Stretching the Coalition

At the spring 1952 meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington, D.C., Jerrold Zacharias and California Institute of Technology physicist Charles Lauritsen convinced Merle Tuve to assemble a small group of his colleagues at the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) to examine the question, “how can mankind live with the atom and with similar destructive weapons, in the long run.” ¹ It is a measure of the anxieties associated with the Korean War and the concurrent build-up of American military forces that Tuve, despite his fierce conviction about the need to isolate research from governmental requirements, jumped at the chance. The DTM group’s conclusions were similar to those of the still unpublished Project East River study. That is, the participants challenged the efficacy (given the prospect of a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union) of a national security policy that emphasized strategic striking forces over other approaches. “The only real long-range protection, or partial protection,” wrote the Tuve-led group, “lies in decentralization and dispersion [of American population and industry].” With regard to weapons, the group concluded, “it is erroneous to think that ultimate destruction can be minimized by increasing the destructiveness of everything in sight, which seems to be a military and public passion.” ²