Nowadays there is a tendency among historians and social scientists to think of the postwar scientists' movement as a quaint aberration, and to dismiss the ideas we developed in the late 1940's as politically naive or irrelevant. Some go even further and would have us believe that time has shown the wisdom of those politicians who insisted on the need for maintaining American preeminence in nuclear armaments, despite our urgent warnings that this was a futile and dangerous course. As evidence, they cite the facts that for thirty years nuclear war has been averted, in spite of recurrent international crises, and that the number of nuclear‐weapons states has remained much smaller than the number that we predicted would be able to produce nuclear weapons on a time scale of thirty years.
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
July 1975
July 01 1975
Nuclear proliferation‐thirty years after Hiroshima
The winner of the Leo Szilard Award re‐examines a 30‐year‐old position—that the only way to ensure an atom‐bomb‐free future is by strict international control over fissionable materials and their means of production.
Bernard T. Feld
Bernard T. Feld
Professor, Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Search for other works by this author on:
Physics Today 28 (7), 23–29 (1975);
Citation
Bernard T. Feld; Nuclear proliferation‐thirty years after Hiroshima. Physics Today 1 July 1975; 28 (7): 23–29. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3069051
Download citation file:
PERSONAL SUBSCRIPTION
Purchase an annual subscription for $25. A subscription grants you access to all of Physics Today's current and backfile content.
Sign In
You could not be signed in. Please check your credentials and make sure you have an active account and try again.
Citing articles via
The lessons learned from ephemeral nuclei
Witold Nazarewicz; Lee G. Sobotka
FYI science policy briefs
Lindsay McKenzie; Jacob Taylor