Maker of Patterns

by Freeman Dyson

  (1) The official work at the agency has become more directed and everybody is more dedicated, now that there is a treaty to fight for. Everybody understands that this fight will be decisive for us. If the treaty is defeated, then the Disarmament Agency will be dead. Kennedy will be impotent, and there is no chance that any negotiations can be carried on with the Russians on any subject at all. Whether or not we particularly like this treaty, we are all fighting hard for it. I myself had my little moment of glory while the negotiations were in progress in Moscow. There was a sticky point which held up the agreement for several days. Averell Harriman cabled back to Washington, “May we give way on this one?” Kennedy picked up his telephone and called William Foster, the head of this agency, and asked him what he thought about it. Foster said, “I must consult with my staff about this.” So Foster called Al Wadman and asked for his advice. Wadman said, “I don’t really know much about this, but maybe Dyson would know.” So Wadman came over to me and talked it over. I had some expert knowledge because of the time I have spent designing weapons at Livermore. I said to Wadman, “This is ridiculous. Of course they should give way.” So Wadman called back Foster, and Foster called back Kennedy, and the cable went back to Moscow, and the treaty was signed.

  Frank Long came back later from Moscow and gave us a complete blow-by-blow account of the negotiations. He said the bargaining was very hard on both sides, and they were not at all sure until the last day that they would be able to agree on a treaty. So it seems that my little contribution helped. This means the death blow for Project Orion. I am really sorry about this. But I had to admit in my own mind that no single project of that sort could be allowed to stand in the way of a treaty. I spent an evening with Ted Taylor here in Washington the day after the treaty was signed. He was very upset, having given five years of his life and energies to fighting for Orion. He took it bravely, even when I told him I was the Judas who had betrayed him to the enemy. He says he plans to wind up Orion in the next six months and then take a year in Europe to get away from it all.

  (2) The public hundred-scientist campaign is starting off well. We had great sport trying to dig up scientists from cultural deserts like Mississippi and Alabama. Unfortunately it is precisely the places like Mississippi and Alabama which have the most crucial senators. The gathering in Washington will be on August 16 so time is short. The FAS already gave a press conference at which I was on the platform with two others. About fifty reporters came to fire questions at us. It was surprisingly easy to answer the questions, and I think we did well. Unfortunately the newsmen who were there were all in favor of the treaty already, so we were preaching to the converted. The senators will not all be so friendly. This week I am supposed to appear at the Press Club in a public debate against Edward Teller. That will be more of a challenge.

  (3) We are involved with Vietnam for several reasons. Yesterday and today I spent interviewing a German doctor called Wulff from Freiburg, who has just come home from two years of doctoring in Vietnam. He had a wealth of first-hand information about misdeeds of Vietnamese and American troops. We plan to fight inside the government for a change in policy, and then if that fails we will do what we can to arouse the public by means of FAS and similar organizations. On August 28 will be the grand negro march on Washington. So it will be an exciting summer.

  AUGUST 19, 1963

  There is a great satisfaction in feeling the strongly expressed approval of mankind for what we are doing. While we work downstairs in the State Department building, there is a steady stream of ambassadors and other important people upstairs coming to sign the treaty. The number of countries who have signed is now sixty plus. At the same time, I do not feel that the distinction between peace-mongering and war-mongering is nearly as sharp and clear as most people suppose. We divide ourselves jocularly into peace-mongers and war-mongers. Roughly speaking, the peace-mongers are those who are willing to accept some military disadvantages in order to come to political settlements which may make the world more stable. The war-mongers consider that we have a better chance of reaching stable political settlements if we maintain the maximum military strength. Both sides are sincerely striving for peace, and even the disagreement about methods is not very sharp.

  The Test Ban Treaty is supported by most of the people who are usually classed as war-mongers. Among my friends only Edward Teller is opposing it strongly. I admired his courage last Wednesday when he came to the Disarmament Agency and argued for two hours with a roomful of people, not one of whom was disposed to agree with him. He gave a brilliant performance, which earned the respect of even those people who hate him bitterly. His strongest argument against the treaty is that it says we shall not use nuclear explosions even in self-defense in time of war. It is in fact true that that is what it says. However, Dean Rusk and other high-up people have said it says nothing about use of bombs in war. Rusk said explicitly that the United States will maintain freedom of action to use nuclear explosions in war whenever our vital interests require it. On this point, Teller made a most eloquent speech describing the German invasion of Belgium in 1914 and explaining how this was justified to him as a schoolboy in Hungary with the excuse that every country must be allowed freedom of action to break treaties if the supreme interests of the country were threatened. I support the treaty because I am in favor of a No First Use pledge for nuclear weapons anyway. But I must admit that for the average citizen who does not believe in No First Use, the argument of Teller ought to cause some anxiety. The treaty is at least ambiguous enough to create a strong political pressure towards No First Use.

