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Nuclear proliferation‐thirty years after Hiroshima

JUL 01, 1975
The winner of the Leo Szilard Award re‐examines a 30‐year‐old position—that the only way to ensure an atom‐bomb‐free future is by strict international control over fissionable materials and their means of production.
Bernard T. Feld

Nowadays there is a tendency among historians and social scientists to think of the postwar scientists’ movement as a quaint aberration, and to dismiss the ideas we developed in the late 1940’s as politically naive or irrelevant. Some go even further and would have us believe that time has shown the wisdom of those politicians who insisted on the need for maintaining American preeminence in nuclear armaments, despite our urgent warnings that this was a futile and dangerous course. As evidence, they cite the facts that for thirty years nuclear war has been averted, in spite of recurrent international crises, and that the number of nuclear‐weapons states has remained much smaller than the number that we predicted would be able to produce nuclear weapons on a time scale of thirty years.

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Bernard T. Feld, Professor, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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This Content Appeared In
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Volume 28, Number 7

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