the technical level, Glynn fails to understand the difference between nuclear weapons and conventional weapons, and at the political level he fails to understand the calming effects of confidence-building measures and three decades of almost constant negotiations. He properly takes into account some political factors, for example to appear to act too softly will encourage your adversary, but he fails to understand that ultimately there will have to be some form of arms control. Even a greatly weakened Russia will want to have its nuclear deterrent, and if not Russia, then certainly the other nuclear weapons states should be engaged in the arms control process. And what about treaties that are clearly in our interest such as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty? Doesn't our failure to adhere to a comprehensive test ban weaken the NPT/IAEA regime? Arms-control regimes have to reflect the interests of other nations, rather than prescribing terms from Washington.

Some of my disagreements with Glynn are:

Glynn didn't want the Soviets to have permissive action links (PALs) on their nuclear weapons if we had to give them some broad, very basic information. He exaggerates the "divulgence of highly classified information" (p. 201) during the passage of descriptive concepts on PALs to the Soviets. Does he want accidental launches?
Glynn criticizes McNamara for encouraging the Soviets to harden their missile silos because it would "encourage an increase in US vulnerability to a Soviet second strike, in the supposed interests of assuring mutual stability" (p. 203). Does he want the US to attack first? Would he rather have the nervous Soviets after the Cuban missile crisis mistakenly launch to protect their missiles from a dreamed US attack?
Glynn exaggerates the Soviet buildup by overstating the capabilities of the Soviet's "five new ICBMs, a new SLBM, and four new types of ballistic missile submarines" and asserts that "the Soviets would pursue a first-strike capability against the American ICBM force" (p. 215-6). But it is clear that one cannot have a first strike without being annihilated in the process. In addition, the technical data and all reasonable exchange-model war games show that, except in the case of the SS-18, US systems have always been far superior to their Soviet counterparts. The lethality of the SS-18 was less than that of the MX or Trident D5/W88, but there are twice as many SS-18 warheads.
The 1960s ABM system was decommissioned at Grand Forks because it wasn't capable or cost-effective. Nonetheless, Glynn thinks that it would have decreased offensive forces.
His concern about "inequalities in the SALT I agreements" (p. 234) seems to ignore our MIRVed, more accurate survivable submarines.
By stating that "--partly owning to their special fear of SDI, the Soviets after 1985 were never at the point where they could afford to reverse course and revert to confrontation" (p. 339), Glynn overstates the Soviet's fear of SDI. The Soviet MIR book and Roald Sagdeev, director of the Soviet space program, told Gorbachev the same things that the APS SDI study said to the US, namely that directed-energy weapons in space won't work on a cost-effective basis, and probably not for other practical reasons.

In spite of his strong political bias, Glynn does document many cases in which being intransigent and stubborn won out. However, there is more to the story than Ronald Reagan. For example, he seems to ignore the real role of Mikhail Gorbachev, who received ideas from the American arms control community that pointed out that minimum deterrence, viable on-site inspections, a comprehensive test ban, and de-MIRVing would reduce the chances for nuclear war. Gorbachev knew he needed to save money for his tattered system and that preventing nuclear war with the US was good for mankind. Without a Gorbachev, who gave up 3-to-1 advantages in both the nuclear INF and conventional CFE treaties, the nuclear world could have spun out of control. The debate over START in the Senate tried to set the record straight: The Bush Administration pointed out that to be firm was successful. However, Senator Moynihan countered by showing that he had written as early as 1979 that "The truth is that the Soviet idea is spent. It commends some influence in the world, and fear. But it summons no loyalty. History is moving away from it with astounding speed --. It is as if the whole Marxist-Leninist ethos is hurtling off into a black hole in the Universe." In other words, communism was a religion that was followed by its first and second generations, but beyond that it would collapse under its own weight. In Moynihan's view, we did the right thing by negotiating on arms control, killing some time, and waiting for the system to collapse. Historians will of course continue to debate this issue, but certainly both sides of the debate are not to be found in Glynn's book.

