Scientist, Citizen, and Government--
Ethics in Action (or Ethics Inaction)
RICHARD L. HORWITZ LECTURE
by
Richard L. Garwin
IBM Research Division
Thomas J. Watson Research Center
P.O. Box 218
Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
(914) 945-2555
(also
Adjunct Professor of Physics,
Columbia University;
Adjunct Research Fellow,
CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University)
May 4, 1993
Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy
Aurora, IL 60506
ABSTRACT.
Experience derived from 40 years of public policy activities
is used to illustrate ethical questions in the light of an
expanded Golden Rule of behavior. The illustrations arise
primarily in the context of large programs supported by gov-
ernment or industry, in which activities skirt the margins
of law but still involve questions of ethics and standards.
S123SCGE 050393SCGE 05/03/93
Views of the author, not of his organizations
I present these views this evening from the perspective of
more than 40 years of involvement with public policy matters
concerning, as the title indicates, my own role as scientist
and citizen in interaction with government and public pol-
icy. Much of this involvement has been concerned with
international security, technology policy, and the future of
democratic society.
Following a brief introduction, I will sketch some of this
involvement, to provide the context for my discussion of
ethics and conduct. What this talk lacks in generality, I
hope it makes up in concrete illustrations that may be eas-
ier to understand. Indeed, rather than as inductive or de-
ductive, my approach should be taken simply as illustrative.
The principles that I will illustrate are too old and gen-
eral to emerge by induction from the examples, and the
actions related hardly follow deductively from ethical prin-
ciples, many other influences having been involved.
When a person comes before you and claims to have been doing
the same thing for 43 years, you may be pardoned for asking
whether this is the truth, and if so, whether it is a case
of early maturity or arrested development. In any case,
here is the story (or part of it).
BACKGROUND.
As befits a talk at the Illinois Mathematics and Science
Academy, I begin with my own personal and educational back-
ground. I was born in 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio, to Robert
and Leona Garwin (nee Schwartz). My father graduated in
1921 from Case School of Applied Science (now Case Western
Reserve University) with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering.
He held two jobs at once, as high school teacher of "elec-
tricity" and motion picture projectionist; my mother had
been a stenographer before marrying. My brother, Ed, was
born in 1933. I attended the Cleveland public schools, and
in 1940, moved with my parents to an Eastern suburb of
Cleveland, University Heights, from which I attended junior
and senior high school in Cleveland Heights. I recall that
when I was 10 or so, I would enjoy reading the Mechanical
(or Electrical) Engineer's Handbook.
I skipped a couple of grades in public school and because of
the Second World War graduated in an accelerated program in
1944 and entered Case School of Applied Science with a major
in Physics, graduating in 1947.
I did my graduate work at the University of Chicago, receiv-
ing the Ph.D. in Physics in 1949 with Enrico Fermi as my
thesis sponsor. The University of Chicago appointed me to
the faculty ranks of instructor and then assistant profes-
sor, which I held until leaving for my career at IBM Decem-
ber, 1952. At that time, the gross income of IBM was about
$250 M per year. Had I taken longer for my Ph.D., I would
have learned more, which would probably have been good for
me.
Because my position at Chicago paid a nine-month salary, and
I and my wife and first child ate 12 months of the year, I
looked for something to do the other three months. Fermi
suggested that I might find it interesting to be a consult-
ant to the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, which from
April 1943 until July 1945 had built the first three nuclear
weapons in the world, in which Fermi had played a leading
role, following his pioneering work that led to the first
self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at Chicago December
2, 1942. I did so, and for the first week or so of June,
1950, I read in the classified report library all of the
progress reports from the war and post-war years.
I was an experimental physicist, and my research of the Uni-
versity of Chicago involved what were then state-of-the-art
machines-- the 100-MeV betatron and the 450 MeV
synchrocyclotron, for which I had designed and built ex-
ternal beam "targets" for experiments on liquid hydrogen and
liquid deuterium. So I was quite interested not only in the
state of development of fission bombs at Los Alamos, but
also in the activities toward the thermonuclear weapon,
usually then called the "super". In April 1993 I spent a
week at Los Alamos at a symposium marking the 50th anniver-
sary of the founding of the Laboratory, so my work in those
summers of the 1950s and 1960s is fairly fresh in my mind.
