Maker of Patterns

by Freeman Dyson

  Reuther is now deeply concerned about disarmament, understands that disarmament is essential, and is trying to get the government to make plans so that disarmament can be done without throwing half his men out of work. Reuther is convinced that this can be done if only the government is not afraid to face up to the size of the problem. We agreed on certain measures of collaboration so that his union can act as a channel for some of our information. Altogether very encouraging.

  JULY 30, 1962, WASHINGTON

  Yesterday was cool, and I decided to make the most of it. I walked across the Potomac to the Arlington Cemetery and walked around there for some hours in the sunshine. The main thing to see is the old house of General Lee, a lovely place built in the style of Mount Vernon, high on a hill overlooking the city of Washington. The house is kept as a museum, in a sentimental nineteenth-century style, with the children’s toys laid out on the floor of the playroom. I find it more appealing than the palatial eighteenth-century style of Mount Vernon. The cemetery is tastefully laid out on the brow of the hill, with many trees to give shade and privacy. The most pleasant thing about the graves is the occasional Samuel Birnbaum or Ezekiel Rosenblum with his Star of David breaking the line of crosses.

  In the evening I went to a bookshop to find a collected edition of Wordsworth. I wanted a motto for a study which I am writing on the changes which are likely to occur in the future in the fields of strategy and disarmament policy. I found what I was looking for:

  Drop, like the tower sublime

  Of yesterday, which royally did wear

  His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain

  Some casual shout that broke the silent air,

  Or the unimaginable touch of Time.

  —WORDSWORTH, Sonnet on Mutability

  This study which I am writing is bound to be only a sketch, since I am here such a short time. I might later expand it into something more substantial, and then I would write it in such a way that it might be read by the general public. A friend of mine called Amitai Etzioni has recently written a book of this kind, The Hard Way to Peace [1962]. He is a young professor at Columbia. I find his book the best thing that has yet been written on this subject. Though he makes technical mistakes, he has a largeness of view, and a willingness to face up to all the difficulties, which are very rare. I read in the newspaper that Etzioni had been in Geneva and gave a lecture to the American and Russian delegations at the disarmament negotiations. I hope they listened to him. The first time I ever heard of Etzioni was when a visiting disarmament expert from Moscow told me I ought to read his book. It seems to have made more impression in Russia than here.

  For me, the first page of Etzioni’s book already was sufficient evidence of his quality. He dedicates it to his four-year-old son Ethan:

  I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour

  And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,

  And under the arches of the bridge, and scream

  In the elms above the flooded stream;

  Imagining in excited reverie

  That the future years had come,

  Dancing to a frenzied drum,

  Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

  This is Yeats, and I must say it is better than Wordsworth.

  In August 1962 I wrote a fifty-three-page report; “ Implications of New Weapons Systems for Strategic Policy and Disarmament,” classified secret, as my contribution to the work of the Disarmament Agency, with a covering letter to my boss Frank Long. I used the last line of the Wordsworth sonnet as epigraph to the report. In my letter to Long, I listed four new weapons systems that were then at various stages of development: (1) gigaton mines (enormous hydrogen bombs to be exploded offshore in ships or submarines), (2) Soviet antimissile systems, (3) fission-free nuclear weapons (pure fusion weapons, then studied intensively in USA and USSR, fortunately proving to be unfeasible), and (4) supersonic low-altitude missiles (the Pluto missile, then under active development at Livermore). I concluded by saying, “In each of these four areas there is need for an intensive technical study of the facts and for an imaginative grasping of the political opportunities which the new technical developments may offer. The political opportunities will mostly be lost if they are not foreseen and prepared for.”

  It is unlikely that my report had any effect on the work of the Disarmament Agency. The agency was too busy with short-term problems to think about long-range strategy. We were deeply engaged in preparing for two kinds of negotiations, one concerning general disarmament at the United Nations, the other concerning a test ban with the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom. The test ban negotiations required constant and urgent attention. We all knew that the test ban was real while general disarmament was mostly propaganda. Every detail of the test ban negotiations had to be discussed with the U.S. senators who would finally vote on ratification of a treaty. We used to joke that the easy part of our job was negotiating with the Russians, the hard part was negotiating with the senators. We knew that the fate of the test ban would be decided in 1963, and it was our job to get the treaty signed and ratified. Twenty years later I published the book Weapons and Hope (1984) explaining to the public the long-range problems of war and peace that we did not have time to pursue at the Disarmament Agency.

  DECEMBER 20, 1962

  There was an executive committee meeting of our Federation of American Scientists. My year as chairman is now more than half over, and I have not been energetic. I will leave the organization much the same as I found it. My talent does not lie in the business of organizing meetings and committees. It was worthwhile to try it once, but it is not my métier. I am most effective when I am sitting quietly alone and writing. In future I will leave the position of chairman to others. The Washington meeting was amiable and disposed of a mountain of business. But I feel I am riding the federation rather than driving it. Our main problem is still to get more members, and this problem is still unsolved.