If you are teaching a course on the arms race, I would recommend Glynn's book only as a library reference. He tells some good stories, but with a heavy bias and some inaccurate conclusions. Although it might spark some good debates in your classes, "caveat emptor."

David Hafemeister
Professor of Physics
California Polytechnic State University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93401

Science Funding: Politics and Porkbarrel

Joseph P. Martino

Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1992, 392 pages

One of the many legacies of World War II was a decision that government would take primary responsibility for supporting scientific research, in order to enhance national defense, economic growth, and public health. In Science Funding: Politics and Porkbarrel, Joseph P. Martino contends that it is time to rethink that decision. His conclusion is based on an extensive examination of the current research scene and a look back at two centuries of science funding, stressing the American experience. The author, who is a senior research scientist at the Research Institute of the University of Dayton, has written two previous books: Technological Forecasting for Decision Making and A Fighting Chance: The Moral Use of Nuclear Weapons.

Martino surveys the many pathologies that have emerged in our science funding system, such as Congressional earmarking of funds for specific locales; the bias toward big science; political and bureaucratic micromanagement; funding instability and red tape; the struggle over indirect costs; biases inherent in peer review; and the organization of scientists into a special-interest lobby. He also explores many alternatives to government funding--alternatives which, having contributed historically to scientific research, were subsequently crowded out by the sheer weight of federal largesse. What makes Martino's critique compelling is its grounding in public-choice theory, which clearly indicates that the problems afflicting our research system are not abnormalities, not mere mistakes correctable by better management, but are rather the inevitable consequences of government funding.

The view has long been prevalent in economics that market processes frequently produce harmful, or insufficiently beneficial, results. Government, as the public interest personified, should step in to remedy "market failure." For example, private firms have insufficient incentive to carry out all the research that would benefit society as a whole. Therefore, government must make up the difference.

Public choice theory points out that politicians and government bureaucrats have their own self interest, which may not coincide with the public interest. Bureaucrats tend to seek more power and perks, a bigger budget, and more prestigious missions for their agency. Politicians are in the business of getting elected. Distorted political incentives arise from voters' fragmentary knowledge of government activities and the consequences thereof--an unavoidable situation, given the enormity of government expenditures and regulations in present-day society. The political image of doing good diverges from the reality. Political profit is available from porkbarrel projects, from government actions having concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, from programs whose conspicuous benefits are outweighed by inconspicuous side effects. Simply stated, there is such a thing as government failure. The results of market processes should be compared not with the public interest personified but with the results of real-world government.

By now, science funding is showing all the classic symptoms of government failure. Congressional earmarking, also known as porkbarrel science, is only the most blatant example. With peer review directing academic research money primarily to the wealthy Northeast and West Coast, the wonder is that politicians from elsewhere refrained as long as they did from grabbing some of that money.

An example of the form-over-substance nature of political priorities is found in congressional micromanagement of the National Institutes of Health, through proliferation of highly-specialized new medical-research institutes. These score points with various medical lobbies and project an image of positive action, but they do not necessarily increase the overall NIH budget, and the resulting distortion of funding allocations probably diminishes the net effectiveness of medical research.

The symbiotic relationship that has been developing between big government and big science should come as no surprise. Science mega-projects acquire large constituencies from outside science, gratify bureaucratic imperatives, and lend themselves to rhetoric invoking nationalistic pride. Deep divisions have appeared within the scientific community regarding such massive undertakings as the Superconducting Supercollider and the Human Genome Project, as many scientists express concern over the displacement of smaller-scale research offering a higher return in benefits to society.

There is little or no payoff to funding agency administrators if a risky piece of funded research is successful, only probable recriminations if it is not. In addition, peer review works to rigidify disciplinary boundaries. The result, according to Martino, is a conservatism which probably inhibits innovativeness and appears to be getting worse.

Government subsidy of any activity creates a special-interest group with the incentive to organize and lobby for additional benefits. Martino says this much, but he seems reluctant to spell out the implications which experience has by now fully confirmed.