I worked on new techniques for testing and diagnostics of
the function of new nuclear weapon designs, and also on the
specific design of the first thermonuclear explosive, MIKE,
detonated at Eniwetok November 1, 1952 with an explosive
yield of approximately ten million tons of TNT equivalent.
In 1981, Professor Edward Teller (a recent visitor to this
Academy) characterized my role as follows:
"I want to do so by telling you a story of which I be-
lieve no one has heard. In the early 1950's when I had
the first crude design of the hydrogen bomb, Dick
Garwin came to Los Alamos and asked me how he could
help. Actually the design I had in mind was not that
of a real bomb but of a model for an experiment. I
asked Garwin to change this crude design into something
approximating a blueprint. He did so in a short time--
a week or two. That experiment was carried out.
Garwin's blueprint had been criticized by many people,
including Hans Bethe. In the end the shot was fired
almost precisely according to Garwin's design, and it
worked as expected."
When I joined the small IBM Watson Scientific Computing Lab-
oratory in December 1952, on the campus of Columbia Univer-
sity, it was to make a change from particle physics (which I
found uncongenial in those days) to what would now be called
condensed matter physics, especially the study of
superconductivity and liquid and solid helium, which were my
research interests for more than a decade. But these activ-
ities, and my work in gravitational radiation and computer
and communications technology are irrelevant to the present
topic.
What is relevant, I believe, is the work I did half-time in
1953-1954 with Jerome Wiesner and Jerrold Zacharias in one
of the famous MIT studies, this one concerned with extending
the continental air defense of the United States and Canada
to the sea lines of approach of bombers from the Soviet Un-
ion. Although I had already spent three summers (3,4, and 5
months respectively) in nuclear weapons work at Los Alamos,
and had spent September of 1952 in Korea during the Korean
War and in Japan for the United States Air Force, this was
my first real contact with the explicit interaction of high-
level scientists with the U.S. government, in attempting to
influence technical programs and policy. I learned a lot,
such as the Zacharias injunction "Don't get it right, get it
written" which is good advice for running a collaborative
program, since the odds of getting it right the first time
are very small, and what is needed is a dynamic of getting
it "written" and then improved by further writings.
But there were some other lessons that did not sit so well.
Zacharias also observed "If I don't get the answer I want
from this group, I will try again with another", which
seemed to me to conflict with Fermi's caution to avoid delu-
sion (self or otherwise) by reporting all the data up to the
stopping point of the experiment. Furthermore, while it was
good technical fun reviewing technology and inventing new
systems to detect and counter nuclear-armed Soviet bombers,
it was perfectly clear that by the time we could have such
expanded defenses, the threat would be Soviet nuclear weap-
ons on ballistic missiles of intercontinental range-- ICBMs.
It was about this time that I became familiar with the tend-
ency of bureaucracies to emphasize those aspects of a report
or proposal that benefit them, rather than taking a balanced
view. Thus, there was never serious consideration given to
a deterrent threat of nuclear response from the U.S. that
would depend upon one-way bomber missions, although that
would surely have been easier to accomplish, more afforda-
ble, and in my opinion just as believable as one that de-
pended upon the fiction that bombers would be refueled in
the air and returned to their bases in the United States af-
ter nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union. Of course,
this led the United States also to ignore the threat posed
by "enemy" bombers that could reach the U.S. only on one-way
missions.
On October 4, 1957, the United States and the world were
shocked by Soviet launch of the first artificial earth sat-
ellite, Sputnik, although a substantial amount of detail had
been published by the Soviet Union. This gave impetus to
various activities in the United States, ranging from the
National Defense Education Act, to the reform of science
teaching in the public schools, to the acceleration of U.S.
programs for ballistic missiles and defenses against nuclear
weapons, to additional studies of the magnitude of the nu-
clear threat to the United States and to its allies, and
also to programs to expand our knowledge of such potentially
threatening activities.
As a result, I was recruited to various panels of the Presi-
dent's Science Advisory Committee, which as a consequence of
Sputnik was brought by President Eisenhower "into the White
House" from the Office of Defense Mobilization. My col-
league at Columbia University and lunchtime partner at the
Columbia Faculty Club table of Physics and Mathematics, the
renowned Professor I.I. Rabi, chaired the PSAC, but did not
want to move to Washington for what was clearly going to be
a full-time job at a critical time. Accordingly, James R.
