The Tufts Daily
6
Weekender
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Conscience and Science in the Nuclear Age: The Legacies of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Andrei Sakharov J. Robert Oppenheimer is credited with being a founding father of the American school of theoretical physics. When World War II began, Oppenheimer became involved in the efforts to develop an atomic bom. In June 1942, General Leslie Groves appointed Oppenheimer as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project. He brought the best minds in physics to work on the problem of creating an atomic bomb. He is often referred to as the “father” of the atomic bomb. The joint work of the scientists at Los Alamos resulted in the first nuclear explosion at Alamagordo on July 16, 1945, which Oppenheimer named “Trinity.” After the war, Oppenheimer was appointed Chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), serving from 1947 to 1952. It was in this role that he voiced strong opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb.
Andrei Sakharov was a Soviet physicist who became, in the words of the Nobel Peace Committee, a spokesman for the conscience of mankind. He was fascinated by fundamental physics and cosmology, but first he spent two decades designing nuclear weapons. He came to be regarded as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, contributing perhaps more than anyone else to the military might of the USSR. But gradually Sakharov became one of the regime’s most courageous critics, a defender of human rights and democracy. He could not be silenced, and helped bring down one of history’s most powerful dictatorships.
with
Martin J. Sherwin and Joshua Rubenstein Recipients of the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award
Martin J. Sherwin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian. His scholarship mostly concerns the history of the development of atomic energy and nuclear proliferation. He was the long-time Walter S. Dickson professor of English and American history at Tufts University until his retirement in May 2007. He is now a professor emeritus of Tufts and a University Professor at George Mason University. He has received numerous awards and grants. He and co-author Kai Bird shared the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography in 2006, for their book on Robert Oppenheimer’s life, titled American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Sherwin worked on the book for two decades before collaborating on the writing with Bird. Sherwin also wrote A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and its Legacies, which won the Stuart L. Bernath Prize and the American History Book Prize. Sherwin serves on the board of The Nation magazine, to which he is a regular contributor.
Joshua Rubenstein has been professionally involved with human rights and international affairs for 30 years as an activist, scholar and journalist with particular expertise in Soviet affairs. A long-time Associate of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, he has made many research trips to Moscow and other Russian cities. He has lectured and written widely on the Soviet human rights movement, including a series of lectures in Russian at the Mendeleev Institute in Moscow in the fall of 1990 and in the spring of 1991. Since 1975, Mr. Rubenstein has been the Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International USA, overseeing Amnesty’s work in New England, New York and New Jersey. He is author of Soviet Dissidents, Their Struggle for Human Rights (1980) and Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: the Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which was awarded the National Jewish Book Award in 2001-2002. He is the co-editor of The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov.
TONIGHT, THURSDAY, APRIL 14 CABOT AUDITORIUM, 8:00pm This is the first event of a new Tufts Student Pugwash chapter -- the purpose of Pugwash is to promote social responsibility in science and technology Part of the 2010-11 EPIIC theme on “Our Nuclear Age: Peril and Promise”
For more information: www.tuftsgloballeadership.org or x73314