Government involvement may stem from the best of intentions, but in the subsequent political process it is inevitable that the priorities of the subsidized group will to some degree be advanced at the expense of the public interest. Research has proved no exception to the rule. Government has squandered priceless resources on the pursuit of technological and scientific exotica, from space shuttles to particle accelerators, from quasars to quarks. The point is not that manned space travel will never be practical or that today's esoteric research will never find application. The point is one of timing: Just because it is physically possible to do something does not mean that now is the time to do it. Premature efforts divert intellectual and financial resources that could have been applied more directly toward building a wealthier, technologically more competent society, one which could more comfortably carry out research that had barely been possible before.

The usual argument for government funding of research--that the market would spend too little--is not merely wrong but misconstrues the issue entirely. It is an advantage of the market that private investors cannot afford to waste money on the scale that politicians customarily do. Yet, even if government were peopled by saints, they could not know how much money to spend on science or how to spend it. Martino mentions this latter point but does not place it in context within economic theory. It is not just a matter of perverse incentives or behavior. Government is inherently inept at allocating resources because it cannot utilize the store of dispersed, unarticulated knowledge in society. The relevant insights in this regard were provided by the Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, (1) long before public choice theory was developed.

In the absence of government funding, philanthropy would undoubtedly play a larger role. "Big science," circa 1900, was astronomy, and its was funded by philanthropy. Even today, one can only speculate whether the scientific returns from the Space Telescope will match those of the privately-funded Keck, which costs twenty times less. Howard Hughes Medical Institute spends $100 million a year on medical research, but NIH apparently regards this as some sort of threat, rather than a philanthropic helping-hand in the fight against disease.

Industrial research has been making important contributions to basic as well as applied science throughout this century. Radio emission from the Galactic center and the cosmic microwave background were both discovered at Bell Labs in the course of applied research. Martino cites evidence that not only has industrial research paid off for private firms, but it paid off more when the research was financed by the firms themselves rather than by the government. Consortia of several firms could carry out more research, probably with a larger ratio of basic to applied; until recently, anti-trust hysteria was an insurmountable obstacle to that option. Government fiscal and monetary policies that discourage savings and drive up interest rates also discourage privately-funded industrial research, because research is an investment that takes time to pay off.

Martino has issued a courageous and persuasive challenge to the prevailing view that scientific research requires massive government support. His book deserves a wide audience.

F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (University of Chicago Press, 1988).

Allan Walstad
Physics Department
University of Pittsburgh
Johnstown, PA 15904

Book and Other Reviews Needed!

The P&S reviews column needs contributors who are willing to write a review of a book, magazine article (or collection of articles), movie, video, or other work that might be of interest to P&S readers. Any topic that illuminates the relationship of physics to society would be appropriate. If you have completed a review (1000 words maximum, please) or just an idea of something you would like to write, contact Ken Krane at the National Science Foundation, 703-306-1666, or e-mail to kranek @ physics.orst.edu. Reviews can be sent in hard copy or electronically.

Subunit Statistics and Membership Database

The October quarterly APS subunit statistics have been run. There are currently 4,978 members of the Forum on Physics and Society, representing 12.1% of the total APS membership. These figures are up from 4,800 and about 11% in December 1992 (see Physics and Society, October 1993, page 13), but they still surely represent only a small fraction of those APS physicists who are interested in societal aspects of physics. Urge your colleagues to join our Forum. It's free, to APS members! Simply check "Forum on Physics and Society" on the annual APS membership renewal form, or send in the form printed at the end of this news section.

Old Physical Reviews Needed!

APS members who may wish to dispose of old issues of The Physical Review are requested to kindly send them to me at the address below. I am collecting these for the Technical Library in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I can also arrange for a pickup in the San Francisco Bay Area. Your donation of copies will be greatly appreciated.

Vladislav Bevc
Synergy Research Institute
P.O. Box 561
San Ramon, CA 94583

OTA Congressional Fellowship Program 1994-95!

The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) is seeking candidates from academia, business, industry, and the public sector for its Congressional Fellowship Program. Up to six Fellows will be selected for one-year appointment in Washington, DC, usually beginning in September 1994. The program provides an opportunity for individuals of proven ability to assist Congress in its deliberations of science and technology issues affecting public policy and to gain understanding of the ways Congress establishes national policy related to these issues.