Killian of MIT chaired the reborn PSAC, which enjoyed a
frank and close working relationship with President Dwight
D. Eisenhower.
I was involved on the Strategic Military Panel of PSAC, was
a member of the U.S. delegation to the U.N.-hosted Ten-
Nation Conference on Prevention of Surprise Attack, which
met in Geneva during the fall of 1958, and sat in on the
early negotiations on a ban of nuclear tests. I was also a
member of and eventually chaired PSAC panels on military
aircraft, transportation, naval warfare, antisubmarine war-
fare, and the like, and participated for almost 15 years in
a panel chaired by Edwin H. Land, the founder of the
Polaroid Corporation, largely dealing with photography from
aircraft and satellites.
Altogether I had two 4-year terms on PSAC, in the Kennedy-
Johnson Administrations and in the Nixon Administration, but
our concern extended far beyond national defense, interna-
tional security, arms control agreements and the like. For
instance, I recall distributing to the 18 members of PSAC
one day copies of the Rachel Carson articles in the New
Yorker, which led to the creation of a PSAC Panel on
Insecticides and Pesticides, ably chaired by John Tukey, the
statistician from Bell Labs and Princeton University. We
were concerned also with public and graduate education, and
my military aircraft panel spread its wings to become the
Aircraft Panel and eventually to study the transportation
problems and opportunities of "the Northeast corridor." I
also served for a year on The New Technologies Panel of The
National Commission on Health Manpower in 1969 or so, so
many of the concerns of 1993 have a familiar ring.
I close this selected list by noting my service on the Advi-
sory Committee of the Federal Energy Management Agency, one
of the predecessors of the current Department of Energy. At
the time of the first "oil shock" in 1973, it was perfectly
clear that there were many things that the United States
could and should do to respond. In fact, years before I had
argued in PSAC that we ought to reduce the potential market
power of foreign oil producers by spending the couple of
billion dollars that would be required to install "gathering
pipelines" from additional wells drilled in the United
States, which would then be closed off except in time of
need. This in-ground resource available to produce at any
time would greatly limit the potential for crises of supply
or price. Needless to say, this idea got nowhere.
The Congress has thus far been absent from this narrative,
as it was in large part from involvement in the details of
national defense or international security questions until
the great ABM debate of 1967 and later years. Up to that
time, congressional testimony regarding military procurement
programs and weapons in general was essentially limited to
active-duty military officers and officials representing the
current Administration, but it became clear that the scien-
tists who had built nuclear weapons and radar during World
War II could not be written off as ignorant about current
topics, and they were invited to testify. This was a sea
change for the United States, and, indeed, no other nation
has had the open and scholarly discussion with Congress and
the public in such matters as has this country.
In part, this is due to the relatively greater freedom of
access to information resulting from the large network of
consultants and advisors to government, itself probably a
result of the transformation of the U.S. scientific commu-
nity during World War II into a mechanism for bringing sci-
ence and technology to the service of the nation in fighting
that war. But until very recently, the U.S. was essentially
alone in the post-war period in having independent scien-
tists who were at the same time highly knowledgeable and
even involved in government programs for national or inter-
national security. In France, for instance, non-government
scientists were for the most part unsympathetic as well as
ignorant of government programs, and this has changed only
recently, and outside overview is still not comparable with
that in the United States. However, this very involvement
of outsiders is often seen to pose a conflict of interest,
and it does present ethical problems, which I will now
finally discuss.
ETHICS AT LAST.
You might suspect that forty years of active involvement
would leave me with a good many examples of ethical and un-
ethical behavior, some of them amusing, some just plain dis-
gusting, but, in any case, too many for me to go through in
detail.
By what standard are we to judge behavior? Not solely
through the glass of religion, although most religions do
have a strong ethical component; nevertheless, religious
fervor has been responsible for a substantial fraction of
bloodshed on this planet. I tend to judge behavior in terms
of an extended Golden Rule-- a simple form of which is not
to do unto others what you would not like them to do unto
you. This seems to me somewhat more feasible than the posi-
tive formulation, "do unto others that which you would like
them to do unto you," but we don't have time here to go into
detail.