  AUGUST 27, 1963

  Today was my great day. I made my speech before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on behalf of FAS, supporting the Test Ban Treaty. The speech seems to have been well received. Many people congratulated me afterwards. I had taken care not to show it to anybody beforehand so they would not try to alter it. When several people try to rewrite a speech it always ends up as a mess. This one was at least my own. After the speech the senators asked some questions, mostly about the Pugwash meeting I had been to in Cambridge last summer. Their questions were sensible and not designed to be harassing. I told them about the Pugwash meetings without feeling on the defensive. The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee is Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, and he is not stupid.

  Pugwash meetings are international meetings of scientists discussing political problems. They meet as private citizens and not as representatives of governments. The meeting at Cambridge (England) in August 1962 was a big one, with twenty people each from the United States, the USSR, and the UK, and twenty more from other countries. Nobody came from the People’s Republic of China. The main subject of discussion was the formulation of disarmament agreements that might be acceptable to the governments of the leading countries. For me, the formal sessions were less interesting than the informal encounters with other participants. The two most impressive people that I got to know were Joseph Rotblat, the secretary-general of Pugwash, and Vladimir Pavlichenko, the KGB official who came with the Soviet scientists to keep them in line. Rotblat was unique among the scientists at Los Alamos as the one who resigned and walked out in 1944 when it became clear that the German nuclear bomb project had failed. Pavlichenko was unique among the Russians as the one who had good communication with his own government and was a personal friend of Nikita Khrushchev.

  The hearings are much more comfortable than I had expected. They are held in a magnificent hall with marble columns and painted ceiling. The witness sits at a small table in the middle of the room, and the committee is arranged in a semicircle around him. Just before me came George Meany, the president of the American Federation of Labor, a huge man resembling Ernest Bevin in size and also in character. He announced his support for the treaty and then launched onto a ferocious diatribe against the Russians and all their works. Tomorrow the great negro march on Washington will be here. These are stirring days.

  AUGUST 28, 1963

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bsp; I would like to write to you about today’s events while they are fresh in my mind. I stopped work at eleven a.m. and walked from the State Department down to Constitution Avenue a few blocks away. The broad avenue was completely cleared of traffic and full of people. I walked to the end of the avenue where the march was beginning, then joined the people and walked with them to the other end where they arrived at the Lincoln Memorial. I found it profoundly moving to be marching with all these people. Just for once to be seeing history made instead of only reading and writing about it. The march was quiet. No music and no stamping of feet. Just people strolling down the avenue in their own time.

  Each group of people carried banners saying where they came from. Occasionally there would be some shouting and cheering when a group came by from one of the really tough places, Birmingham, Alabama, or Albany, Georgia, or Prince Edward County, Virginia. Most of these people from the Deep South had never been away from their homes before, and they had never had anybody to cheer for them. It must have been quite an experience for them to see so many friends all together. There was an interesting difference between the northern and the southern people. The northerners were mostly rather well-dressed family people, husbands and wives, many of them union members who were brought to Washington by their unions. The southerners were much younger, most of them hardly more than children, and they looked like the hope of the future with their bright faces and gay clothes. Of course, in the bad southern states a man with family responsibilities cannot afford to be put in jail, so it is necessarily the young who must carry on the fight. Some of these southern groups sang their freedom songs very beautifully while the northerners listened.

  The march along Constitution Avenue started at eleven and went on for three hours without stopping. They said 250,000 people came. I would guess they were about 80 percent northern negro, 10 percent northern white, 10 percent southern negro. The weather was kind, a temperature of eighty-two with cool breeze and sunny sky. All the people there were enjoying the outing. They had been told to leave their children at home, and that made it different from an ordinary holiday crowd. It was quite relaxed, but very serious in the underlying mood.

  From two till four they had the official speeches at the Lincoln Memorial. It was very effective to have the huge figure of Lincoln towering over the speakers. The speeches were in general magnificent. All the famous negro leaders spoke, except James Farmer, who sent a message in writing from a Louisiana jail. The finest of them was Martin Luther King, who talks like an Old Testament prophet. He held the whole 250,000 spellbound with his biblical oratory. I felt I would be ready to go to jail for him anytime.

  I think this whole affair has been enormously successful. All these 250,000 people behaved with perfect good temper and discipline all day long. And they have made it unmistakeably clear that if their demands are not promptly met, they will return one day in a very different temper. Seeing all this, I found it hard to keep the tears from running out of my eyes.

  SEPTEMBER 25, 1963

  In today’s newspaper comes the news that the treaty is ratified as expected. So that struggle now passes into history.

  NOVEMBER 14, 1963

  We had a surprise call the other day from my old friend Oscar Hahn. He telephoned to say he would come and see us in Princeton, so we invited him for lunch. He talked about his uncle Kurt who is now back in Germany at the Atlantic College, his latest educational venture. This is an international school close by, but not identical, with the first school which he founded at Salem in South Baden. Oscar said the original Salem school and the Gordonstoun school are both flourishing, but Kurt is not interested in anything once it is established and running smoothly. The new Atlantic College is only two years old and is still keeping him happy. Oscar invited me to go over and visit Salem. It is quite near to Zürich, being just across the frontier opposite to Lake Constance.

