Found myself redirected to an interview (not very long) while searching for something completely different that some might find interesting (see especially 6 & 7) - note: not on the forum from what was searched:
_http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/Pauling/pauling1.html
The topic headings are as follows:
Here is the Transcript:
_http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/conversations/Pauling/pauling1.html
The topic headings are as follows:
1. Background ... scientific work during World War II ... reaction to dropping of the atomic bomb ... first public speeches on world peace
2. The Role of Ava Helen Pauling in Linus Pauling's Peace Work ... the FBI visits Dr. Pauling ... Ava's decisive influence ... her background
3. Public Criticism and Peace Activism ... acceptance of rational deterrent ... falsely accused of seeking total disarmament ... author of first petition against atmospheric testing
4. The Test Ban Treaty ... leading a movement ... invitation to the White House ... conversation with Mrs. Kennedy ... loss of President Kennedy
5. Science versus Politics: The Arms Race ... dangerous level of stockpiles ... action/reaction and the spiral of fear
6. Science versus Politics: Moving beond Militarism ... dangers of nuclear war ... militarism and the failure to solve real problems ... importance of hope
7. Science and Morality ... role of scientists in the peace movement ... peace research ... science and weapons research
8. Conclusion
Here is the Transcript:
Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Background
Dr. Pauling, welcome to Berkeley.
Thank you.
I wonder if you might recall for us the early days of the peace movement right after the Second World War. You were a member of Einstein's Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, one of the first efforts.
That's right. I got interested in world peace in 1945. I had been working during the Second World War, and for a little while earlier than that, a year or two earlier, on war projects. I still was Professor/Chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, but I had about 20 contracts with the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Oppenheimer asked me to come to Los Alamos as head of the chemistry section of the atomic bomb project, and I decided not to do it. I had so much going on in Pasadena, including continuing teaching chemistry and this large amount of war work. When the atomic bombs were dropped, exploded, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, I was very soon asked by the Rotary Club in Hollywood to talk about nuclear fission, about the nature of these weapons. I was able to do so because I had not been connected with the atomic energy project and had no classified information about these weapons. So I began giving talks, popular talks, to groups of that sort which were purely education, descriptive in nature, with little political content. Rather soon, they began to involve the expression of my own ideas -- I don't remember just how early it was that I was able to quote Albert Einstein as saying that now that a single bomb can destroy a whole city and a single rocket can lob it over, the time has come when we must give up war. But then I was asked to join the Board of Trustees of the Einstein Committee, the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, which consisted only of the Board of Trustees, half a dozen scientists, Albert Einstein as chairman and Harold Urey as vice chairman. So every few months I went with my wife to Princeton to a meeting of this board, and later I began making lecture tours, partially along with Leo Szilard. We would show a film which the committee had made, the first film about atomic bombs explaining what nuclear war would be. Just a little atomic bomb of the Hiroshima - Nagasaki type then. And Leo Szilard would give a talk and I would speak, too, about the necessity to understand what had happened in the world now that the means of waging war had changed in such an astounding way.
And very early on, you were advocating against the production of the hydrogen bomb, even in the late 40s.
I opposed the construction of the hydrogen bomb on the, I think, rather reasonable grounds that an ordinary atomic bomb could destroy a whole city, even the biggest cities. It could do much damage, perhaps kill a million people out of the 10 million in a large city, and that there was no need to accelerate the arms race by developing weapons a thousand times more powerful.
The Role of Ava Helen Pauling in Linus Pauling's Peace Work
How important was the fact that you had not really been in government service? Do you think that made it easier for you to draw some of these conclusions and for you to speak publicly about them?
Yes. Of course, I had in a sense been in government service in that I took leave one summer from the Institute in order to go to the Central Explosives Research Laboratory.
This was during the war?
During the war. And I had a large number of government contracts that I was responsible for. But I didn't have classified information about atomic bombs. I could talk about them as freely as I wanted, I thought. After my first talk, I think the second day after my first talk, an FBI man turned up in my office and said, "Who gave you information about how much plutonium or uranium 235 there is in an atomic bomb?" And I said, "Nobody, I figured it out." So, I wasn't bothered thereafter. But, if I had had classified information, we concede that I might well have been restrained from speaking to the public about the need to get control over war the way that I was speaking.
