Ask A Scientist: Scientists & Arms Control From Oppenheimer To Today
Oppenheimer and his allies obviously lost the debate over the hydrogen bomb. Today, most of the US nuclear arsenal is made up of thermonuclear weapons that have yields ranging from 10 to 80 times larger than the Hiroshima bomb.
The very real concern that nations could secretly continue to conduct underground tests would prove to be an obstacle to further progress until the 1980s, when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness, allowed US and Soviet scientists to talk directly with each other.
Ronald Reagan’s original notion of a space-based system was enthusiastically championed by some scientists, particularly Edward Teller, but UCS and other scientific organizations have demonstrated how impractical and dangerous these proposals are. These efforts mounted technical, as well as moral, challenges to the Star Wars program and highlighted the folly behind it. They remain a shining example of how scientists can best use their expertise to debunk bad—and dangerous—government policy, showing that there is no technical solution to protect people from nuclear weapons. The real solution is political and diplomatic.
In 2000, the last full year of the Clinton administration, UCS scientists published another study, this time in collaboration with scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and elsewhere. The study,, showed just how easily the proposed national missile defense system could be defeated using technologies available to any state capable of launching a nuclear-armed ballistic missile.
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