  NOVEMBER 28, 1963

  Shortly after the Kennedy assassination was announced, I happened to be at the post office sending off a Christmas parcel. In front of me in the line was a negro, and he started to talk with the clerk behind the counter. “Well,” he said, “there’s some people on this earth who’d shoot at Jesus Christ, if he ever came back here. The trouble is all this ideology and hatred that people are taught. In my family I don’t allow the kids to talk hate against anybody. I won’t have any of that sort of talk in my house.” After this little speech, the whole crowded post office stood silent in quiet admiration.

  You say that you felt disappointed. I suppose you mean that you had expected the United States to behave in a more civilized fashion. For me, the reaction to Kennedy’s killing was different. I do not feel disappointed. It is a great pity that Kennedy is dead. But to me the moral shock of his killing was much less than that of the killing of Medgar Evers, the negro who was killed in exactly the same way in Mississippi last summer. Evers was an even braver man than Kennedy and is probably harder to replace.

  I suppose I have expected that the next year or two in this country will be bloody and brutal. It has seemed impossible to imagine the country taking serious actions to deal with the negro problem, unless forced to it by a major outbreak of violence and bloodshed. I have expected that there would be violence and bloodshed, probably of a peculiarly uncivilized kind, before the end of next year. In Washington last summer I have heard one of Bobby Kennedy’s staff, who works on the civil rights cases, say the same thing in surprisingly unqualified language. In this situation the murder of Kennedy comes not as a disappointment but rather as a natural consequence of the general unrest. It seems that Lee Oswald was not himself concerned with the negro problem at all. Still he certainly had heard of the murder of Evers, and he had lived in this atmosphere of bitterness and violence which has always been particularly bad in Texas. So I consider it not pure accident that Kennedy should have been killed just now, in the middle of the racial crisis.

  What I hope and even believe is that the death of Kennedy may have caused a sufficiently strong revulsion against violence, so that a bloodbath of Negros can be avoided. I was especially hopeful after Johnson’s speech in Congress yesterday. Possibly the murder of a president can change the atmosphere enough, so that the negro demands can be accepted peacefully.

  DECEMBER 12, 1963

  I saw Oppenheimer the day after he was at the White House [to receive the Enrico Fermi Prize, an official reward for public service, and a tacit apology for the denial of his security clearance in 1954. The award had been planned before the assassination, to be given by Kennedy, and then approved a second time to be given by Johnson.] He was enthusiastic about Johnson. He said he had been invited for a private session with Johnson before the official presentation ceremony and that Johnson talked “exactly right” about the important things. He would not be more specific than this. I presume this means that Johnson showed he takes seriously the long-range problems of war and peace and not only the immediate issues. At the ceremony Oppenheimer had his wife Kitty and both his children present to witness his triumph. He made a very apt little speech which you probably have read. He said, “It is possible that you, Mr. President, required some charity and some courage in order to make the award.” Afterwards Oppenheimer saw Mrs. Kennedy and told her that originally the speech had said, “some charity, some humour, and some courage,” but that when Kennedy died, Kitty had insisted that the humour should be left out. Mrs. Kennedy then said, “Yes, you were right to put it in, and Kitty was right to take it out.” It seems this story gives an accurate picture of the difference between Kennedy and Johnson. But there is no doubt that Johnson is far better than most of us had expected.

  This Sunday I am flying to Dallas for a three-day meeting on astronomy and gravitation. The meeting is held at a new institute called the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies, intended to put Texas on the intellectual map. It is exceedingly bad luck that Dallas has now such an odious reputation. What made it especially bad luck was that Kennedy had prepared a speech singing th
e praises of the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies. This was the speech he would have delivered in Dallas if he had not been killed.

  DECEMBER 18, 1963

  The meeting was a grand affair. Nobody stayed home because it was in Dallas. The meetings were good because we had something to talk about. The subject was the new astronomical objects which have been discovered during the last year [later known as quasars]. Nine are now known, and more are being found every month. The nearest one is 1,600 million light-years away, and still it is so bright that they have several thousand photographs of it going all the way back to 1870. These things are totally different from what anybody had expected. They must be understood if we are to pretend to understand anything about the general plan and history of the universe. The observers swept us all into silence with the solidity and clarity of their observations. Afterwards the theoreticians and physicists mumbled pathetic fragments of ideas, not having anything coherent to say. I kept my mouth shut.

  I enjoyed a long evening talking with a young man called Yuval Ne’eman from Israel. He made his reputation two years ago with a brilliant theory of particles. He was then a student at Imperial College in Kensington. The remarkable thing about Ne’eman is that he is not really a physicist but a professional soldier. When he was still a boy, he fought in the War of Independence of 1948 and ended up as a colonel. He then quickly became deputy chief of intelligence on the Israeli General Staff. During the Suez campaign of 1956 he was flown to the British and French headquarters on Cyprus in a fruitless attempt to establish some coordination between the Israeli and British-French armies. Afterwards he was military attaché in London and bought two submarines for the Israeli navy. It was during the period when he was buying the submarines that he found time to study physics at Imperial College. I think it is an unparalleled achievement in modern times for a man who had been a professional soldier for ten years to make a major contribution to physics. I found his stories about the military world illuminating. He had been through the French Staff College, and in London he had got to know well most of the leading generals and admirals.