And, over the next decade and a half, both you and your wife [Ava Helen Pauling] were very active in lecturing and holding conferences and for petitioning the government and making known to the public the issues involved in these new weapons.
Yes. My wife had been interested in social, political, and economic problems ever since she was a teenage girl. She used to argue with a friend of the family, one of the judges of the Oregon State Supreme Court.
So she was very supportive of your efforts, and in fact, would direct a lot of her own speeches to the women's perspective on these issues.
Yes. I'm sure that if I had not married her, I would not have had this aspect of my career -- working for world peace. It was her influence on me and her continued support that caused me to continue. In fact, I have said that during the McCarthy period when many people gave up, especially scientists, I continued because I had to retain the respect of my wife.
And what drove her? Was it her academic background or her humanistic concern about the fate of the world?
Well, I think largely her humanistic concerns. She had had some training as a chemist, and during the Second World War she worked as an assistant to Professor Hagamsmith on a war project developing rubber. And she had a general interest in science and was very able, very smart, but she was really concerned about human beings. The humanistic concern she had was very great.
The lectures that you both gave, were very similar to what we see today being done on a larger scale by the Physicians for Social Responsibility: exposing the public to the horrors of nuclear war.
Yes, but when you say on a larger scale, I'm not even sure of that, because we gave hundreds of lectures about world peace. And, there were other people, too. Norman Cousins gave a great number of lectures. There was great activity twenty-five years ago in this field.
Public Criticism and Peace Activism
One of the petitions that was signed by fifty-two Nobel Prize winners, the Mainau Declaration of July 15, 1955, included this sentence: "We think it is a delusion if governments believe that they can avoid war for a long time through the fear of these weapons. All nations must come to the decision to renounce force as a final resort of policy." Was that a criticism of the notion of deterrence?
Well, it may be that it was. I wasn't at Pugwash that year. I have gone to Pugwash where there were meetings of Nobel Laureates from time to time, every year in fact. I signed the statement, but I wasn't involved in writing it. I believe, and I continue to believe, that the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons is very important. In 1961, the Soviet Union exploded in the atmosphere a single three-stage nuclear weapon that was a 60-megaton bomb with explosive power equal to 60 million tons of TNT. That's ten times the explosive power of all of the bombs used in the whole of the Second World War, in one explosion. And these bombs exist by the thousands. I don't know that there are any other 60-megaton bombs because there's no target worthy of one, but there are 20-megaton bombs and many one-megaton bombs around, roughly equal to the Second World War in a single bomb. The feeling that I had and many other people had was that the existence of these stockpiles of terrible weapons, weapons that if used would certainly destroy civilization as we know it and might well wipe out the human race, meant that the great powers must not get involved in a war with one another. My own feeling, then as and now, as expressed in the report called "The Price of Defense" issued about four years ago by the Boston group, Philip Morrison and his associates, is that the nuclear deterrent should be reduced from its present completely insane level to a somewhat less irrational level. But I think we shouldn't get rid of it entirely and tempt the great powers to go back to old-fashioned wars with one another with conventional weapons, with 20 million people killed in the First World War, 40 million in the Second World War, perhaps 60 million, or 80 million, in the Third World War, fought with conventional weapons. Why take that chance? I believe in the nuclear deterrent, but it's gotten out of hand, and we continue to waste money on it instead of stabilizing it.
Were charges made against you that you were for unilateral disarmament? In a public debate there tends to be such a distortion of views that are so different from the conventional as yours were in the fifties.
There were some irresponsible statements about me to the effect that I was working for disarming the United States, that I was taken by Soviet propaganda, and that sort of thing. Of course, I was speaking out contrary to the official opinion. If we had had a dictatorship in this country, I might well have been accused of the crime of seditious libel, which is used in dictatorships to suppress criticism. When I was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963, Life Magazine published an editorial with the heading "A Weird Insult from Norway -- The Norwegian Nobel Committee Awards the Peace Prizes." I think that the writer of this editorial thought that it was insulting to give the peace prize to someone who advocated something that was not the official policy of the United States government.
And, indeed, when you circulated a 1958 petition which was signed by 2,000 American scientists, and I think 8,000 foreign scientists from 49 different countries, there was government harassment, there was harassment in the press, and charges of working for the enemy.
