CHARLES SCHWARTZ is a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley the sponsoring institution of the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratories. Schwartz has been active for years in raising questions about the complicity of scientists with the military and the nuclear arms race.
Most recently he has been an outspoken opponent in the science community of the Star Wars program. In addition to signing the "Anti-SDI Pledge," a commitment signed by almost 7,000 scientists and engineers to boycott SDI research, Schwartz announced last year that he would refuse to teach physics major degree courses as a further act of non-cooperation with the arms race. Schwartz was interviewed in March by Danny Collum.
-The Editors
Sojourners: Let's begin with some of your personal history. How did you end up in the physics profession?
Charles Schwartz: Probably like a lot of other people in the sciences, I got into that line of study early in my educational career and got locked into it pretty thoughtlessly - I was good at it and it seemed exciting.
I was an undergraduate at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] in the early 1950s, and I stayed there to get my doctorate in physics. Then I came to California and was on the faculty at Stanford University for a brief period. After that I got a position on the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, where I've been since 1960.
In the early part of my career, I was a pretty standard academic, interested in my research first, in teaching second, and in the rest of the world hardly at all. But being in Berkeley in the late '60s, I learned from and responded to the activism and the criticism about the role of science in relation to war, the role of this university in particular, and the role of my profession.
I undertook a series of attempted actions around those issues that continued to radicalize me in understanding the reality of the power of the state, the corporations, and the Pentagon. It taught me a lot about the role of institutions like the university and especially about the miseducation and misdirection that is given to so many scientists and engineers.
So I've been active with various peace organizations ever since, as well as students and others on and around the campus, trying to raise these issues. Also over the years I've focused more of my research and teaching time on questions of social responsibility, on the complicity of the academic institutions, and on problems of science, war, and human values.
What happens at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in California? Is there a connection between Livermore and the University of California?
There are two central laboratories in this country that have carried the complete responsibility for research and development of nuclear weapons. One is the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was developed. The second, called the Lawrence Livermore lab, is located 40 miles from Berkeley. It was established as a second bomb lab by Edward Teller, scientist and early advocate of the hydrogen bomb, and others in 1952.
The regents of the University of California hold the contract for the so-called management of both of these laboratories. That strange arrangement has been in existence since World War II. It has been the topic of sporadic complaints and protests from within the campus. But the university has maintained a rigid patronage relationship with these two leading nuclear weapons labs.
The laboratories - Livermore and Los Alamos - are enormous scientific laboratories; their combined budgets are something like $1.6 billion a year. They are highly autonomous organizations. They not only do the technical work related to nuclear weapons, but their top officials are very significantly involved in helping to shape government policy regarding all aspects of the nuclear arms race. The connection to the University of California is that the university lends its name as a kind of intellectual legitimation for the whole enterprise of nuclear weapons.
This legitimation by the university also adds to the particular credibility of laboratory officials when they go to Washington - as they frequently do, and mostly in secret - to "advise," or, I would say, to lobby for a variety of weapons programs.
From the evidence in the public record, the advice these lab officials give the government shows a very strong bias toward the continuing of the arms race. They've voiced opposition to a variety of arms control measures and have advocated varieties of new weapons. Often they think up new weapons and then go actively selling them to the Pentagon.
There has been a fair amount of publicity regarding the Lawrence Livermore lab and the Star Wars program. Some accounts have Livermore officials initiating the program in the way you've just described. What has been Livermore's role?
In the late '60s, there was a big push for a missile defense system, the so-called ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) system. It was a controversial issue then. At that time in many sectors of what is called the "defense community," and certainly at the Livermore lab, scientists were very much in favor of a defense system and promoted the idea. The idea of missile defense was stopped at that time by the ABM treaty. One of the main drawbacks to the ABM was that it just wasn't likely to work. The technology wasn't there.
But research and development work continued at Livermore and elsewhere in the decade or two since then. Some people, especially Edward Teller and others in the weapons-planning business, have always dreamed of having a combination of effective first-strike offensive weapons - which we do have and are continuing to build - together with a defensive system, in order to make nuclear war a credible military tool.
So, apparently they continued research at modest funding levels through the '70s. And according to various reports, Edward Teller, perhaps with some of his colleagues, was able to persuade President Reagan that they had wonderful new technologies on the horizon that would finally make such a missile defense system possible. Apparently this had a lot to do with Reagan's coming forward with his surprise announcement of the SDI, or Star Wars program, in March 1983.
At the same time that one sector of the scientific community played a key role in initiating the Star Wars plan, other scientists have been at the forefront of opposition to the program. Why are so many scientists against SDI?
There are two reasons. First, a few scientists who took the lead have a great deal of prestige in the scientific community and considerable reputation and experience from working on the inside with the government in earlier atomic bomb programs. So they have quite high credibility. These include Hans Bethe, Richard Garwin, and others with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
These people are acknowledged weapons experts but are free of the political constraints that exist for people within the Reagan administration or at the lab. In the past they have criticized various weapons systems, and they undertook a vigorous technical criticism of the SDI program when it first appeared. This provided a technical basis for the credibility of scientific criticism.