It seems to me that in simple societies of relatively few
people such a rule was quite satisfactory as a prescription
and standard for behavior, but as people became more numer-
ous, society more complex, and a body of law and practice
grew up around the Golden Rule, law took precedence over
ethics as a standard for conduct. Indeed, public figures
have been prosecuted, convicted, and assessed token penal-
ties such as $1, a process understandably followed by a vic-
tory celebration by the culprit and his supporters.
But the law tends to evolve as well, from the standard of
injury of an individual by an individual, for which one can
prescribe but not always sympathize with a simple remedy
("...a tooth for a tooth...") to more complex situations in
which, for example, several or many individuals might be in-
volved to intentionally injure someone. To prevent and con-
trol such behavior, conspiracy law evolved, so that the
performance of an act that would not normally be criminal
becomes so when it is part of a larger scheme.
Knowingly receiving stolen goods is analogous to playing a
part in a conspiracy.
In a different dimension, one is concerned with the slight
magnitude or probability of injury done to each of a large
population by one individual-- the basis for environmental
law. Even in cases in which the injury is statistical, one
is concerned with the overall mathematical expectation of
harm or loss to the population from the actions of an indi-
vidual, and although there is dispute over the precise
standard that should be set, there is hardly any disagree-
ment with the proposition that acts are improper which will
result in greater total harm than the benefit to the indi-
vidual actor.
A moment's reflection will show that this is not an adequate
standard, since even a "zero-sum action" is clearly forbid-
den in many cases. For instance, if I should steal from
someone without the likelihood of imposing bodily harm, even
this is unacceptable to society, although one might not nec-
essarily believe so given the minor penalties imposed for
white collar crime. A surprisingly large fraction of the
population, in my experience, clearly sees little wrong with
stealing from an unidentifiable set of people, as is the
case with thefts that are covered by insurance, cheating on
income tax, or the like. Here the burden is born by the
overall mass of insured, or the entire nation.
Economists tend to regard such activities as a "transfer
payment" without economic significance. So, then, is a
holdup on the street.
The practitioners of "the dismal science" of economics do
have a judgement about activities that are economically in-
efficient, such as the theft of artistic objects formed of
precious metals, which is then sold as ingot. The benefit
to the thief is in this case far less than the loss to the
initial owner, and society as a whole is poorer as a result
of this action. Nevertheless, even in a positive-sum trans-
action, unless the losers are in some sense willing, there
is no presumption that this is ethical.
For instance, it is illegal in the United States to discard
a hand grenade. Very likely, it would be picked up by some
child or other, and would have a high likelihood of killing
or maiming at least one person. But until 1970 it was not
in any way illegal to drive an automobile that produced an
average of 100 grams of carbon monoxide (CO) per mile
driven. In small concentrations, CO binds tightly to the
hemoglobin in red blood cells, each molecule of CO substan-
tially eliminating the capacity of the blood to carry four
molecules of oxygen, and the binding is so tight that the CO
is not liberated, typically, for some hours. Except in en-
closed spaces, CO was not a problem for the general public.
Nevertheless, any harm that might be caused to the general
public is proportional to the number of people exposed at a
given level of CO, and the harm from a given amount of CO
(all other things being equal) to a population of 10 million
would be 10 times as much as to a population of one million.
But if automobile use grew with the population, there would
be 10 times as much CO, so the overall harm 100 times as
large; and if the automobile population grew with population
but usage expanded, the harm would be even greater, hence
the impetus for the Clean Air Amendments of 1970 controlling
CO, hydrocarbon emissions, and oxides of nitrogen from auto-
mobile exhaust.(1)
Thus increasing population, increasingly complex society,
and the evolution of law and regulation have expanded eth-
ical concerns and judgements from the simple Golden Rule re-
lating individual conduct to individual harm or benefit; to
the conspiracy concern of harm to one individual by the acts
of many; to the environmental concern of harm to the many by
the act of one; to the expanded environmental concern in
which the conduct of each of us must be regulated in such a
way that if all behaved within the regulations there would
not result intolerable harm to the population.