I first announced that 2,000 American scientists had signed the petition asking for cessation of the testing of nuclear weapons on the atmosphere where they were liberating radioactive fallout over the whole world that would cause defective children to be born and that would damage living human beings, causing cancer and other diseases. We asked that the nations make an agreement to stop testing of nuclear weapons. At that time, the government policy was not to make this treaty, it had not yet been decided, but pretty soon it was decided to make such a treaty. I think that I got a good bit of support but some criticism also. I'd written this petition together with Barry Commoner and Ed Condon. Ed Condon is a Berkeley man who was at that time Professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis; Barry Commoner was Professor of Biology at Washington University. We circulated the petition. Scientists from foreign countries began to send in signed copies of the petition, so my wife and I circulated it in foreign countries and ultimately turned over 13,000 signatures of scientists to Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld of the United Nations.
The Test Ban Treaty
On another occasion when you were in the Soviet Union, you actually wrote a letter to Khrushchev which included a draft treaty which was very similar to the partial test ban that was eventually adopted in 1963.
Yes. I didn't get to talk with Premier Khrushchev then. There was an appointment set up for me, and then it was canceled, and it's hard to know why these things are done. But, in fact, in 1961, which is when this occurred, my wife and I were there for a scientific, biochemical, congress, but we said we would like to speak at a peace meeting, a public meeting. The Soviet Peace Committee put out posters announcing the meeting and we went to it, to the Hall of Scientists that holds a thousand people. We had a film -- "The Peace Movement in Southern California" -- showing a demonstration of 2,000 or 3,000 people marching with banners and meeting in a park and my speaking to them, and then my wife talked and I talked. I said that the Soviet Union had just exploded a 60-megaton bomb which I estimated over the course of generations (because these gene mutations last, are passed on) would cause a million children to be born with gross physical or mental defects who would not have been defective otherwise, and would cause perhaps just as many people to develop cancer or another disease. And that I thought it immoral and unethical for nations to do this damage to the human race. I think that was the last atomic bomb that they exploded, but I'm not sure. At any rate, the bomb test treaty negotiations were going on and very quickly, the next year, the treaty was signed and it went into effect in October of 1963.
The Nobel Committee in awarding you the Peace Prize pointed out that the language that President Kennedy used in his speech announcing the signing of the partial test ban was very similar to the language that you had used in defining the debate and in fact, the language you just used in describing your speech in the Soviet Union. Was this an instance of power listening to science?
I think so. President Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy held a dinner for recipients of the Nobel Prize. On the day before, and in fact on the day of the dinner, my wife and I had demonstrated outside the White House against the bomb tests. When we came through the reception line, Mrs. Kennedy said, "Do you think it is right, Dr. Pauling, to march back and forth with your sign outside the White House so that Caroline says to me, 'Mummy, what has Daddy done wrong now?'" And then she introduced me to President Kennedy who said, "Dr. Pauling, I hope that you will continue to express your opinions." And that was about at time that he became aware that the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons was really the wrong thing to do and began applying political pressure to the Senate to approve the test ban treaty, and began deciding to instruct his negotiators to sign the test ban treaty.
Do you think that if he had lived the progress on arms control would have been more significant since he had gone through this process of negotiating this treaty -- and then of course, he had gone through the Cuban missile crisis as well.
I think he had a real understanding of the significance of nuclear weapons and very great concern for his responsibility. And I believe that he admired Khrushchev for his restraint. They handled that missile crisis well. I think he could understand the feeling of Khrushchev and the other Soviet leaders that if the United States had rockets armed with nuclear warheads in Turkey and other places close to the Soviet Union, why shouldn't the Soviet Union put them in Cuba? But, of course, it was the wrong thing to do. It's good that there was some restraint over the spread of nuclear weapons.
Science versus Politics: The Arms Race
Why has it been so difficult to bridge this gap between the insights of scientists and the thinking and actions of our political leaders? Looking at the history of the peace movement in the 1950s, it's as if we're re-living all of this today.
That's right. It looks as though we haven't learned anything from the history of the last twenty-five years. When the three-stage hydrogen bomb had been developed, the individual warheads became a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs. Ten or twenty thousand times more powerful than the one-ton blockbusters with which most of the bombings were done in the Second World War. The stockpiles had already become irrationally great. Twenty-five years ago the analysts all talked about a ten thousand megaton attack on the United States, and a ten thousand megaton counterattack on the Soviet Union, and were making estimates that perhaps 80 percent of the people would be dead 60 days after the attack. We still talk about ten thousand megaton attacks. It hasn't changed very much in that respect. The need for détente was clear. And, of course, we went through a period of a number of years when the relationship was better. But changes were still being made in the development of nuclear weapons, usually with the United States taking the lead, just as we had a five-year lead initially on building atomic bombs. We introduced the anti-ballistic missile, but this development was stopped by treaty. That is one case where a good treaty was made between the United States and the Soviet Union.