As a result it was easily understood by many in the scientific community, and indeed many in the public, that the ambition for providing a complete shield that would, as President Reagan said, "make nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete," was really a fantasy. To be able to stop thousands of nuclear weapons, each one having perhaps many decoys, and identify, locate, and destroy all of these targets in a very short time, with something very close to if not equal to 100 percent efficiency, was simply beyond reasonable technical expectations.
This early criticism was widespread within the scientific community and was accepted by many as showing that the Reagan proposal was rather nonsensical. So there was an element of technical absurdity that scientists professionally felt they ought to speak out about.
The second aspect of SDI that deserved criticism - and to my mind it is certainly more important - is that by trying to develop such a weapons system and perhaps partially succeeding in having the ability to stop some Soviet missiles headed toward us, one has created a very dangerous military posture. The combination of a large offensive nuclear arsenal with a modest defense creates the possibility for a first strike. You could knock out most of the opponent's weapons and then be able to defend yourself against a modest retaliation.
This is a posture that causes fright in the Pentagon when they imagine the Soviets developing it. And, similarly, our plans cause the Soviets great anxiety. That anxiety, of course, creates more weapons, more instability, and in fact makes the possibility of a nuclear war more and more likely. This is a prescription for a destabilizing configuration of offensive plus defensive weapons.
You mentioned that some prominent scientists have opposed previous weapons systems. But the current campaign of scientists actually boycotting SDI funding and research is something new, isn't it?
I think it is novel. Certainly there have been statements and petitions by significant numbers of scientists on various arms-related issues. For example, a nuclear weapons freeze was publicly supported by a large number of scientists in the usual way of putting their names on a statement that might be published somewhere in a newspaper.
But this SDI petition that has circulated in the last two years is more significant, because many academic scientists are pledging that they will not accept funds to work on the SDI project. For academics to be refusing money is very significant. It is a move of active resistance on the part of large numbers of scientists- resistance to going along with this government program.
There's a very familiar attitude among many academics who take Defense Department money and say, "But it's just pure science." They claim it's not a weapon they're working on. Academics and other scientists have found various ways to rationalize their acceptance of some relationship with the military while still professing their opposition to certain military programs and saying that their work is not really contributing to them.
So the SDI boycott stand really is a significant one. Here we see scientists refusing to participate in the program and refusing to take the very generous buckets of money that are being offered.
Do you think that is the result of a higher political consciousness growing out of the freeze campaign and other initiatives of recent years? Or is it the perception that the Star Wars program poses a much higher, historic order of danger and thus requires more active opposition?
I'm sure there are elements of a historically higher political consciousness. Also there is the sharpness and clarity of this issue being really technically absurd. As most scientists are opposed to things like astrology, or doctrines that they feel are professionally offensive, similarly Reagan's proposal of the SDI was a professional insult that many felt obliged to respond to.
But I think the more serious consideration is its real impact on the question of peace and war. Many scientists understand that SDI would be destabilizing, making the nation and the world less secure rather than more secure. That's a more subtle judgment and gets into realms where many scientists would say they are not competent. But that's an important judgment that scientists can and should engage in. And in this case, many did.
In the course of the last year, you have taken a particular stand with regard to what you will do and not do as a physicist.
Yes. My own concern and opposition to militarism and the arms race have been rather stronger than many of my colleagues. Over the last several years, I have noted two phenomena particularly. One is the increasing danger of the nuclear arms race. We have seen the development of first-strike weapons like the MX and Trident II missiles and battle-management systems that seem to be oriented toward the possibility, if not the plan, of our government to engage in an active, vigorous nuclear war-fighting situation.
The SDI caps all that off. It makes a war-fighting scenario rather more plausible and even likely because of the possibility of defending oneself against an opponent's weakened retaliation. So the heightened objective danger of the arms race has caused me to reconsider what can be done and what my own role as a physicist and physics teacher might be in response to that.
The second feature I've noted is the increasing number of reports from physics students leaving the university who say it seems extremely difficult, if not almost impossible, to find jobs that are not related to weapons programs in one way or another. The fact that an enormous portion of the physicists we train in the universities end up working on weapons is not new. But under the budget priorities of the Reagan administration, there's been a very sharp shift so that there are very few jobs - and some say none - available for people in physics and certain other technical fields that would use their trained skills in other than weapons-related programs.
For many students this is an important moral and political question. They cannot avoid making a choice when they're looking for a job. In light of that, I felt it was important to re-examine my own role and reassess my own choices and activities and complicities.
Even though many years ago I had given up various areas of research that had some relation to military work, I actually looked at the fundamental job that I still do, which is teaching basic physics at the introductory freshman level, the advanced undergraduate level, and the graduate level. And I was forced to acknowledge the obvious fact that the people who make weapons get their basic training in colleges and universities from people like me, perhaps many of them from me in particular.
