by Thomas Hager
Teller had said that fallout was no more dangerous to human health than being one ounce overweight. But who could say, Pauling asked, what the health effects of being one ounce overweight were? Teller's point, Pauling said, was "ludicrous." AEC commissioner Bill Libby had said that there was no evidence that people in Denver had higher cancer rates than anyone else despite the increased cosmic radiation due to the altitude. But that was ridiculous, Pauling countered, because medical science is not precise enough to detect the small predicted increase in cancer rates. Libby had said that "There is no single provable case of any person being injured or seriously affected by any of the slightly extra radiation created in the United States by these tests." That might be accurate in a sense, Pauling wrote, because you can't make a firm cause-and-effect connection between fallout and any individual case of cancer or birth defect. But it is misleading because it implies no danger, when in fact every scientist, Libby included, agreed that fallout would lead to at least a slight increase in genetic defects and other health dangers to the entire population.
The final pages of the book, harkening back to the rhetoric of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, presented Pauling's call for a new world order. "Does the Commandment 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' mean nothing to us? Are we to interpret it as meaning 'Thou shalt not kill except on a grand scale,' or 'Thou shalt not kill except when the national leaders say to do so'?" Immorality was loose in the world, Pauling said, a lust for power and profit and war, and only a return to good old values would save humankind. "May our great Nation, the United States of America, be the leader in bringing morality into its proper place of prime importance in the conduct of world affairs," Pauling wrote. But even this was not enough by itself. Say the United States became righteous overnight. The rest of the world might not. How then do we achieve peace? "I propose that the great world problems be solved in the way that other problems are solved," Pauling wrote, "by working hard to find their solution—by carrying on research for peace." He once again advised setting up a secretary for peace in the U.S. cabinet, with a budget equal to 10 percent of the military's, the funds used for "a great international research program involving thousands of scientists, economists, geographers, and other experts working steadily year after year in the search for possible solutions to world problems, ways to prevent war and to preserve peace." Every nation should have its own peace office, which could work together through a World Peace Research Organization overseen by the United Nations to clear the way for international agreements like the test ban and then conduct research to end all wars between nations. Newer, bigger weapons could never bring us peace, Pauling wrote. Only international law could do that.
- - -
As Pauling was writing his book, fallout from the previous six months of heavy bomb tests began to descend around the world, increasing public fears as well as levels of radioactivity. The news reports of rising strontium 90 levels helped bring public opinion again to Pauling's side. Dozens of local protest groups had now merged into a new national organization, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, better known as SANE. Antibomb protests were flowering across Europe and in Japan as well, exerting new pressure on national governments to do something about fallout.
His manuscript complete, Pauling began thinking of new ways to halt the tests. His petitions and speeches had now made him an international heavyweight in the antitesting movement, and as his web of correspondents grew, so did the number of schemes he juggled. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the Hungarian-American discoverer of vitamin C and a scientist with interests almost as far ranging as Pauling's, had written Pauling with the idea of convening representatives from the premier science academies in the United States, the Ukraine, and the USSR in a sort of scientific summit meeting to discuss ways to modernize their nations' "antiquated" economic and political systems as a first step toward peace. Pauling was enthusiastic about the idea and quickly expanded it into a proposed "World Scientific Parliament" in which representatives from many nations would gather to "study the question of how the political structure of the world should be adjusted to the progress of science."
In March, as he read of plans to arm U.S. submarines with nuclear weapons, Szent-Gyorgyi became more impassioned about the need for the parliament, writing Pauling, "There will be no guarantee that the commanders of these subs belong to some very high ethical group. What we can be sure of is that they will be laying on the bottom of the sea, bored to death and drunk all the time. The fate of the world will thus be in the hands of a few score of drunken people, any of whom may want to cheer himself with fireworks." Pauling and Szent-Gyorgyi forwarded their idea for a parliament to the NAS.
Pauling had been in contact as well with Bertrand Russell and the loose international network of concerned scientists who had coalesced around him to fight the bomb. As a follow-up to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, these activists had arranged in the summer of 1957 the world's first independent conference of scientists from East and West designed to discuss concerns about nuclear weapons without the hindrance of nationalist concerns. The first meeting—called "Pugwash," after the Canadian estate of wealthy industrialist Cyrus Eaton, where it was held—turned out to be so valuable that Russell thought it should be expanded into a series. Pauling, as one of the original signers of the manifesto, had been expected to be among the twenty or so delegates to the first Pugwash meeting but had been unable to attend because of a European trip. In 1958, however, he met with Russell and a number of others to make arrangements for the next Pugwash meeting in Vienna.
And he continued his public appearances. He debated Bill Libby on Edward R. Murrow's See It Now television program and made himself available to a number of radio interviewers.
In March 1958 the Soviets dropped a political bombshell by calling for an immediate halt to all nuclear testing. It was a masterstroke of timing, coming just as the Soviets had finished their own long and very dirty test series and before the Americans were to start one, and just as world concern about fallout (much of it from Soviet tests) was reaching another peak. The timing, however, was less important to Pauling than the fact that a serious test-ban proposal had been forwarded.