We introduced the idea of MIRV, multiple independently directable re-entry vehicles with nuclear warheads. So that a single big rocket, instead of carrying a 20-megaton bomb that would destroy Moscow or any other city, could be made more effective because there aren't many 20-megaton targets. Instead, it could carry perhaps 16 small rockets, each with its own one-megaton bomb (twenty or twenty-five times as big as the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bomb) -- big enough for most cities -- and with computers programmed in such a way that 16 different targets could be destroyed. Now, a few years later, the Soviet Union hasn't quite caught up with us on MIRVing their big rockets, but they're well on their way. So now we have the Cruise missile. I was in Moscow the 23rd of December, three weeks ago, when Andropov gave his talk in which he said that they were willing to cut down on intermediate-range missiles to the number that the West had -- Britain, France, the United States -- and would continue to cut down if we were willing to cut down. But he went on to become very tough then -- I suppose he has to under the circumstances with a tough opponent in the United States -- and he said that they were well on their way towards completing the development of their own Cruise missile if we went ahead with our 7,000 Cruise missiles. Very dangerous business: they would soon have an equal number.
So the race has gone on.
Yes. He said they would keep up with us. Of course, President Reagan says we will keep ahead of the Soviet Union. What is going to happen if these two great nations are not able to get enough sense to stop this waste of money and this increasing of the danger of nuclear war breaking out? As these weapons, the delivery vehicles, the whole system, become more and more complicated, the chance that there will be a technological or psychological accident that initiates the catastrophic interchange of these terribly destructive weapons becomes greater and greater, so that we get in more and more danger that a nuclear war will break out. When the world is destroyed, it'll be by accident, not by design, not by the direct decision of Reagan or Andropov, but by accident.
Why then have the politicians, the political leaders on both sides, failed to heed the warning about these dangers? When one goes through this history or reads your book No More War, published in 1958, one finds that the issues have been on the table since early times in this new era.
The arguments in my book are essentially the same. I talked about a twenty thousand megaton bomb war, ten thousand from each side, and that's what we still talk about, and the other dangers and the needs for making the world a safer place. Arguments are still just as good twenty-five years after this book was published. Why haven't we got control? The Soviet Union, first the people and the government, fear war. They don't want to have a war. They're afraid, also, of attack by the western powers, the expressed statement that we're out to destroy communism. And they're more afraid than we are, because they know what war is. There were 50 times as many people in the Soviet Union killed in the Second World War as Americans killed in the Second World War. They experienced the destruction of their own country. So I think that they feel that they have to try to keep up with the United States and not tempt our militarists.
Now, our position has been made pretty clear. Year after year, or decade after decade, from 30 years ago, our gross national product is twice that of the Soviet Union. We fear that communism will take over the world. Khrushchev and other communists believe that communism is so good a system that it's inevitable that it will take over; we don't agree with that, so we fear communism and think that we must prevent the takeover. We're twice as affluent as the Soviet Union, have twice the gross national product of the Soviet Union. The burden of militarism, even if it were great for us, would be twice as great for them.
A few months ago President Reagan issued a national security directive that repeats the statement that we must apply economic pressure, military pressure, diplomatic pressure, propagandistic pressure on the Soviet Union with the hope of eliminating it from the world. In fact, he said to the British Parliament in London that by applying this pressure we ultimately shall achieve the goal of leaving Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history. I'm quoting President Reagan. So we have a goal: applying pressure by increasing military expenditures until finally they become intolerable for the Soviet Union. I read one statement by a commentator back in Connecticut who said President Reagan's plan to spend 1.6 trillion dollars on militarism in the next five years to bankrupt the Soviet Union already in its first year has come close -- has brought the United States to the verge of bankruptcy, not only economically, but also morally and spiritually.
Science versus Politics: Moving beyond Militarism
So what the politicians didn't learn from the scientists was to go beyond the notion that victory is still possible. They believe that by building a nuclear weapon, they do not necessarily have to go to nuclear war, but will be in a position to keep the other party down; then by simultaneously applying economic screws, might possibly even break the system. The politicians haven't really gotten over these old ways of thinking that Einstein and others warned they really would have to move beyond.