Candidates must have extensive experience in science and technology issues or have completed research at the doctoral level. OTA encourages applicants with diverse backgrounds and work experiences to apply. Applicants must be prepared to perform balanced, comprehensive analyses; to work cooperatively in an interdisciplinary setting, and to present reports in clear, concise language.

Salaries range from $35,000 to $70,000 per year, based on the Fellow's current salary and/on training and experience. In some instances a Fellow may accept a salary supplement from his or her parent organization.

Applications must submit the following:

a resume limited to two pages, including education, experience, and area(s) of special interest;
a one-page listing of most recent published works;
three letters of reference, sent directly to the address below;
a statement of up to 1,000 words that either evaluates an issue and describes why it is of interest to you, or summarizes the public policy findings of work you have done;
a statement of up to 250 words explaining how the Fellowship fits into your career objectives.

Applications and letters of reference must be received by 1 February 1994. Send application and reference letters to: Morris K. Udall Fellowships, Personnel Office, Office of Technology Assessment, 600 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, Washington, DC 20003.

Minutes of the Forum's Executive Committee Meeting

We met at the Ranaissance Hotel, Washington DC, on 14 April 1993. Attendees were Anthony Fainberg (chair), Marc Ross (chair-elect), Tony Nero (vice-chair), Carol Herzenberg (secretary-treasurer), Al Saperstein (vice-chair elect), Ruth Howes (past chair), Barbara Levi (councillor), Lisbeth Gronlund, Tina Kaarsberg, Robert Lempert, Julia Thompson (executive committee members), Art Hobson (newsletter editor), Jo Levinger, Chuan S. Liu, Barret Ripin, Nancy Forbes, Peter Zimmerman (nominating committee member), Dirk Plummer, Edward Gerjuoy (program committee member), J.E. Felten, Dave Hafemeister (editorial board member), Richard Scribner (editorial board member). Executive committee members absent: Badash, Garvey, Schwartz, Wittels.

Fainberg called the meeting to order at 2:16 p.m. Herzenberg circulated minutes from the 1992 executive committee meeting, and the treasurer's report (Table 1). At the suggestion of Levi, it was decided to keep the $5,000 previously transferred into the general account in the awards account.

Table 1. Treasurer's Report

	Income Account
Balance 4/1/92	$24,494
Revenues
Dues Equivalent	$11,995
Interest Income	$1,239
Registration Equivalent	$7,161
Other	$30
Revenues Total	$20,425
Expenses
Newsletter	$11,027
Stipends	$735
Meetings	$855
Forum Award Transfer	$5,000
Travel	$1,014
Conference Proceedings	$2,508
Other	$125
Expenses Total	$22, 436
Balance 4/1/93	$22,483
Award Account
Balance 4/1/92	$1,917

Herzenberg reported on the election of new executive board members. Alvin Saperstein was elected Vice Chair, and Tina Kaarsberg and Robert Lempert were elected to the executive committee.

Program Chair Ross reported on past and future programs sponsored by FPS at APS meetings. At the Seattle meeting, there were 2 invited sessions and a jointly sponsored session; during the 1993 Washington meeting, 3 invited sessions and 2 jointly sponsored sessions. It was suggested that the Program Chair's report give time and date of sessions and attendance. The possibility of having sessions at other meetings was discussed. The possibility of organizing a contributed session, at the Washington meeting, was discussed.

Hobson presented and circulated a report on the newsletter, Physics and Society. Hobson requested articles from the invited sessions. Hobson was unanimously renominated as editor of the newsletter.

Liu and Ripin reported on the proposed Dwight Nicholson Award for Humanitarian Service (a memorial of the tragedy in the University of Iowa physics department), and circulated copies of a proposal. The Division of Plasma Physics will find $2,000 to start an endowment to make up a medal, with an intended trial 5 awards sequence. A motion to support the award was moved by Howes and seconded by Herzenberg, and passed unanimously.

