Massachusetts College of Art and Design - Palette and Pen Yearbook (Boston, MA)

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THE NEW YORK TIMES. FRIDAY. DECEMBER 29. 1912 ‘We Must Tell the President’ 1968. Beginning the Sunday morning after Christmas, Dec. 26, and continu- ing until Dec. 31 — as we met — 1,000 bombing sorties were flown over North Vietnam. We know now that bombing has continued ever since; and now as we meet again in another Christmas season, it is being enormously in- tensified. Is our science to serve life, or death? This planet that is in our care — this environment that concerns us so seriously — can we talk of ways to foster and preserve it here while wan- tonly destroying it there? We must speak out, as Americans, as scientists, against this outrageous misuse of the fruits of science for death and destruction. We must tell the President where we stand. Let us insist on an imme- diate end to the bombing. Let us insist that the cease-fire, we were told he was virtually ready to sign last Oct. 26 be signed now. This statement was prepared for the American Association for the Advance- ment of Science, and signed by these members: Dr. George Wald, Nobel Laureate, Harvard University: Dr. Salvador Luria, Nobel Laureate. M.I.T.; Dr. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Nobel Lau- reate, Marine Biology Laboratory, Wood’s Hole; Dr. Everett Mendelsohn, vice president A.A.A.S.; Dr. John Edsalle, Professor of Biochemistry, Harvard; Dr. E. W. Pfeiffer, Professor of Zoology, University of Montana: Dr. Arthur Galston, Professor of Biol- ogy, Yale University: Dr. Arthur Westing, Director of the Herbicide Assessment Commission, A.A.A.S.; Dr. Richard Lewontin, Professor of Biol- ogy, University of Chicago. WASHINGTON — Can we scientists meet in Washington and ignore the fact that our national Administration is launching from this city the most massive air attacks in history? It is launching those attacks against con- centrated centers of civilian popula- tion, while blandly announcing lists of military targets that under these cir- cumstances insult the intelligence of every thinking person. North Vietnam hardly contains military targets; and a B-52 bombing pattern one and one- half miles long by one-half mile broad, dropped from an altitude of 30,000 feet, cannot pick out targets. Yet such bombings are now crisscrossing some of the most densely populated cities in the world, in an unprecedented orgy of killing and destruction that hor- rifies people everywhere — as Guer- nica, Coventry and Dresden once hor- rified them. And all in our name. As scientists we bear a special re- sponsibility. Explain as we will — that science is not technology: that most of us do not make proximity fuses, B-52 bomb sights and all the sophisticated super-weaponry of electronic battle- fields — we have also too often claimed that our science is the ultimate source of all such advance technology. Indeed in World War II, which we could re- gard with some justice as a war of defense, we were ready to help design the prototypes of much of the tech- nological arsenal being used now against one of the smallest and poor- est of nations — a nation that offers so little in the way of military targets. This arsenal is now destroying nature itself in Indochina, the land, the trees, the stock animals, depriving a poor people of their homes, fields, means of livelihood and very lives. Can we meet to talk of nature as our Government is destroying nature? As though that were not going on, directed from this very place? Just a year ago, as we met in Philadelphia — the city of brotherly love— our President ordered the re- sumption of mass bombing of North Vietnam, which had been halted in

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1873 1973