KOMANOFF'S COME-ON

Dear Professor Beckmann: 12/3/81

... I mean do you really believe that [Science editor] Phillip Abelson is antinuclear?

Dear Mr. Komanoff:

Your economics is as good as I had indicated in the June AtE issue if you think that anybody would voluntarily exchange a monthly source of information for a pile of what the ancient Romans might have called excrementum taureum.

As for Abelson, of course he is not antinuclear; no competent physicist is.

But look at it this way: In the 30's, there were few German physicists like Max Planck or Hans Bethe who stood up against a medieval witch hunt (I do not count Jewish physicists like Einstein or Teller, who were the hunted); and perhaps even fewer were the physicists like Johannes Stark who actively supported the hunters. The vast majority of German physicists did nothing: they passively followed the fashion, and in 1945 they all explained how they had never really been Nazis.

When the present antinuclear witch hunt is over, as it surely will be, Philip Abelson will doubtlessly explain how he had never really been antinuclear.

And you, Mr Komanoff, will be one of the few listeners he will be able to buttonhole.