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Introduction to the 2005 Awards Brochure
by Claus Biegert
»Brighter than a thousand suns«, cheered the makers of the first atomic bomb in the morning grey of 16 July 1945. The 'Trinity' blast was so bright that Georgia Green, a blind student on her way to school in Albuquerque, asked her driver, »What was that?« Today, some sixty years later, despite the lessons gleaned from a host of painful tragedies, nuclear arsenals boast fan clubs as fanatical as ever. What's wrong? What spell of black magic has so successfully blinded us and poisoned our knowledge of right and wrong for the past six decades? Massive question. One that needs a light look back…
Switzerland, 1905. After performing his official clerk duties, Albert Einstein stole time from his work at the patent office in Bern to piece together what is today called the 'Special Theory of Relativity,' his amazing intuitive leap: E = mc². In this equation 'E' represents energy, 'm' represents mass, and 'c' – the initial letter of the Latin word celeritas – stands for the speed of light. It's this final ingredient that creates our predicament: during the time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second, light, in a vacuum, travels exactly one meter; 'c²' then equals the very large number of 89,875,517,873,681,764 – thus a very small mass can be transformed into an enormous amount of energy. In a nuclear reactor the chain reaction is severely throttled; when a nuclear bomb detonates, the chain reaction is instantaneous. Einstein had no inkling of nuclear fission at the time he authored his famous formula. Not until 1919 when Ernest Rutherford achieved the first artificial transmutation of matter did Einstein remark: »It is likely that out of this, vast sources of energy will be found«.
Over the next few years breakthrough after breakthrough in the realm of nuclear physics – Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, Lise Meitner, Otto Robert Frisch, Niels Bohr, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi were just a few of the atomic pioneers – paralleled developments of quite another sort taking place in Germany. On 2 August 1939, Albert Einstein wrote in a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt: 'In the course of the last four months, it has been made probable – through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America – that it may become possible to set up nuclear chain reactions in a large mass of uranium... And this new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs... A single bomb of this type, carried by boat or exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.' He urged Roosevelt to begin a nuclear program without delay. In response, the President did appoint a 'Uranium Committee,' but appropriated only $6,000 to buy graphite and uranium for experiments.
A large-scale U.S. atomic project did not begin until 6 December 1941, one day before the bombing of Pearl Harbor; it evolved into the 'Manhattan Project,' and was headquartered in Los Alamos on the eastern flank of The Valles Caldera (Caldera is the Spanish word for cauldron), one of the world's largest dormant volcanoes. For the Pueblo Indians native to the area, the site was always, »the place of fire«. The first successful detonation of a nuclear warhead – the 'Trinity Test' – took place on Apache land in the White Sands desert near Alamogordo on 16 July 1945. It was the Monday that changed the world. A few weeks later 'Little Man' was dropped on Hiroshima, and 'Fat Boy' on Nagasaki. »The one great mistake in my life,« Einstein later lamented, »was when I signed the letter to
President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made.«
Too late, the stopper had been pulled from the nuclear genie's bottle. Another atomic bomb test, this one in Kazakhstan. Those Soviet scientists who would have been shot if the bomb had failed became Heroes of Socialist Labor; those who would have been imprisoned were awarded a less prestigious honor, the Order of Lenin. The beginning of the nuclear arms race...
With 'the peaceful use of the atom,' gilded on its calling card, nuclear physics was introduced into polite society as a panacea for our energy ills. By 1985, dad would be driving a nuclear hovercraft. In retrospect one must wonder whether all the atmospheric atomic warhead testing hadn't somehow mutated the human brain. But not everyone's: many of the Manhattan Project physicists left Los Alamos to retreat to the Canadian fishing village of Pugwash to regroup and work towards defusing our nuclear nightmare. Albert Einstein and Albert Schweitzer were two of the Pugwash group's ideological godfathers.
On 4 November 1954 Albert Schweitzer received the Nobel Prize in Oslo. He used his acceptance speech to warn of the growing nuclear danger. Einstein asked him to make use of his international celebrity and call for an end to atmospheric nuclear testing. Einstein died in 1955, but his urgings fuelled Schweitzer's anti-nuclear energies for the rest of his life. On 23 April 1957, Radio Oslo aired Schweitzer's Declaration of Conscience, a broadcast calling for total nuclear disarmament. More than 140 radio stations around the world transmitted Schweitzer's plea, though many broadcasters – in the West as well as the East – were forbidden to do so from 'higher up.' »In an atomic war,« Schweitzer implored, »there will be no victors, only losers.«
Albert Schweitzer prepared three other appeals. The manuscripts were read by
Gunnar Jahn, president of the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee, on broadcasts aired by Radio Oslo on the 28th, 29th and 30th of April 1958. Reaction was mixed. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung, treating Schweitzer as a man suffering from senility, headlined its commentary: 'Wayward Albert Schweitzer.' One excerpt: 'The respected name of Albert Schweitzer cannot hide from serious scrutiny the fact that his ideas are politically, philosophically, militarily and theologically worthless. His prescriptions for the West are grotesque...Schweitzer's analysis of America and the Soviet Union make it impossible to do anything but dismiss his advice.'
Such arrogance of tone was recently echoed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna… Last autumn, at a symposium in Linz, Austria entitled, 'The Lie of the Peaceful Use of Atomic Energy – Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Power Plants – Two Sides of the Same Coin' (organized by Award recipient Mathilde Halle), an open letter to Kofi Anann was drafted asking that the IAEA be stripped of its mandate to further the spread of nuclear technology. Over 150 international organizations, among them the Nuclear-Free Future Award, signed onto the letter. The IAEA staff answered by saying that 'to give up the promotion of nuclear technology is both a naïve and inherently inhuman suggestion.' They went on to propose that the signatory organizations should 'focus political lobbying on areas where more positive benefits for humanity and peace can be achieved.'
The Nuclear-Free Future Award arrives in Norway some sixty years after the detonation of the first nuclear bomb, fifty years after Einstein's death, and forty years after Albert Schweitzer's courageous appeal. We have gathered in Oslo to hear fresh voices from the South Pacific, Denmark, Austria, and the United States, the voices of our Award recipients, each an architect of a future nuclear-free – progressive, free-thinking people who continue the noble, anti-nuclear campaign of Albert Einstein and Albert Schweitzer. For the sake of the generations to come...
The image that graces the front cover of this year's brochure (placed at the top of this webpage) was originally created by the Munich graphic artist Pierre Mendell for a green energy campaign that we support, its motto: 'Nuclear power has no future. Blind are those who fail to see the alternatives.' Blind are also those who fail to see that the 'the peaceful use of the atom' fosters nuclear proliferation. May the recent news from North Korea and Iran strike the blind IAEA staffers dumb.
Oh yes, our massive question. So long as the world powers continue to divide the globe into factions of good and bad – those who are with us, and those who are against us – nuclear arsenals will speak louder than political diplomacy, however enlightened. Only by taking the spiritual leap 'beyond good and evil' (Rumi, Nietzsche), can the way be prepared towards a culture of peace and tolerance. It is but a short step from 'beyond good and evil' to nuclear abolition.
--English translation, Craig Reishus
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