Indeed, economics is of some help. We need no law against
each of us eating lobster in unlimited amounts, although if
we did so there would surely not be enough for all of us,
and the lobsters would likely be imperiled or even elimi-
nated. Access to lobsters (or excess of lobster) is ra-
tioned by price, so that most people, most of the time,
content themselves with eating something else. Furthermore,
there is not a lot of waste of lobster, either, because it
can be sold for valuable consideration which can then be
used to buy something else. In similar fashion, there has
been reached in recent years rather uneasy agreement in the
United States on rationing of pollution. Rather than re-
quiring each person to remain within an emission level which
if committed by everyone would harm no one, an individual
for the most part is allowed to pollute more, but they may
be charged a fee which is set in one of two ways. A fee
could be set at such a level that the anticipated overall
generation of pollutant would not exceed the tolerable
level; alternatively, it could be set so that enough money
is collected to mitigate the damage or at least to compen-
sate those injured by pollution.
Some would say that the important aspect of the fee is to
compensate society as a whole for the damaging act, and that
it is of lesser import that the funds actually get to the
specific people who are injured.
One might characterize these extensions of the Golden Rule
as:
o GR-1-- Damage by an individual to another individual.
o GR-2-- Damage to an individual by a group (conspiracy).
o GR-3-- Damage to a group by an individual (environmental
damage).
o GR-4-- Damage to a group by a group via the environment
(extended environmental concern).
o GR-5-- Irrational consequences or the power of example.
I have added a fifth aspect according to which one might
judge conduct, and that is the impact of example, or the
possibility of unjustified consequences. I use this to re-
fer to conduct that is socially desirable, ethical, but
which may either be misunderstood, or if committed by others
may result in harm, or which could provoke unintentional and
unjustified damage. I will have one example in this cate-
gory.
ETHICAL QUESTIONS I HAVE KNOWN.
Since 1950 or thereabouts, I have had three principal,
interlinked goals: The prevention of nuclear war, the limi-
tation of world population and the preservation of an envi-
ronment suitable for people, and the preservation in the
United States of a system of government that would allow the
preservation of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi-
ness."
THE ETHICS OF NUCLEAR DETERRENCE. A discussion of this ques-
tion would fill many books, without resolving the problem.
Because a single nuclear weapon targeted on a city would
kill a good fraction of a million people, it has not been
possible to find an effective direct defense against nuclear
weapons, and so the United States (and the Soviet Union)
have relied on deterrence -- the promise of nuclear retali-
ation in case of nuclear attack. Nuclear deterrence has not
failed, but we do not know whether it was ever necessary.
As I have discussed previously(2) I believe that nuclear de-
terrence is allowable and desirable in the case of an indi-
vidual or a true emperor, and that it may be desirable and
acceptable to deter a democratic society, although the
"rights of the minority" are hardly protected if the major-
ity initiates nuclear war, and both majority and minority
die in the ensuing retaliation. Paradoxically, deterrence
is hardly justifiable ethically against a country in which
almost all those who would suffer in retaliation have no
power to prevent a nuclear strike. Yet if deterrence
"works" and may even prevent large-scale conventional wars
in which many of those people might have lost their lives,
it seems justifiable as an interim measure. In any case, I
have judged this question to be beyond resolution by myself
alone, and have assumed the obligation (together with many
of my colleagues) of bringing the question of nuclear
weaponry to the attention of the Congress and the broad pub-
lic in the United States and in the world. I have advocated
and worked for the limitation of nuclear weapons to the de-
terrent role, judging proposals for the military use of nu-
clear weapons thus far to be destabilizing and likely to
lead to nuclear war. I emphasize that this judgment is a
conclusion, based on case-by-case analysis, and not a preju-
dice. I have tried to make the options for the United
States explicit to various Administrations and to the Con-
gress, and to the general public. I have argued for re-
straint and responsibility, and for a long time for
regarding nuclear weapons as a kind of universal trust, pro-
posing reductions over only a few years to a level of 1000--
just a few percent of the maximum holdings of the U.S. or
the Soviet Union. The good news is that this is now largely
agreed; the bad news is that the dissolution of the Soviet
Union, leaving Russia as the nuclear heir has still not re-
sulted in the retrieval of strategic nuclear warheads from
the three nations, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, all
former republics of the USSR.
