Winter
FAS Winter 2006 Public Interest Reports
From its origins, the Federation of American Scientists has worked both to advance technologies that its members felt could meet critical public goals — in 1945 they worked to promote research of civilian nuclear power — and to block dangers created by scientific advances that scientists were in a unique position to understand. In 1945, the challenge was proliferation of the technology of atomic weaponry. Our anniversary forced us both to reflect on the successes and failures of our organization’s work over the course of 60years and assess how our community can be most useful in the future… read more
In December, the FAS Board of Directors met to review recent developments and share thoughts on the future direction of the Federation at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.
FAS President Henry Kelly opened the meeting with the Independent Auditor’s Report for fiscal year 2005 (July 2004 through June 2005), which received the highest opinion allowed by the AICPA, and a brief financial summary that illustrated positive financial growth for the year…read more
The Federation of Atomic Scientists (FAS) announced its formation and released its first newsletter on Capitol Hill on 1 November 1945. FAS’s members were associations of atomic scientists at national laboratories such as Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Chicago, who organized themselves to help the United States understand the problems of atomic energy on which they were the most expert…read more
When the Pacific War finally ended with Japan’s formal surrender on September 2, 1945, it was a euphoric moment. Science and engineering had played essential roles in that victory. Radar, code-breaking electronic computers, heavy bombers, cathode ray tubes, and a blizzard of other inventions had changed the nature of conflict forever. But it was the atomic bomb that dominated discussions that fall. An invention that could, in an instant, obliterate a city and a hundred thousand lives forced issues that had been discussed in private into plain view. Did the species that had the intellectual power to create such things also have the wisdom to use this power wisely? And specifically, did the people who created the weapons carry a special obligation to ensure that wisdom was exercised?…read more
Remarks by Edward Markey (D-MA) at the FAS 60th Anniversary symposium at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on Wednesday November 30, 2005.
Thank you very much, Henry, for inviting me here, and to Tara and to Ivan, who is the affirmative action, non-Irish scientist at the table, which is a new phenomenon by the way. And I thank all of you for inviting me here today. It’s a great honor to participate in this incredible event. The Federation of American Scientists, right from the dawn of the nuclear age, has played a very important role in having our country and the world debate this tension that exists in a technology, which on the one hand has the capacity to provide enormous technological benefits across the whole of society and on the other, simultaneously, the capacity for great destruction…. read more
Remarks by Tara O’Toole, Chair of the FAS Board and CEO and Director of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and Professor of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.
Well, first of all thank you all for being here. This is obviously an important landmark in the history of the Federation of American Scientists. I’m here today to present the Hans Bethe Award.
The Hans Bethe Award commemorates a great scientist and one of the founders of the Federation of American Scientists. During the Manhattan Project, Dr. Bethe was the director of the theoretical division of Los Alamos at the heart of the atomic weapons program….. read more
Hans A. Bethe co-founded the Federation of Atomic Scientists, now the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), with the belief that scientists had an obligation to participate in the difficult choices that were forced on our country by the extraordinary advances in nuclear physics so vividly demonstrated by the development and use of atomic weapons. In the sixty years since the founding of the organization, the range and complexity of issues hinging on sound scientific advice has increased…read more
Acceptance Speech by Steve Fetter, Dean, School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park.
First, I should state the obvious: how incredibly flattering it is to be given an award named for Hans Bethe, for which the previous recipient was Phillip Morrison. I want to assure everyone that I know I’m not in the same league as these giants. But I am very grateful and pleased to accept it. I’m especially proud to have been associated with FAS, and happy to see that it is on such firm footing…read more
Remarks by Theodore Sorensen at the FAS 60th Anniversary symposium at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on Wednesday November 30, 2005.
Thank you very much. It’s an honor for me to appear before an organization that I have known about and admired since its founding. I was trying to search my memory. I’m quite certain that a leader of, or one of the founders perhaps, of your organization, lobbied me so-to-speak when I was the young assistant to Senator John F. Kennedy. I distinctly recall our having lunch together in the Senate cafeteria. It might have been Hans Bethe if he did that sort of thing. And maybe some of you here are old enough to know whether he did. Well, I think that’s who it was, and no lobbying was required because all of the goals that he sought were the goals that I sought and that John F. Kennedy sought….read more
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
– T.S. Eliot “The Hollow Men,” 1925
Since Hiroshima, we have feared the world would end with an enormous bang. It hasn’t. Rather, it is the disarmament process, the attempt to preclude the possibility of the bang that has ended, with a curse rather than a whimper.
How it all started
In Washington, on October 9, 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated the nuclear arms race. He decided that the U.S. government should proceed full-speed-ahead to the goal of making fission weapons before the Germans did. His decision was based on the recommendation of Vannevar Bush, whom he had chosen as Chairman of the recently created National Defense Research Committee. Bush and his colleagues had before them the conclusions of the corresponding high-level scientific advisory committee in the U.K., known as the Maud Report… read more
A deluge of studies pointing to pending problems with the nation’s system of research and innovation have created a rare debate on national research strategy. The President introduced a National Innovation Initiative in the State of the Union address proposing to double the budgets of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy’s basic energy science over the coming decade. Legislation with similar goals is being actively pursued in the Senate. This could be a once-in-a-decade opportunity to reset priorities and rebuild a political commitment to federal research investment and education. Or, it could become another hollow exercise like the NSF budget doubling that never happened…read more
Joseph R. Heller, Ph.D., is a Renaissance Man. After retiring from a fulfilling career in psychology, he volunteers his time to community service and does a little bit of everything — from counseling the homeless to constructing homes to writing grants — for the Primavera Foundation and Wingspan in Tucson, Arizona…read more
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