Gronlund reported on discounts on subscriptions to the journal Science and Global Security for members of the Forum. There was considerable discussion, and note made of the lawsuit by the publishers, Gordon and Breach, against the APS and former Forum secretary/treasurer Heinz Barschall for libel (in conjunction with the subscription-costs issue that Barschall raised). Howes made the point that FPS should not be in the business of endorsing any commercial product. A decision was reached not to promote this journal.

Gronlund presented a speakers bureau report, and circulated recommendations from that committee. Speakers bureau options were considered. It was considered not feasible to have a speakers bureau to address the public because of the cost. Gronlund suggested that the Forum emulate the committee on the status of women in physics in providing a speakers list. A screening process is needed; Gronlund suggests abstracting talks. Nero suggested starting with invited speakers that the Forum has sponsored already. This listing could be sent out with the women in physics and minorities in physics lists.

Levi gave the awards committee report. This year's Szilard Award went jointly to Roy Woodruff and Ray Kidder, and the Forum Award went to Harvey Brooks. Letters went to the recipients indicating that they would be receiving cash awards in addition to the trophies, so cash awards will be made this year. However, care must be taken that such letters do not go out next year so that the awards will be limited to trophies in future years. Levi indicated that there was a possible conflict of interest in soliciting and selecting candidates for awards. Gronlund suggested creating two subcommittees for the two purposes.

Fainberg presented the report of the fellowship committee for Valerie Thomas, who was not present. FPS nominees for Fellow of the APS this year are: Art Hobson, Ruth Howes, and Carol Jo Crannell.

Councillor Levi reported that the APS Council would hold its meeting in two days. She indicated the agenda, and said she would write a summary for the newsletter (see the July 1993 issue). There will be a meeting of senior APS members on the following day, and that she will go and promote Forum activities. Forum membership is up to 4,800 from 4,300 in 1991. The international physics group is extremely active; they gave away $1.3 million in grants, supported 3,000 physicists in various ways. A joint meeting is planned with the Mexican Physical Society. There was a proposal that the APS Council endorse a statement critical of the state of Colorado because of the recent amendment.

Howes reported on coordination with the new Forum on Education.

Herzenberg volunteered to provide coordination with the Forum on the History of Physics.

Fainberg and Hafemeister discussed the APS Panel On Public Affairs. POPA decided to do a study of renewable energy. Issues that had come up in POPA included ethics, RF fields, Patriot missile effectivenss, and funding cuts on advanced nuclear power. POPA is looking at the anti-gay boycott in Colorado. POPA is having trouble locating a chair for the renewable energy study. POPA has been involved with the physics planning committee. Fainberg suggested that FPS should have a representative (Hafemeister or Kaarsberg) at every meeting of POPA, with FPS covering travel costs.

Howes and Zimmerman reported on a study on conventional weapons. About 10 names and topics had been identified, but this was postponed since they found themselves over committed.

Saperstein proposed a new study of the job situation, which may lead to a book. Saperstein has 10 authors lined up for 12 chapters, and wants to have a meeting of the authors. Howes moved to allocate $5,000 for a study of employment. The motion was seconded by Thompson, and passed unanimously.

Thompson presented a report on the minority students' summer research program at the University of Pittsburgh, and Levi suggested that they report at the recruiting and retaining minorities conference put on by the AIP/APS.

It was reported that the study of the hydrogen economy was still at an early stage, and Fainberg suggested that it be deferred until next year.

Gronlund reported on physics and education after attending the AAAS meeting on that subject, and will prepare a written report for the newsletter. Howes suggested a joint invited session with the Forum on Education for the April 1994 APS meeting.

Fainberg reported that he and Levi will look into endowing the Szilard and Forum awards. They are to meet with Harry Lustig on that.

The possibilities for use of an electronic bulletin board for the Forum were discussed, and a subcommittee composed of Nero, Fainberg, and Chonacky is following up on this.

The issue of the anti-gay rights referendum in Colorado came up. It was noted that there are no meetings scheduled in Colorado. Levi, as councillor, was given guidance to express the Forum's support of equitable treatment of physicists irrespective of sexual preference.

The meeting adjourned at 4:58 p.m.