As for the ethics of scientists creating weapons about which
irresponsible judgments may be made by the broader society,
I have taken the position that it is the responsibility of
this broader society to decide, and mine to create such
weapons but also explicitly to point out their problems,
hazards, and the questions to be resolved.
I may be wrong.
BITING THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU. In September 1967, then Sec-
retary of Defense Robert S. McNamara gave a thoughtful
speech in San Francisco explaining why a system to protect
the United States against nuclear-armed ICBMs or submarine-
launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) would be ineffective,
provocative, and undesirable; however the last 5% of the
speech announced that the administration of President
Lyndon B. Johnson had decided to deploy such a system
against a potential Chinese ICBM threat, that could
eventuate within weeks or months. Without rehearsing the
entire dispute, I just note here that the PSAC Strategic
Military Panel had for more than decade been studying such
questions, and both the "Chinese" threat and the need for an
ABM system were unjustified. Indeed, the flight test of the
Chinese ICBM occurred more like 15 years later than the cou-
ple of months that was implied in the speech. Since 1968
was an election year, knowledgeable people in Washington
called this an "Anti-Republican Missile System" rather than
Anti-Chinese or Anti-Soviet, and I suspect they were right.
However, scientists involved as advisors to the Adminis-
tration faced an ethical dilemma. Their knowledge about the
particulars of ABM systems and the potential threat derived
from access provided in the course of soliciting their ad-
vice, although many had been involved through several Admin-
istrations, Republican and Democrat.
Jerome B. Wiesner, Science Advisor to President
John F. Kennedy, and a Consultant at Large to PSAC during
the Nixon Administration that took office January 1969,
asked specifically of Nixon's first Science Advisor,
Lee DuBridge whether he should resign from PSAC, in view of
his decision to testify against the Nixon ABM program, an-
nounced February 1969, which would deploy essentially the
same technology as that announced by the Johnson Adminis-
tration, but this time to protect the U.S. ICBM fields in
order to preserve our capability to retaliate against Soviet
nuclear attack! DuBridge asked President Nixon specifically
and told Dr. Wiesner that the President favored open dis-
cussion of the matter. When President Nixon took office for
his second term in 1973, one of his first acts was to abol-
ish PSAC and the Office of Science and Technology, suppos-
edly "to save money." But many commentators thought that
the opposition of scientists to the Nixon ABM Program and to
the Nixon-favored commercial supersonic transport was the
real reason.
In any case, Professor Hans A. Bethe and I participated in a
December 1967 New York meeting of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), organized by
Gerard Piel, publisher of The Scientific American, along
with Marvin L. Goldberger. Mr. Piel moved heaven and Earth
(and almost broke our arms by twisting) until Professor
Bethe and I agreed to provide a paper for The Scientific
American addressing the question of the ABM System. This
appeared in Scientific American of March 1968, and I recall
leaving from Dulles airport for Europe the afternoon the
magazine went on the stands. Although we had obtained a se-
curity review and had followed the few comments that were
made, it was perfectly clear that the Administration was
politically opposed to the publication of this article,
which helped to mobilize the scientific and technical commu-
nity against the ABM System. A considerable number of us
who had been and were then involved in PSAC and Department
of Defense panels were invited to testify independently to
the relevant congressional committees which had responsibil-
ity for these matters (the Armed Services Committee of the
House and of the Senate, and the Foreign Relations Commit-
tee). Eventually some $10 B was spent to deploy the so-
called Safeguard system, the telling blow struck in favor of
it in 1972 being a telegram from Moscow by the negotiator of
the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT-I), Gerard
Smith, that if the Congress did not provide authorization
and appropriate funds for Safeguard, the U.S. negotiating
posture would be undercut. Mr. Smith never again supported
this position.
As for Hans Bethe and myself, my own conscience was clear.
We revealed no information about the proposed ABM System or
the threat that was not generally available. We did bring
to this the expertise for which we were hired by various Ad-
ministrations, and which had been honed over many years of
working on problems of interest to government and industry.