They haven't recognized that this is too dangerous a policy to follow. I'm sure that President Reagan and his advisors do not anticipate that there will be a nuclear war. I'm sure that they don't believe the statement that they made last year that we might carry on a limited nuclear war in Europe and still not destroy the world. I'm sure they don't believe that. That was just propaganda to get the American people to accept the whole idea of continuing the military buildup and increasing the military budget at the same time that we are having trouble with the parts of the budget that relate to the well-being of the American people. This is just propaganda.
I have said that perhaps a limited war in Europe wouldn't get any objections because the Soviet Union wouldn't be harmed, they wouldn't complain. We wouldn't be harmed, we wouldn't complain. The European nations wouldn't complain because they wouldn't exist any longer. The fact is that in even a limited war, the radioactive fallout thrown up in the air might prevent the sun shining through for a long time; the smoke from the forest fires might hinder the growth of plant life on the surface of the earth all over the earth for months or year; and the radioactive fallout spread all over the world, the carbon-14 that has a half-life of 5,070 years and continues to damage human beings, would continue for tens of thousands of years. These effects, even in a limited nuclear war involving say only a thousand times, or a hundred times, the explosive power of the Second World War, might well mean the end of the human race. So we need to have the change in thinking that Einstein talked about.
I still want to understand why this hasn't come about. Did these efforts of the 50s and early 60s fail to win the bulk of public opinion in this country? Did the issue recede into the background of more immediate issues like the Vietnam war? Because so much of this material resonates with what we're hearing now, and in some ways it's bothersome. It's as if we haven't learned the lessons.
That's right. We were making statements of this sort, especially when the stockpiles of nuclear weapons got up to 600 megatons. This was very early, and it already was irrational to have such destructive power. Then they got to 6,000, perhaps even to 60,000 -- estimates now are usually around 30,000 as the total stockpiles -- but that order of magnitude. As Philip Morrison said, it was really insane for the human race to have developed the powers of self destruction to this level. And why? Twenty years ago, the bomb test treaty went into effect. This was a victory. It looked as though there was some sanity coming into the situation. There was a period of détente, and then, of course, the decision was made to contain communism by participating in the war in Korea, and then in Vietnam. Not very successful efforts to contain communism, and the wrong kind, I think.
How much money we waste on militarism in the world, something like $600 billion a year, equal to the total income of more than half of the people in the world. A terrible waste. Think of what good could be done if we were not to expend so much money. There are great problems to be solved in the world, to be attacked. The problem of over-population, the problem just of feeding people is going to be a more and more serious one; encroachment on the environment, possible catastrophe from damage to the ozone layer, and so on. And we aren't cooperating in solving them. The United States and the Soviet Union, even if they were to be cooperating in solving these problems, will have in the future a pretty difficult time. And when they are fighting each other the way that they are and wasting money on militarism, senseless militarism, there's not much chance of solving these other problems.
Don't your get frustrated in these endeavors?
I'm asked from time to time, am I hopeful?, and I say I am. I believe that we're going to get through this difficult period, that rationality will come into the conduct of world affairs. I have evidence. If I weren't hopeful, why should I be spending my time going around making television interviews and giving popular talks and traveling around working for world peace? If I didn't think we would succeed, I might as well be enjoying myself reading the physical and chemical literature, and trying to solve some of the interesting problems about nuclear structure, molecular structure, and even about the vitamins and their interaction with the human body, and trying to find some way of decreasing the amount of suffering caused by disease. So, I believe that we're going to be successful. The fact that I believed twenty-five years ago that we were going to be successful very soon doesn't keep me from believing now that we're going to be successful. And the fact that there hasn't been a war between the United States and the Soviet Union in the twenty-five years leads me to believe that nuclear deterrence really does work. It does work. It's insanely overdeveloped, but it works, and the danger is that it will cease to work because of some accident. This would be the result of our poor sense in continuing to make the system more and more complicated instead of trying to simplify it and get it under control.
Science and Morality
Do you feel that scientists have a special moral responsibility to make known these insights and mobilize public opinion?