  • 17 •

  MARCHING FOR JUSTICE

  THE YEAR 1963 was full of public turmoil, triumph, and tragedy. It was the year when I was most heavily involved in public affairs. The letters in this chapter are mostly describing history as I saw it unfold in Washington. President Kennedy had opened the door for me by creating the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. During the short years of his presidency, ACDA was an independent branch of the government, intended to wage peace just as the Defense Department was intended to wage war. While Kennedy was empowering ACDA to wage peace, he was sending troops to Vietnam and involving the United States on the losing side of a civil war. Then Kennedy was assassinated, and to our surprise President Johnson became a stronger force both for good and for evil. Johnson was stronger for good when he pushed through Congress the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the laws that gave legal equality to black Americans. He was stronger for evil when he sent hundreds of thousands of young Americans to Vietnam to fight an unwinnable war.

  Nowhere mentioned in the letters is the birth of our fifth child Miriam in September. That event is missing in the letters because my sister Alice came over from England to help Imme, and I did not write letters while Alice was with us. On the day of the birth, there was a public meeting in Princeton to organize a citizens’ coalition for peace. As I was preparing to go to the meeting, Imme announced that she had to go to tbe hospital. Reluctantly I abandoned the meeting and drove with her to the hospital. While we were there, a thunderstorm raged outside with torrential rain. Flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder greeted Miriam when she arrived.

  Miriam did not disappoint us. She remained a rebel all her life. She disliked her name and changed it to Mia as soon as she had the legal right to do so. She trained as a nurse at Columbia University and led a rebellion of the nursing students. At that time the medical students had cadavers to dissect, but the nursing students had none. Mia condemned the discrimination as unjust and unhealthy. Nurses need to know at least as much about human anatomy as doctors.
Mia’s rebellion succeeded, and the nursing students got their cadavers. Some years later she was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. She continues to work as a nurse as well as a pastor, taking care with equal skill of bodies and souls.

  JANUARY 7, 1963

  On New Year’s Day we had a cozy tea party with homemade cake and candlelight. Helen Dukas came and brought along Margot Einstein, the stepdaughter of the great man. Margot was thin and frail, an old lady dominated by the forceful Helen. The four children were unusually sweet, and Margot talked more than I have ever heard her talk. She is usually shy, but this time she opened her heart and evidently enjoyed the party as much as we did.

  JANUARY 16, 1963, NEW YORK

  I am in New York for two days doing my job as FAS chairman. Yesterday we had three hours of the executive committee, followed by four hours of the council. Our main business was to plan a new series of educational breakfasts for congressmen and senators in Washington, to impress on them the fact that not agreeing with the Russians on some kind of disarmament may be more risky than agreeing. We authorized the Washington office to spend a thousand dollars on breakfasts. FAS membership has gone up from 2,200 to 2,450, and the council was enthusiastic about the chances of doing something effective in Washington. I have not been an outstanding chairman, but my time in office has gone by without FAS falling apart. It seems to be at least as vigorous now as it was a year ago. I had a letter from the Disarmament Agency asking me to come to Washington again for two months next summer. I said yes. I am glad that they invited me instead of waiting for me to invite myself.

  We had a surprise telephone call from James Lighthill, just arrived in New York on his way to meetings. I asked him to come down to Princeton. He talked a great deal about the Nassau meeting [in the Bahamas] where he had taken part as scientific advisor to [Prime Minister Harold] Macmillan [during his three-day meeting with President Kennedy to discuss the British purchase of Polaris missiles from the United States]. He said he advised Macmillan to reject the American offer, but Macmillan accepted it. It was interesting to me to find that Lighthill has an unshakeable belief in the future of England as a great power. He believes that it really does some good for England to build bombs and rockets and all the rest of it. He talks about these things just like de Gaulle. I suppose he has to believe in all this in order to do his job well at Farnborough. All my arguments were unable to shake his faith. James enjoyed our household so much that he stayed overnight and slept in my pajamas.

  James Lighthill was one of my closest friends since we arrived together at Winchester College at the age of twelve. We were both in love with mathematics and worked together at Winchester through the three fat volumes of Jordan’s Cours d’Analyse which James discovered in the school library. In 1943, when I went to work at RAF Bomber Command, James went to work at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. In 1945 I was best man at his wedding. He later became a world-class expert in fluid dynamics and a high-level advisor to the British government. His biggest contribution to science was the understanding of jet noise. He discovered the famous eighth-power law, which says that jet noise increases with the eighth power of the jet velocity. He returned to Farnborough as director of RAE, a huge organization responsible for design and development of airplanes, at the age of thirty-five. He was one of the chief promoters of the Concorde supersonic airliner. I argued with him about the Concorde. I said that the Concorde was too small and too expensive to compete in a commercial market with ordinary subsonic airliners. I said that ordinary people like us would never be able to afford to fly in Concorde. James replied, “Ah, but people who matter will be able to afford it.” People like us do not matter. I knew then that I would never win the argument.

