In the May issue of Physics Today, the American Physical Society (APS) Council released the Executive Summary of its 423-page report on Directed Energy Weapons, that is, on Star Shield (SDI). The APS Council also issued a statement condem-ning near-term deployment of strategic defenses.
Dr Frederick Seitz, a former President of both the National Academy of Sciences and of the APS, and President Emeritus of Rockefeller University, noted in a statement to the House Science and Technology Committee that "I know of no prece-dent, in my 55-year association with the APS, for the issuance of so seriously flawed a document as this." Joined by Dr. Lionel Wood of the Lawrence Livermore Natl. Lab., and Dr. Gregory Canavan of the Los Alamos Natl. Lab., Seitz pointed out major errors not only by a factor of up to 100, but always in the same direction
¾exaggerating the difficulties of defending the US against a Soviet nuclear attack. Moreover, the Executive Sum-mary is inconsistent with the report it pretends to summarize, and again reaches more negative conclusions than warranted by the latter. As for the APS Council's statement made after the release, it "abandons all pretense of being based on scientific fac-tors" and is a political declaration.Prof. Seitz's words will come as no surprise to those who have been watching how the coercive activists have been taking over professional organizations in virtually all fields; but this is par-ticularly painful when the organization is scientific. It has long been apparent that the APS leadership has been corrupted
¾ no, not by money (which has lost its importance as a power vehi-cle, and of which they have no shortage anyway), but by the power conferred on them by the media, forever eager to trumpet such fashionable findings as "scientific." Like the AAAS or the IEEE, the APS made little or no effort to stand up to the nuclear and radiation hysteria; to the contrary, it dignified a political publicity stunt like "Nuclear Winter" by treating it as if it were a scientific theory. Like other organizations, the APS activists often tried to dupe the public with the lie that a strategic defense must be 100% perfect to replace the present insane balance of nuclear terror.It is sad to see physicists corrupted by the fashionable short-cuts to glory that come more naturally to lawyers, sociologists or literature scholars, who deal in unquantified opinions rather; than the strict proofs of the physicist or mathematician. But they all cohabitate in the modern university, where subsidy, tenure, infighting, the lack of genuine competition, and the intellectuals' ill-disguised yearning for conformity often breed a coercive men-tality. (The situation is very similar in the upper echelons of large corporations.)
It is a mentality that is hostile to voluntary exchange and to natural selection by merit
¾the conditions under which the pro-ducers flourish and the redistributors perish.I do not believe that the political activists of the APS speak for a majority of physicists; perhaps not even on campus, and certainly not among those who earn an untenured, unsubsidized living by the sheer merit of their work.
Nor do laymen need to refrain from an opinion because they, cannot, like Prof. Seitz, check the calculations and conclusions by which the APS activists seek to rationalize their defeatism. They need only recall how incomparably easier it would have been, in the 1930s, to ridicule the impossible dreams about weapons that were to save the world. Nuclear energy was a dream resting on a few unverified formulas and a handful of primitive experimental observations. Radar needed, among other things, impossibly high powers at impossibly high frequen-cies. And the jet plane was a chimera based on nonexistent metals that would not melt in the searing jet.
But in those days the APS was manned by men who were determined to see mankind survive in freedom.
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Vol. 14, No. 11
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 14, No. 11 Date: November 30, 2004 10:00 AM (For actual publication date see newsletter.) Title: Doctored data
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