Yes. I think that scientists have a special responsibility. All human beings, all citizens, have a responsibility for doing their part in the democratic process. But almost every issue has some scientific aspect to it, and this one of nuclear war, or war in general, is of course very much a matter of science. Scientists understand the problem somewhat better than their fellow citizens. I think that scientists who are able to do it, who are in the position to do it, and who have the ability to do it, should help their fellow citizens to understand what the issues are and how they look at it, and should go beyond that and express their own opinions for the benefit of their fellow citizens.
In your book No More War you discuss how science had become the handmaiden of war -- helped to think about war, to define new instruments of warfare, and to define new strategies. And you propose in that book that science more and more became a handmaiden of peace. That an international research organization for peace studies that would deal with many of the problems you just discussed should be instituted. I wonder if you might reflect on that now, because you probably know the University of California is going through a process of evaluating what it should do in the realm of peace studies.
There are a number of rather small peace research institutes, institutions that have been set up. Some contribute very little, like the Hoover Institution on War and Peace of Stanford, which doesn't pay much attention to world peace, it seems to me. Or the United States Government Arms Control and Disarmament Agency seems to me to contribute little directly to world peace. My idea that this could be a government function may not be very reasonable. It may be better to get it as far as possible from government. I envisaged a large place that would be essentially like a great university, a very great university, where the staff members would be interested in world peace and would devote part of their time to striving to solve the problem of eliminating war from the world and planning a better world. They would also be productive scholars working on problems, perhaps basic problems in fields of science or problems of applied science that would help in the question of overpopulation or damaged environment and all the others. Some of them would be futurists trying to plan the future. I think Harvard has a rather small group that might be described in this way. It would be fine if there were a large and effective group in the University of California. Here we have a university that I have from time to time, ever since 1948 when I was Eastman Professor at Oxford, described as the greatest university in the world. And I still think of it in this sense. The University of California needs to continue to lead the world. And what we need more than anything else is to lead the world toward peace.
Do you feel that in this postwar period science has been corrupted by its relationship to the government and to weapons programs?
No, I don't think so. There's misuse of science, in my opinion. All this weaponry stuff is a misuse of science. Individual scientists have been tempted into working for the government, working on weapons either directly or indirectly. I've seen a statement that half of American scientists are involved in such work. It would be better if most of them were working for the welfare of human beings in one way or another. There's plenty of work to be done. We haven't exhausted the scientific problems. I don't think that the scientists could get together, all of them, and decide that they would not work on weapons, that they would not work for the government. This would mean that we were instituting an oligarchy of scientists. I think that the country, the world, should be run by the people as a whole, not by any small group, not by an oligarchy of scientists.
Conclusion
What about the problem of science in the Soviet Union, and the problem of science and peace movements in the Soviet Union? One can compare, for example, your career here and your harassment by the government here with the situation of Sakharov, for example, or with the suppression recently of a burgeoning peace movement there.
I was harassed, of course, in a less blatant way when my passport was refused at the time that the Royal Society of London had arranged a conference of scientists, a two day symposium, on the biochemistry of DNA, and on my ideas. I would be the first speaker. And the second speaker was my associate Professor Cory, and then there were talks from people from many countries for the next two days. I wasn't there because my passport was withheld from me on the grounds that it was not in the best interest of the United States. A statement was made that my anticommunist statements hadn't been strong enough. So, I didn't get to go and to see the X-ray photographs taken by Russell and Franklin, which I would have seen if I had gone to London on that occasion.* And others ... I was prevented from attending various scientific congresses. And, of course, I was threatened by the Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate with a year in jail for contempt of Senate, when I was being harassed by the Internal Security Subcommittee.
Well, things aren't so bad. I wasn't treated as badly as Russian scientists are treated. I think of Russia... the first time I went to the Soviet Union in 1957, I thought, this is something like Oregon in 1907. My early memories as a boy in Oregon, the simplicity of the people, the simplicity of the life; and I think the Soviet Union just lags behind us in the way that it treats individual human beings, too. We aren't trying to help them to catch up, we try to hinder them in whatever way we can. When I was invited by the Supreme Soviet last month to come to the Soviet Union to help celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Union, I'm sure I was invited because I had been given the International Lenin Peace Prize ten years after I got the Nobel Peace Prize. I got there and I gave them a list of the people that I wanted to see including Sakharov, who I wanted to talk with. I didn't get to see Sakharov. I had said I would stay ten days, and after six days I got sort of bored. It was the 23rd of December, and I thought of two of my children and their spouses and my grandchildren in California. I sort of wanted to get back. I came home four days early and gave up on it. I didn't see him; didn't go ahead with the last of my program.
