Redefining Science by Paul Rubinson

Author:Paul Rubinson [Rubinson, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781625342430
Google: XSTojwEACAAJ
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 2016-01-15T16:02:33+00:00

The ABM Debate

Having seen both sides of the nuclear weapons issue, York continually worried about the influence of what Eisenhower described as the scientific-technical elite in his famous farewell address. “[Eisenhower] had in mind, and I know this from talking with him later,” York recalled, “[missile designer Wernher] von Braun and Teller as people who are just out there selling and selling, and telling you that if you don’t do what they’re telling you you ought to do, you are going to be doomed. The hard-sell technologists are what he had in mind.”37 In a 1964 article in Scientific American, York wrote that “there was no technical solution to the problem of security vis-à-vis the Soviets,” and he called for “arms control restraints.” The article, according to York, “very much annoyed” the DOD. York’s congressional testimony for the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and against ABMs at the end of the decade put, in his words, “a measure of dissent between me and . . . the majority of the Defense Establishment.”38 He also wrote a book supporting the General Advisory Committee’s recommendation against the H-bomb in 1950, stating that “it was not only right, it was right for the right reasons.”39 And in 1973 he told an aide to Senator George McGovern (D-SD) that “for the long run, I think we’ve got to attack the notion of deterrence itself. . . . There has got to be a better way.”40 By 1976 York had moved far from where he started, telling a peace organization staffer:

My basic position is that the development and deployment of nuclear weapons have turned out to be a horrible mistake that must somehow be undone. We and four other nations have created and built systems whose basic purposes are to achieve certain policy goals by threatening to set in motion a chain of events which would kill a half billion people in a single day. That is not a theoretical statement or speculation about what might be done or what ought to be done; it is a literal description of what has been done; it is a description of a means which cannot be justified by any conceivable ends.41

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