Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
scientific life. As mentioned earlier, during the Manhattan
Project, the successful World War Two US effort to build nuclear
weapons before the Nazis did, certain participating scientists
began to have reservations, the more so when it became clear how
immensely powerful these weapons were. Some, such as Leo
Szilard, James Franck, Harold Urey and Robert R. Wilson, tried
to call the attention of political leaders and the public (especially
after the Nazis were defeated) to the dangers of the forthcoming
arms race, which they foresaw very well, with the Soviet Union.
Others argued that policy matters were outside their jurisdiction.
'I was put on Earth to make certain discoveries,' said Enrico
Fermi, 'and what the political leaders do with them is not my
business.' But even so, Fermi was so appalled by the dangers of
the thermonuclear weapon Edward Teller was advocating that he
co-authored a famous document urging the United States not to
build it, calling it 'evil'.
Jeremy Stone, the president of the Federation of American
Scientists, has described Teller - whose efforts to justify thermonuclear
weapons I described in a previous chapter - in these
words:
Edward Teller . . . insisted, at first for personal intellectual
reasons and later for geopolitical reasons, that a hydrogen
bomb be built. Using tactics of exaggeration and even smear,
he successfully manipulated the policy-making process for
five decades, denouncing all manner of arms control measures
and promoting arms-race-escalating programs of many
kinds.
The Soviet Union, hearing of his H-bomb project, built its
own H-bomb. As a direct consequence of the unusual personality
of this particular individual and of the power of the
H-bomb, the world may have risked a level of annihilation
that might not otherwise have transpired, or might have come
later and under better political controls.
If so, no scientist has ever had more influence on the
risks that humanity has run than Edward Teller, and
Teller's general behavior throughout the arms race was
reprehensible . . .
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