Not since Galileo

Keeping ahead of the times, we brought our "1984" editorial four years ago ["Huxley, not Orwell," Jan. 1980]. 1984, the enforcement of an ideology by brute coercion, has proved a total failure: there are no believing Communists east of the Elbe. But Brave New World, the mass manipulation of minds by conditioning, has proved a striking success.

But make no mistake what the Big Lie is. That war is horrible, and nuclear war most horrible of all, is no lie. And the numerous technical frauds (some of them discussed below) are not what is essential.

The Big Lie is the message "Defense is Suicide;" it is the biggest lie of our time.

Of course, only a halfwit would expect ABC to show that it is disarmament, appeasement and cowardice that is suicidal; much less would anyone expect them to screen nuclear war horrors saying "This is the result of the Mutual Assured Destruction doctrine: you can prevent it by a defense that defends instead of retaliating." Nevertheless, this intimidation by horrorama was a new record even for the professional mind manipulators and stomach turners of the American Brainwash Consortium.

But on to our business: science. In sociology, you can claim that crime is due to an unjust society, in economics that inflation is due to greedy businessmen, in biology that heredity is unimportant; in other words, you can inject ideology into the soft sciences. Your professional peers will let you -- especially if you inject their type of ideology.

But not in the hard, quantifying sciences. Only experiment and mathematics decide. Yes, there are maverick physicists who will ignore these two, but they get ditched by the wayside; and there are controversies, but on small fractions, not on orders of magnitude. (Typically, the great low-level radiation "controversy" in the National Academy of Sciences, played up by the very same brainwashers who brought you the Big Lie, concerns levels amounting to 1/100^th of the natural background, 1/1000^th of what you can get in energy-efficient homes, and 1/100,000^th of a lethal dose.)

But since when have physicists of academic standing disregarded experiment and mathematics for the sake of ideology? If we disregard some brief and minor exceptions in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, then not since 1632, when Galileo Galilei was forced to abjure his heretic conviction that the earth revolves about its axis and moves round the sun.

But there are such physicists in America now: Carl Sagan (see below) is one of them. True, nobody can predict exactly what nuclear weapons would do to the environment, and nobody claims they would improve it. What every honest physicist does know, however, is that nature is consistent: that 1 unit of energy cannot do the same work as 100 units, and that the world's combined nuclear arsenal, in both energy and dust spewed into the atmosphere, would be chickenfeed compared to the energy and the hundreds of cubic kilometers of debris spewed out by a single intense volcanic eruption.

What can you do about it? For starters, when these nobodies adorn their invocations of academic freedom with the name of Galileo (as they usually do), you can remind them that when Galileo in 1591 first got into trouble by supporting the Copernican system and proving that the velocity of falling bodies does not depend on their weight, it wasn't the Church that hounded him from the University of Pisa: it was his fellow faculty.

You can also give this part of the professoriat an easily grasped lesson in free enterprise, for there is one thing the aware and sensitive knights against capitalism are particularly aware of and sensitive to: money. Especially the funds beyond those regularly extracted from the inexhaustible and endlessly acquiescent taxpayers.

Stop giving to the college of your choice.