  FEBRUARY 5, 1963,

  MANNED SPACECRAFT CENTER, HOUSTON

  No, I did not volunteer to be an astronaut. I came here for three days for a meeting of the Astronomical Advisory Committee to the Space Agency. Mars is very bright now in the evening sky. If all goes well, my friend Martin Schwarzschild will launch his balloon telescope on Friday night and take the first photographs of Mars from eighty thousand feet altitude, where the unevenness of the air no longer disturbs the optical definition. If he has good luck, he will see a clearer picture of Mars than anybody has seen before.

  The meetings had two main items of business, the Orbiting Astronomical Observatories (OAO) and the problem of the scientific training of astronauts. The OAO will be the first substantial pieces of scientific equipment to be put into space. The first OAO will fly about the beginning of 1965. We are pleased with the way this program is coming along. The astronauts are another story. This Manned Spacecraft Center has been from the beginning the most unscientific of the space establishments. There are no scientists here, and there is not even a good university within hundreds of miles. The emphasis is entirely on the practical problems of getting people to the moon and back. Nobody cares much about what the people may do when they are there. Space flights are considered as sporting events pure and simple.

  I am quite sympathetic to the “sporting event” view of space flight. It is probably wise not to expect much in the way of serious science to come out of the manned flights for the next ten years. However we want to educate the people here, and the astronauts in particular, to be aware of the scientific jobs that they might be able to undertake. The astronauts are willing, but their time schedule makes it impossible for them to pick up more than a smattering of science. We are trying to change this. Yesterday we talked for two hours with Deke Slayton, the astronaut who was rejected for a flight last year because of some minor heart trouble. He is an intelligent and helpful person. But he was available to talk to us just because he is medically suspect. The others are too busy preparing for their flights.

  The U.S. space program has always consisted of two separate parts, the manned program and the unmanned program. The Manned Spacecraft Center at Houston is the control center for manned missions. Unmanned missions are controlled from Goddard Spacecraft Center in Maryland and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Our Astronomical Advisory Committee held meetings at all three places. President Kennedy gave an enormous boost to the manned program when he announced the Apollo program to land astronauts on the moon. For science and astronomy, unmanned missions are far more effective than manned missions. But for the politicians and for the general public, the manned missions are more exciting. The main concern of our committee was to keep the unmanned program alive while the big money was flowing to the manned program. Our efforts were in the end successful. When six brilliantly executed moon landings had used up the available money, and the Apollo program was abruptly terminated, the unmanned missions continued to explore the universe.

  Last Wednesday I went to Haverford College to talk about problems of disarmament. Haverford is one of the little Quaker colleges near Philadelphia. I was invited by the student peace council. I enjoyed the Haverford students especially because they reminded me of the students I knew at Cambridge in 1941–43. They were ostentatiously ill-dressed, uncombed, and unwashed. Rebellious against all generally accepted conventions, particularly against the prevalent materialistic standards and against the political establishment. This is the way students ought to be. One misses it completely among the pampered young people in Princeton.

  JUNE 8, 1963

  A week ago we had George’s tenth birthday party, postponed because he wanted to have it out of doors. There came fifteen boys, and they were real ruffians. The main entertainment was squirting water pistols at each other until they were all completely soaked and the garden inundated. They tormented Franklin Yang and shouted “Chinese Chinese” at him until he took refuge up a tree. I was so angry that I almost sent them all home without any supper. I regret to say that George did not come to Franklin’s defense. It seems that those of us who are not brutes are mostly cowards.

  JULY 9, 1963, WASHINGTON

  [On July 4] we walked out in front of the White House and watched the fire
works. After the official fireworks were over, there were large numbers of children, all negro, running around on the grass and letting off their own little fireworks which they had brought with them. Dorothy and Emily stood fascinated watching the children play. Three times in a few minutes, one of the negro children came up to Dorothy to give her a firework which she could hold in her hand. I was very much touched by this.

  The agency is in a hectic state preparing for the Moscow negotiations which are due to start in a few days. Our group of people went to see Kennedy today and will leave for Moscow on Thursday. I do not have any clear idea of how much freedom of negotiation they will have. Probably very little. I expect nothing very significant to come out of these negotiations, but I may be wrong.

  AUGUST 5, 1963,

  DISARMAMENT AGENCY, WASHINGTON

  I am in the middle of three separate campaigns: (1) the preparation of papers inside the government for the Senate debate on the Test Ban Treaty ratification, (2) a public campaign to bring two scientists from every one of the fifty states to Washington, where they will talk to their respective senators in defense of the treaty, and (3) a campaign going on inside and outside the government against the present policies in Vietnam. In addition to these various activities I try to get home for weekends.