Nuclear danger is growing. Physicists of the world, unite!

Bulletin, By Curtis T. Asplund, Zia Mian, Stewart Prager, Frank von Hippel | July 1, 2024

Physicists have been central to imagining, developing, constructing and advancing nuclear weapons ever since the idea of a nuclear chain reaction came to Leo Szilard in 1933. Over the subsequent 90 years, physicists have also been an important force in global efforts aimed at confronting the nuclear threat they created, through the promotion of nuclear arms control and disarmament. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the physics community has been relatively absent as analysts, activists, and advocates contesting nuclear weapons policies. Meanwhile, the Cold War-era nuclear arms control regime has mostly collapsed, a nuclear arms race led by the United States, Russia, and China is underway, and all nine nuclear-armed states are recommitting to nuclear deterrence for the foreseeable future.

In response, in October 2023, a group of 50 physicists from 20 nations gathered for a three-day workshop at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy—“The Increasing Danger of Nuclear Weapons: How Physicists Can Help Reduce the Threat.” The objective of this workshop was to brainstorm on how to mobilize the international physics community to engage in advocacy for nuclear threat reduction. This discussion resulted in the formation of an international working group to help foster this mobilization.

As recently described in the Bulletin and depicted in the movie Oppenheimer, prominent physicists tried to think through the challenges posed by what were then new weapons and be a voice of reason and restraint informing nuclear weapons policy debates during the Manhattan Project and beyond. The early debate and introspection at Los Alamos and elsewhere on the implications of nuclear weapons were not just among Americans, however. The debate was international, involving physicists from many countries within the Manhattan Project, including refugees from Europe escaping fascism. All these efforts were private and aimed at US policymakers, not the larger scientific community or the public.

After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the beginning of the US-Soviet nuclear arms race, the debate about nuclear weapons became more deliberately public and more international. In Princeton in 1946, Albert Einstein announced the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists to educate and mobilize scientists and the public on the dangers of nuclear weapons.

The clearest international expression of scientist activism started in 1957 with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Historian Matthew Evangelista gives Pugwash “considerable credit for substantial breakthroughs in US-Soviet arms control in the late 1960s and early 1970s.” This determined decades-long effort eventually earned the Pugwash Conferences and their key leader, physicist Joseph Rotblat, a shared Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 “for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms.”…………………………………………………….

Today, new efforts by the international physics community against the threats posed by nuclear weapons are very much needed………………………………………………………….

A strong consensus emerged from the Trieste workshop on the importance of catalyzing international advocacy by physicists for nuclear arms control and reduction. Early-career scientists, especially, found engagement with like-minded physicists from various countries to be strongly affirming of their concerns regarding the dangers of nuclear weapons and their desire to engage in policy activism.

As a next step, the ICTP meeting participants agreed to form an international working group to promote engagement and advocacy across and within nations among physicists and colleagues in the engineering sciences. This initiative can complement the efforts underway by the Scientific Advisory Group of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to establish a broad network of scientific and technical institutions and experts to support that treaty’s goals.

“Today, the arms race is draining humanity of enormous resources; material, moral and intellectual. Unfortunately, science and scientists have contributed to this dangerous state of affairs. As scientists, as citizens of the world, we have the duty both to recognize this and to use our skill to explore ways out of the present situation.” This is from the call to the 1986 Hamburg meeting. Now, in 2024, physicists must step up again and exercise that responsibility.

Editor’s note: This article is a product of a workshop at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), organized by a committee consisting of the authors as well as Jürgen Altmann and Götz Neuneck. This workshop received support from the ICTP; the Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction; the German Physical Society; the American Physical Society’s Forum on Physics and Society; the Research Association for Science, Disarmament and International Security (Germany); and Princeton University‘s Program on Science and Global Security. https://thebulletin.org/2024/07/nuclear-danger-is-growing-physicists-of-the-world-unite/