6,500 Scientists Reportedly Vow to Boycott ‘Star Wars’ Research

More than 6,500 scientists, including a majority of professors in the nation’s top 20 university physics departments, have declared themselves opposed to President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative and have pledged not to accept any “Star Wars” research funds, opponents of the program said Tuesday.

The scientists, including 15 Nobel laureates, have signed a “pledge of non-participation” that calls the Strategic Defense Initiative “ill-conceived and dangerous.” The pledge maintains that no weapons system can render nuclear missiles “impotent and obsolete,” as Reagan has called for, and that further pursuit of a missile defense is likely to spur an arms race on Earth and in space.

Scientists’ Rebellion

“What we are witnessing is the third major uprising of the nation’s scientists against an element of U.S. weapons policy,” Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton) said Tuesday. He said that the only precedents are scientific opposition to nuclear tests in the atmosphere in the late 1950s and to development of anti-ballistic missile systems 10 years later.

Brown said the opposition to a space-based missile defense shows that Lt. Gen. James A. Abrahamson, “Star Wars” director, was incorrect last fall when he said that there were “only a few die-hards left, sincere die-hards, but only a very few” opposing the program.

Attempts to obtain comment from the Defense Department’s SDI Organization on Tuesday were unsuccessful. Last Friday, a group of pro-Strategic Defense Initiative scientists announced the formation of a Science and Engineering Committee for a Secure World and said that they had enlisted 80 scientists to support “Star Wars” research.

John Kogut, a physics professor at the University of Illinois-Urbana and a leading opponent of the Strategic Defense Initiative, held a news conference Tuesday to announce the results thus far of the scientists’ campaign against “Star Wars” research. Kogut was joined by Brown and Philip W. Anderson, a Nobel laureate in physics from Princeton University; James W. Cronin, a Nobel laureate in physics from the University of Chicago; and James R. Melcher, an engineer who heads the Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Non-Participation Vows

Kogut said that 57% of faculty members at the nation’s top 20 physics departments, as ranked by the Chronicle of Higher Education, have pledged not to participate in “Star Wars” research.