He and the Pugwash group gave the antitesting process a push. On April 4, three days after the Soviet initiative, Pauling, Russell, Clarence Pickett, Norman Thomas, and a miscellany of others—including sixteen Marshall Islanders—filed suit in federal district court to enjoin the AEC from conducting the planned series of bomb tests. In a unique legal move, Pauling and the others argued that Congress had never given the government authority to threaten "the right to life and the right to raise normal children" by releasing fallout radiation into the atmosphere. Similar legal efforts, Pauling announced at a press conference, were being mounted in the Soviet Union and Great Britain.
Taking on an agency of the federal government in court was a quixotic maneuver, designed primarily for publicity, but it pleased Pauling. If the government was going mad, why not use the courts to provide therapy? He put his favorite lawyer, Abraham Lincoln Wirin, on the case, but Wirin told him that it would likely drag through the courts for years.
Antitest work was now taking up almost all of Pauling's time, but it was time spent in a good cause, one to which he could give every fiber of his being. Even the negative press he got seemed somehow unimportant. When Time magazine ran photos of Pauling and other antibomb activists with the caption "Defenders of the unborn ... or dupes of the enemies of liberty?" he could even manage a wry smile. There was new momentum building against the tests; perhaps the time had come when the old attacks, the Red-baiting and innuendo, would no longer work.
- - -
In early April 1958, while combing through the most recent fallout literature, Pauling came across some amazing information. In a speech to the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences, The AEC’s Bill Libby himself had identified a previously unreported source of radioactive contamination in fallout: a long-lived isotope called carbon 14. This was a su
bstance Libby knew well; his professional career had taken off years earlier when he discovered that the decay of naturally occurring carbon 14 could be used to accurately date artifacts.
But Pauling was more interested in the new information that a great deal of this substance was being spewed into the air—about 160 pounds of it with each good-sized nuclear blast. Carbon was the backbone of almost all biomolecules. Pauling knew that the body would treat carbon 14 like regular carbon, incorporating it into tissues in whatever proportion it existed in nature. Carbon 14 also had a very long half-life, somewhere in excess of 5,000 years, making it a threat far into the future. Pauling quickly calculated that bomb tests to date had increased the total carbon 14 on earth by somewhere around 10 percent. If it were incorporated into human bodies at the same rate, its radioactive decay would dramatically increase the mutation rate. No "clean bomb" would eliminate it as a problem, because carbon 14 was produced not by fission but by the reaction of neutrons with nitrogen in the air. And no one had yet pointed out the danger. Pauling hastily calculated the long-term results.
On April 28, Pauling called a press conference at a meeting of the NAS in Washington, D.C., to announce his discovery of "a new threat in atomic fallout." Pauling told reporters that the carbon 14 produced by bomb tests to date would create 5 million defective children over the next three hundred years, with millions of additional cases of cancer. The next day, Pauling's "new threat" was on the front pages of papers across the nation.
Libby was outraged. He immediately responded that Pauling's estimates were far off the mark, that most carbon 14 ended up in the oceans, and that total carbon 14 exposure for humans had been raised less than 1 percent by testing so far—which would lead only to "a very minute effect," he told reporters. Two days later, a group of Columbia University geologists wrote the New York Times that Pauling had confused his estimates by using figures based on total carbon 14 in the earth instead of in the atmosphere alone; their calculations showed that Pauling had overestimated the amount of carbon 14 by a factor of fifty. The actual threat from carbon 14, they wrote, was equivalent to the increased radiation risk represented by going up a few feet in height. They ended with: "Exaggerated statements by respected scientists only add to the public's confusion and do not contribute to the solution of the problem."
Pauling realized that he had made a mistake in his calculations and adjusted his estimate of damage downward by a factor of five— while still insisting that carbon 14 was a long-term threat to unborn children.
His original estimate had been off, but his revised number was on target. Six months later, the AEC quietly released a report in which the commission's own estimates of the long-term genetic damage caused by fallout of carbon 14 closely matched Pauling's revised figures.
But damage had been done to Pauling's reputation. He had been caught making exaggerated claims, a mistake that would be remembered by his critics far longer than the fact that he was essentially right about carbon 14.
- - -
On May 11, 1958, Pauling appeared on Meet the Press, a nationally televised public affairs show, in order, he thought, to explain his views on fallout. He seemed unaware of the fact that the show's host, Lawrence Spivak, had built his show's ratings by routinely giving his guests a tough grilling.