When one hires an expert lawyer, it is not with the proviso
that the individual will never again work for somebody else,
exercising the same skills. The deal is that the informa-
tion provided in confidence to the expert remains in confi-
dence, and no one has argued that we had revealed privileged
information. The other half of the advisory deal is that
the advice proffered is the property of the person being ad-
vised. The advisor can advice someone else in the same way,
or even the general public, but the fact that the advice was
given and taken or not taken does not belong to the advisor.
I felt that I had not only the right but the responsibility
to provide expert opinion to the Congress, which, after all,
in our system of government is a branch co-equal with the
executive. The inferior status of Congress in access to
technical information and advice was soon to be remedied in
part by the creation of the Office of Technology Assessment
and the expansion of technical competence in the Congres-
sional staffs, which stem from that same era. In fact,
given the reluctance of Presidents to have independent sci-
entific advice in the White House, in recent times, the Con-
gress has had access to better independent advice than has
the White House.
Had I known for sure that the Scientific American ABM paper
would result in the demise of PSAC, would I have still pub-
lished it? Yes. But had I known for sure that the non-
publication of the ABM paper would have resulted in the
preservation of PSAC, would I have published?
That is a trick phrasing of the question, because I would
have redoubled my efforts to inform Congress and the public,
and the question as phrased would guarantee that if we had
published instead in Foreign Affairs, for instance, PSAC
would have been preserved!
THE SST PRESSURE. In 1965 the PSAC Military Aircraft Panel
reviewed in a cursory fashion for President Johnson the po-
tential military uses of a Mach-3 commercial supersonic
transport (SST). We found that the technology already ex-
isted in the supersecret SR-71 aircraft, and that the flow
of technology would be from the military to the SST and not
the other way around. We also found no specific military
use of the SST itself, presumably a disappointment to the
President, who, like most presidents, was a fan of U.S.
technology.
In 1969 President Nixon asked various agencies of the U.S.
government, including the Office of Science and Technology,
to help form a decision as to further USG funding of the SST
program, with the aircraft under development by Boeing
(airframe) and General Electric (engines). I led a 6 week
study by a small team including Brig. Gen. Jack C. Ledford,
the officer who had been in charge of the development of the
SR-71. My panel provided a written report March 30, 1969,
recommending termination of the USG involvement with the SST
program.
This was not the answer President Nixon wanted.
However, we never received any indication that the President
had read the report. The head of the OST, Dr. Lee DuBridge,
who was also the President's Science Advisor, had announced
the creation of the OST SST Review Panel and had even prom-
ised to try to share the contents with the press. Imagine
the outcry when the Panel's report disappeared into a black
hole.
I was immediately invited by the relevant Congressional com-
mittees to testify on the SST program, as a person well ac-
quainted with aircraft and transportation issues, but I
respectfully declined. Only the next year, after the admin-
istration had given thoroughly misleading testimony, did I
accept the invitation, and I testified in no way about the
OST report but only provided an analysis based on materials
already in possession of the Congressional Committees.
The U.S. airlines had been encouraged by the U.S. Department
of Transportation to show their enthusiasm for the SST pro-
gram by investing in it (in the form of non-refundable con-
tributions-- later refunded!), and I was therefore not
astonished, although dismayed, to have the Chairman of the
Board of IBM tell me that his friends who were heading vari-
ous U.S. airlines had complained to him that I was inter-
fering with the important SST program by giving
Congressional testimony and writing papers on the subject
when I was not qualified to do so. I explained that I was
indeed an expert in view of my contact over the years with
the program and other supersonic aircraft programs, and that
if IBM felt that they were not overall receiving value for
the money they were paying me to do research and invention
and to give IBM advice, then I would go elsewhere; but in
any case I would continue to try to help the administration
and the Congress to understand the various programs that
were or might be funded by the government. This seemed an
effective response, because such attempted pressure was
never again transmitted to me through IBM.
LESSONS TO BE LEARNED. From myths of space technology(3)
some of which I will discuss in my meetings with smaller
groups here, we may draw some conclusions of more general
interest. I say "lessons to be learned," because they have
not already been learned. The first lesson is that we pay a
very high price to maintain these myths, far beyond the cost
of the particular program.
