Six Who Worked on A-Bomb Assail ‘Star Wars’ : Nuclear Arms Policy Called Illusionary

Six scientists who played key roles in the development of the atomic bomb Tuesday called on President Reagan and Congress to abandon the “grand illusions” that nuclear weapons can serve rational military or political purposes or that defenses can be developed to protect the population from nuclear attack.

The appeal was issued on the 40th anniversary of the world’s first nuclear explosion, in which a test device released a blast equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT in the New Mexico desert. Three weeks after the secret test, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

At a news conference and in a Capitol Hill briefing commemorating the anniversary, the scientists--who were present when the pre-dawn explosion was set off in 1945--contended that deployment of the Reagan Administration’s so-called “Star Wars” defensive weapons would only add another chapter to the U.S.-Soviet arms race, rather than producing more security.

‘Wishful Thinking’

“The idea that ‘Star Wars’ will be a catalyst for arms reductions is at best wishful thinking,” said Hans Bethe, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who 40 years ago headed the theoretical physics division at the Los Alamos Laboratory, where the first nuclear weapons were designed.

In pressing its controversial “Star Wars” initiative, the Administration has contended that defensive technology on the horizon could shift strategic planning to defense, generating new incentives for arms control.

But the scientists, recounting the artificial sunrise created by the first nuclear explosion, took issue with the philosophical underpinning of “Star Wars” research.

In their appeal, the veterans of the Manhattan Project, which developed the bomb, called for “a policy for nuclear weapons that abandons two grand illusions of our times: that nuclear warfare can achieve rational military or political objectives, and that a defense of populations against nuclear attack is possible.”

‘Just Two Options’

“We ask you to recognize that nuclear weapons can serve but one, albeit vital, purpose--to deter their use by an adversary--and that as a nation we have just two options, mutual security or mutual insecurity,” the scientists said.

They quoted from a letter written by Los Alamos director J. Robert Oppenheimer 10 days after the first use of the bomb against Japan. In the letter, Oppenheimer pleaded for international control of the new weapon. He told Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson that there was no way to assure a U.S. atomic weapons monopoly, and declared: “It is our firm opinion that no military countermeasures will be found which will be adequately effective in preventing the delivery of atomic weapons.”

“The situation has not changed appreciably since then,” said Henry W. Kendall, chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which sponsored the Tuesday briefings.

Joining Bethe in calling for renewed efforts to reduce nuclear armaments were Robert Bacher, professor of physics emeritus at Caltech, who oversaw assembly of the plutonium core for the first test device, and four other project scientists, now professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--Philip Morrison, Cyril Smith, Victor Weisskopf and Kenneth Bainbridge.

Warning on ‘Star Wars’

In a special report issued Tuesday by the Union of Concerned Scientists, Morrison warned that the deployment of the weapons envisioned by “Star Wars,” formally known as the Space Defense Initiative, “will provoke an end to the long regime of peaceable toleration of satellites by the states whose territories they overfly, long before the SDI goals are within reach.”

Predicting that new space-based defensive weapons would bring a race between new generations of measures and countermeasures, Morrison said: “If ever there was a system whose realizable technical accomplishments, not its fancied goals, would in fact lower American security--and Soviet security with it--it is the SDI.”