When the show started, the four-reporter panel immediately asked Pauling about his motivations in opposing the bomb tests. When Pauling tried to explain the difference between his approach to data and Libby's, he was interrupted by a reporter from the Hearst newspapers. Why shouldn't Americans believe Libby and Teller, he asked, scientists "who have not been tainted . . . with a rather prolonged association with Communist fronts and causes, as you appear to have been?" When Pauling tried to answer that the majority of scientists agreed with his views on fallout, the reporter cut him off with more Communist-front questions. The others joined in: Wasn't it odd how he came up with the carbon-14 data just in time to impugn the clean-bomb tests? Hadn't he supported the Rosenbergs? Pauling got into a mini-debate with Spivak over the fine points of the Rosenberg case. Then the questions turned to how he obtained money for his petitions. When Pauling said that he raised it himself, he was asked, "Then how does it happen that the same day the Communist press all over the world blazoned this thing?" "The newspaper services—" Pauling answered. "I am afraid you know more about that than I do."
His half hour was over, and he had been unable to say anything substantive about fallout. Pauling stalked out of the studio with Ava Helen. It was not a public affairs show. This was an inquisition. They were both outraged.
Resignation
So was Lee DuBridge. The spectacle of his chemistry head defending convicted spies on national television made it more difficult than ever for DuBridge to continue defending Pauling.
DuBridge had watched Pauling change after the Nobel Prize, becoming, to his mind, less responsible and more outspoken, lavishing time and energy on fighting bomb tests instead of performing his Caltech duties. He had seen Pauling make outrageous statements, push politically unpopular positions, visit Russia, fight government agencies on which Caltech depended for research support, and alienate his board of trustees.
The relationship between the two men had grown increasingly chilly as Pauling's political commitments deepened, although not because DuBridge disagreed with Pauling's stands. Both he and Caltech physics head Robert Bacher had been vocal opponents of nuclear testing, as had a number of other Caltech professors. "I think that there was some—the word would be somewhere between resentment and discomfort—that Linus didn't make an effort to generate a consensus of the other faculty members who had, in their own quiet way, been involved in advising the government about peace issues," said Pauling's colleague Norman Davidson. Pauling had ebulliently gone off on his own and forgotten to acknowledge the good work of the rest of the Caltech family.
DuBridge disagreed not with his stand, but with his tactics. Pauling hardly ever seemed to be around to perform the routine duties expected of a chairman: the in-house stuff, the polite socializing, and the cultivation of prospective donors. Nor was his research going well. His old triumphs with the chemical bond were fraying around the edges as more chemists tilted toward the molecular-orbital theory—which Pauling continued to ignore completely—and much of his current scientific work, such as the attempt to find the molecular roots of mental disease, refused to yield valuable results. There was grumbling among his faculty about space allocation and research priorities. Pauling never seemed to be around to hear it.
Instead, he was globe-trotting, getting himself in the headlines.
The count of Caltech trustees who resigned because of their frustration over Pauling was now up to three, including John McCone. The Republican Party bigwig abandoned the board after an early-morning blowup occasioned by his opening his newspaper and reading yet another column about Pauling's Communist-front peace activities. He called DuBridge to complain. It was 6:30 a.m., and the phone woke DuBridge out of a deep sleep. McCone harangued him about his errant chemist, then hung up and called other board members. Some of the more moderate trustees were so tired of McCone and his complaints that they stopped speaking to him. He finally quit the board.
Now, in 1958, however, DuBridge heard that McCone was slated to succeed Lewis Strauss as the head of the AEC. DuBridge and his physics head, Bob Bacher, also were both heavily involved in the commission's business. Pauling’s continued sparring with the AEC was a sore point.
In early June, Pauling was asked into DuBridge's office. There was no point in any small talk. DuBridge went back over his concerns, telling Pauling, "Just because you know science doesn't mean that you should pose as an authority on international affairs." Pauling reiterated his right to speak on issues he believed were important. They agreed that Pauling was causing the institute a good deal of trouble. DuBridge asked Pauling again if he would moderate his activities. Pauling refused. But DuBridge needed to give his trustees a sign that Pauling was still so
mewhat under control. Noting that Pauling had offered to resign as department head a year before, DuBridge said, "Now I think I'll take you up on it." Pauling got up and walked out.
He had chaired the chemistry division for more than two decades. There was no doubt that it would be something of a relief to be freed from administrative headaches. It was true that he had raised the idea himself a year earlier. Quitting would mean that he could devote more time pursuing world peace.
On June 10, he wrote DuBridge, "I feel that, after having served as Chairman . . . for 21 years, I should like to turn this job over to someone else. . . . Let me take this opportunity to express again to you and the Board of Trustees my deep feeling of appreciation of the privilege that I have had in the past and continue to have to carry on scientific work in the California Institute of Technology. ... I am happy to have been a member of the staff for 36 years, and I expect to be happy in continuing for another decade."
Later, in an interview, he remembered the incident more bluntly. "I was asked to resign as Chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and Director of the Gates and Crellin Laboratories of Chemistry," Pauling said, "and I did resign."
CHAPTER 20
The Subcommittee
No More War!
Pauling was very quiet about his resignation. He told none of his colleagues about DuBridge's pressure. To everyone at Caltech he said the same thing: He had simply decided to cut back on his administrative duties in order to devote more time to research and politics. He did not want it made public that, essentially, he had been forced out.