The second lesson is that there is a continued, important
role for scientists. Neither the Challenger disaster of
January 1986, nor the Chernobyl disaster of April 1986 re-
quired deep scientific insight to observe that something had
gone wrong. But in both cases, the hazards existed before
the disaster, and was reasonably accessible to scientific
inquiry. In both cases, in my opinion, the entrenched bu-
reaucracy prevented the voices of scientists and other know-
ledgeable critics from being heard, although the problem of
cost-ineffectiveness of the space shuttle program, and the
hazard of suppressing the evolution and continued procure-
ment of expendable boosters was far simpler to state than
was the task of analyzing the hazard of the combined phys-
ical and management deficiencies in the case of the
Chernobyl-type power reactors in the Soviet Union. Scien-
tists should vigorously report the truth, and this should be
welcomed by their colleagues and by society. Even a program
that is "merely wasteful" is denying wealth to people and is
damaging the ability to make proper decisions.
Returning to the arms race, we note that in many cases it
takes participation of both sides to become a real hazard,
as can be seen in interpersonal relations. As small a mat-
ter as inadequate calibration or judgment of the effort on
the other side (or "worst-case analysis") can over the years
and successive budget cycles result in a threatening arms
race. This might be avoided if one side is vastly richer
than the other and can afford much "greater" security, but
if both sides are comparable and look to compensate "capa-
bilities" and not intentions on the other side, one will
eventually see, on both sides, vast military machines for
which there is no rational reason, which will therefore in-
spire fear and instability on the other side.
We have in these myths the danger of jargon and of rhetoric.
Many honest, loyal people are involved in the continuation
of these programs. In the modern world of persuasion and
advertising, they are asked to turn their talents to the
support of the program of their organizations, and they do
this very well-- with public relations and lawyerly skills
that must be admired, but with results that can be disas-
trous. In the SDI program, we now see that the promise of
President Reagan to "share the technology" of strategic de-
fense with the Soviet Union has officially become a commit-
ment "to share the fruits of technology." As I have
commented,(4) "sharing the fruits of technology" can be un-
derstood as the mutual occupation of a peaceful world in
which one side has nothing to fear from the nuclear weapons
of the other side, because of an impenetrable shield, while
the other side (with useless nuclear weapons) has nothing to
fear because the protected side has no "reason to attack."
More simply, in feudal days, both lord and serf "shared the
fruits of the wealth" of the lord. The lord did this di-
rectly, and the serf lived whatever kind of life was optimum
as directed by the leadership of society. Human beings owe
their society honesty and candor, and they should be very
cautious before using their talents to deceive or mislead,
especially in the service of a program of their government
or society.
The code of honor of the United States Military Academy for-
bids not only lying but also "quibbling," which is the use
of words in such a way that they give a misleading im-
pression of assurance, threat, etc. If we all perceive the
reality, then we can all turn our attention to improving
this world. At present, the myths of space technology in-
hibit our putting an end to the extension of the arms race
into space, and they deny modern societies the full produc-
tive civil and military (non-weapon) uses of space.
CONCLUDING REMARKS.
The "public trust" to which reference is commonly made in
government is essential to the future of our democratic so-
ciety, and we should hold our officials, government employ-
ees, and contractors to that standard if we are to enjoy the
tranquility and prosperity that was not only the dream but
within the grasp of the founders of our country in the 18th
century.
----------------
1 The Clean Air Amendments of 1970 set limits effective in
1976 of 0.41, 3.4, and 0.40 g/mi of hydrocarbons, carbon
monoxide, and oxides of nitrogen, respectively. In the
vast literature on this subject, these entities are
written "HC, CO, and NOx".
2 "Reducing Dependence on Nuclear Weapons: A Second Nu-
clear Regime," in the 1980s Project/Council on Foreign
Relations' book, Nuclear Weapons and World Politics.
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1977.
3 "Space Technology: Myth and Promise" by R.L. Garwin,
published in the book Ways Out of the Arms Race, edited
by J. Hassard, T. Kibble and P. Lewis. Proceedings of
the Second International Scientists' Congress held at
Imperial College of Science, Technology & Medicine, Uni-
versity of London, 2-4 December 1988.
4 Symposium on "New Defense Technologies and the Strategic
Balance," Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas,
September 1986.
The Garwin Archive