C. Herzenberg

Secretary/Treasurer of the Forum

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Open Letter to US Senator Daniel K. Akaka

We write as President and President-Elect of The American Physical Society, on behalf of the Executive Board, to call your attention to an urgent matter that threatens the ability of the US to respond to the competitive challenge of the post-Cold-War era.

The Committee Report accompanying the Senate version of H.R. 2491, the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development, and Independent Agencies Appropriation Bill, contains language in the section titled "The Future of the NSF" that is clearly in error. The NSF is directed to pursue a course that would duplicate the functions of other agencies and jeopardize the long-term prospects for American competitiveness.

Moreover, to embark on a major redirection of an agency that plays a vital role in the scientific and technological leadership of the US, without authorizing legislation or debate, is not a sound way to make policy.

This ill-considered directive was apparently based on a misreading of last year's report of the Commission on the Future of the NSF. According to the Commission's report: "The universities and the NSF should complement rather than replace the roles of those engaged in technology development. Redirecting the NSF's activities from research and education would have little or no effect on the US competitive position in the near term, but would seriously restrict prospects for the long-term."

A balanced national effort to achieve and maintain a position of competitive leadership must include both short-term "strategic research" to provide the incremental advances that keep industry competitive in existing technologies, and long-term research, which has the potential to generate entirely new and unforeseen technologies.

The need for NSF support of long-term fundamental research has never been greater. Basic research in the nation's industrial laboratories has all but vanished, even as government laboratories and federally funded research and development centers have shifted their research to support manufacturing.

We therefore respectfully urge that the section titled "The Future of the NSF" be stricken from the Senate Report accompanying H.R. 2491.

Donald N. Langenberg
APS President
Burton Richter
APS President-Elect

Statement on Termination of the Superconducting Supercollider

The Executive Board of the APS is deeply concerned by the prospect of termination of the Superconducting Supercollider.

The Supercollider is a project of great scientific merit that has met each of its technical milestones. It was undertaken only after approval at every level of government.

A decision to discontinue the Supercollider in midstream would underscore the lack of the coherent national research policy that is needed to sustain American leadership in science.

The APS Executive Board reaffirms its support of the supercollider in the context of a balanced effort for all of science.

APS Executive Board
September 11, 1993

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Archived Newsletters

January 1994 Newsletter

In This Issue

How Do We Know?

Radioactive Waste

Making Physics Self-Supporting

Perception of Risk and the Future of Nuclear Power

Fears, Fantasies and Fallout

Public Perceptions of Nuclear Power

Some Observations from Experience

How Nuclear Power Controversies Become Amplified: Contrasts Between Technical Analysis and Public Expectations

Elections of the Forum on Physics and Society

Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb

Closing Pandora's Box: Arms Races, Arms Control, and the History of the Cold War

Science Funding: Politics and Porkbarrel

Book and Other Reviews Needed!

Subunit Statistics and Membership Database

Old Physical Reviews Needed!

OTA Congressional Fellowship Program 1994-95!

Minutes of the Forum's Executive Committee Meeting

Join the Forum! Receive Physics and Society!

Open Letter to US Senator Daniel K. Akaka

Statement on Termination of the Superconducting Supercollider

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Archived Newsletters

January 1994 Newsletter

In This Issue

How Do We Know?

Radioactive Waste

Making Physics Self-Supporting

Perception of Risk and the Future of Nuclear Power

Fears, Fantasies and Fallout

Public Perceptions of Nuclear Power

Some Observations from Experience

How Nuclear Power Controversies Become Amplified: Contrasts Between Technical Analysis and Public Expectations

Elections of the Forum on Physics and Society

Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb

Closing Pandora's Box: Arms Races, Arms Control, and the History of the Cold War

Science Funding: Politics and Porkbarrel

Book and Other Reviews Needed!

Subunit Statistics and Membership Database

Old Physical Reviews Needed!

OTA Congressional Fellowship Program 1994-95!

Minutes of the Forum's Executive Committee Meeting

Join the Forum! Receive Physics and Society!

Open Letter to US Senator Daniel K. Akaka

Statement on Termination of the Superconducting Supercollider

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