This basic-level physics is used as a foundation for every physicist, mathematician, chemist, or engineer to build upon their technical skills. When there are not many alternative jobs for these people other than weapons work, it becomes harder to justify the teaching work by saying, as most people do, "Well, teaching is just pure. It's just the knowledge of physics. It could be used for good or for ill. So let's just hope that it's used more for good than for ill."
I had to face, and finally accept, the reality that what I'm doing in continuing as a physics teacher is performing a vital service for the Pentagon. I was providing essential raw material for the arms race by training the students who will be the next generation of weapons designers. And I think that perhaps they may be the last generation of weapons designers if this march toward nuclear war that I see happening is not halted and reversed.
This caused me to make a choice, and I chose to inform the chair of my department that I was no longer willing to teach most of the regular physics courses. I said this was because I no longer wanted to be complicit in what appeared to me clearly to be preparations for nuclear war - something that would have to be called unconscionable.
I said that as a teacher I felt that I had to withdraw my services. I even asked to be considered "a kind of conscientious objector" but still within the profession of physicist and physics professor.
How has that worked out practically?
Not too badly. I was a little concerned. It was not my objective to confront my department chair and my university. Ultimately they are not responsible for the problem.
The chair first responded by asking if I was planning to resign as a professor. And I said no, it's not that simple. Then I asked if he would simply assign me to courses teaching physics to liberal arts majors and to people going into the biological sciences, where they were rather unlikely to use the knowledge I taught them for weapons work.
I also teach a course on the arms race and another course on science and politics. I felt that these were positive uses of my knowledge and skills as a teacher and that I certainly wanted to continue doing this and hoped that the university and the department would be able to accommodate me.
So, at least for the present, I have been given those teaching assignments, and it has worked out. I don't know if, at a later time, I may be ordered to teach some course that I don't find morally acceptable. I hope we won't have that kind of confrontation. But we'll see.
How have your colleagues in the department responded to this decision?
Mostly they haven't responded. When I first made this proposal, I asked to have the whole matter discussed at a faculty meeting, because I knew that it raised a number of questions which I wanted to discuss with my colleagues.
Obviously my hope is that many of my colleagues would like to do the same thing. I'd love to organize a national or international strike of physicists and other scientists to end the arms race. I've spoken and written about such a proposal, but it hasn't gotten much support. But what troubled me here was that I could not even get my colleagues to discuss my position and my ideas.
That is a typical way to deal with something which is uncomfortable - avoidance. So that's the way most of my colleagues have behaved. When I attempt to discuss it privately with one or two, they can't comprehend it, they can't understand it. That's because it clearly implies difficult choices for them which they prefer to ignore or to define away by simplistic rationalizing. So I'm viewed as doing something strange. But at least the questions are there for them to think about.
How do the students react?
It's a mixed reaction. For example, many of the graduate students are themselves working as teaching assistants, performing very much the same kind of teaching work that I said I no longer want to do. So they are in an awkward position themselves.
My ideas are clearly very disturbing to my colleagues and to many of the more advanced students, especially as they get on and become more committed to the profession. Graduate students have to choose an area of research. And the question they face is whether they will be locked into a skill for which only the military will be able to employ them later on.
A few students have spoken to me and asked whether it wouldn't be better if I continued as a teacher, because then I would be able to convey my ideas about these things to the physics students, rather than removing myself from the classroom and leaving them in a vacuum or exposed only to the attitudes of other teachers. Of course I had considered that. But I felt that on balance there is really very little that I can transmit about political and moral values in the context of teaching a regular physics course.
Most of the time I am giving students the technical material they will use for weapons work. So in trying to balance the positive and negative contributions, I couldn't avoid the conclusion that teaching those courses was an overwhelmingly negative contribution.
But my plan is to continue at the university. I intend to be active in raising these issues and let students hear about them through other channels.
I have asked the department to at least provide students the kind of information they need to make informed choices about their careers; for example, what the job market is like these days for physicists in terms of military vs. non-military jobs. I've asked the department to collect the best data and inform students of that early on in their careers. But that's something the department does not want to do.
Similarly I've asked the department to assess the different sub-areas of research as to their potential for military application, so that students who go into a particular field may be preadvised as to whether they may be getting locked into a technical skill for which there will be only a military or weapons-related job. That seems like information that teachers have an obligation to provide to their students. But, again, my colleagues find it very disturbing to have to make those judgments. I think they understand the implications of what that would do.
But to me it's a very clear responsibility of teachers. So that's an issue that will come to the fore only if enough students start demanding it.
Many students, I think, are concerned about this question of the military uses of science. But many others manage to keep their minds closed to it. I don't want to say they are apathetic. I would say they are in a condition of encouraged ignorance. And the silence of teachers helps to protect and maintain that passive ignorance.
I think that is a highly immoral role for teachers to be playing. It is playing "the good German" and training students to be "good Germans." That's a phrase some find offensive. But I think that if you consider the potentiality of modern weapons and nuclear war, it is a very appropriate one. Either one just goes along following the plans that the government has made, or one takes an informed, independent look at it, applies human values, and reaches a conclusion such as, "I will not participate in this. I must engage in active resistance and protest against it."
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