There's room for a lot of improvement in the Soviet Union, just as there's room for a lot of improvement in the United States. An important issue in human rights, it seems to me, is the basic human right of having a job, contributing to the work of the world, feeling pride that you are a part of the human race and are doing your part in keeping the human race going, doing work that needs to be done. And yet, here our system depends on having millions, over ten million now, American people out of work. This is a great violation of human rights, the rights of the individual human being. So, there's something wrong with our system. Well, there's a lot wrong with the Soviet system. In No More War I said that I foresee that with cooperation between our nations, working to solve the problems of the world, these systems will change, develop, incorporating into each the better features of the other, until finally, I hope, we'll have a world in which each human being is able to lead a good life. There aren't many people in the world who lead really good lives, you know.
One final question. If you look back at your involvement in the peace movement and your experiences in politics, are there any lessons that you learned about things that you would have done differently, or things that you think you did right that show an example for people presently involved in the movement?
Well, one problem that my wife and I experienced in the peace movement 25 or 30 years ago, is that of difficulty in cooperation. We were not active members of the peace organizations to any great extent. She and I worked by ourselves. We arranged in 1961 an international conference of 60 scientists from 15 countries in Oslo to discuss the issue of the spread of nuclear weapons. We got out a good report giving the reasons for this. And I was pleased that President Kennedy, again, seemed to me to have cribbed from this report when he gave his speech against the spread of nuclear weapons. We included a statement which was signed by all 60 scientists that loyalty to one's own nation is not enough; we now need to be loyal to the human race as a whole. I was afraid when this statement was written that the three people from the Soviet Union, perhaps two or three others from behind the iron curtain, wouldn't sign this statement. But they did sign this statement that we need to have loyalty to the world as a whole. Patriotism is not enough.
How did anticommunism affect the peace movement?
Anticommunism caused trouble in the peace movement. We went to a peace movement in Oxford where my wife and I represented ourselves. We came under our own steam, with our own support, as we did with most of these activities, such as our supporting the symposium against the spread of nuclear weapons. And representatives of many organizations came there. The British had invited representatives from the World Peace Council to come. The Americans refused and they managed to prevent the peace meeting in Oxford from taking place. We were there, the others were there, and it was stopped. There were other occasions, too, where it was said that we must be careful to not join together with groups that are dominated by communists, or by communist sympathizers. Our policy was that we would sign statements that expressed what we believed, no matter who else signed the statements. When Senator Hennings of Missouri held a hearing in which he was checking on the passport office of the State Department, I was called in to testify about my passport being withheld. The Assistant Secretary of State in charge of passport affairs was there to testify before the Senate Committee. He was asked, "How did it happen that Professor Pauling received his passport to go in 1954 to Stockholm to get the Nobel Prize in Chemistry [though he was later denied]? Did he appeal? Was there an appeal?" And the Assistant Secretary of State said, "Well, there was a sort of self-generating appeal. Here, I've just got some documents from the State Department...." Several years after I wrote in under the Freedom of Information Act. He had correspondence in which the State Department officials were discussing whether it would do more damage to the United States to refuse to let me go to get the Nobel Prize, or to let me go to get it, and they decided it was better to let me go to get the Nobel Prize. Well, here, the fact that they objected to my traveling because my anticommunist statements are not strong enough indicates how important this matter of being an anticommunist is. In the peace movement, too, while we want to have peace with the Soviet Union, we don't want to talk with anyone else who wants to have peace as long as we think that he is too friendly to the Soviet Union. Well, to go on with Senator Hennings. Senator Hennings said, speaking to the Assistant Secretary of State, "Your suggestion that Dr. Pauling was following the Soviet line may be wrong. Perhaps the Soviets are following Dr. Pauling's line."
Dr. Pauling, the example of your leadership points to the way that we can move beyond that particularism, that nationalism, toward a universalism. Thank you very much for joining us.
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* Footnote: Russell and Franklin's X-rays would have shown Dr. Pauling that his research on the structure of DNA was based on a false hypothesis. By not attending the conference, Dr. Pauling was denied an opportunity to correct his ideas, leaving the field open to James Watson and Francis Crick, who received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for their discovery.
