A Scientist Among Warriors : MONKEYS, MEN AND MISSILES : An Autobiography 1946-88 <i> by Solly Zuckerman (W. W. Norton: $22.50; 498 pp., illustrated;0-393-02689-2) </i>

One leaves this second volume of Lord Zuckerman’s highly readable memoirs astonished at its author’s sheer energy. During most of the period it covers, he pursued three simultaneous careers. As an internationally recognized zoologist, he was chairman of the Department of Anatomy at the University of Birmingham. As a skilled administrator and fund-raiser, he was the hands-on president of the London Zoo, itself a major center of animal research. Throughout the period, he served upon, and more often than not chaired, myriad committees advising the British government on just about every issue even remotely connected with the uses or misuses of science or technology. For the dozen years following 1959, he was the full-time chief science adviser first to the British ministry of defense and then to the government as a whole. And it is apparent from the way he tells his story that very few persons ever left his presence feeling short-changed.

The second astonishing thing that comes through the book is the enormous number of people who really mattered to Zuckerman, and to whom he clearly mattered as well. That, also, is a product of his energy. He is a man who has nurtured friendships. And those friendships have included persons from every part of the spectrum of British politics and many in American politics as well, leaders of the scientific establishments in both countries, a vast array of military and diplomatic officers, many of the powers of the financial world, and legions of writers, sculptors, actors, dancers, and musicians.

Zuckerman’s account makes clear that he was as open and direct in his enmities as in his friendships. One example: In 1962, Edward Teller, the “father” of American thermonuclear weapons, later one of the inspirations behind Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, told a large gathering of NATO military and civilian leaders that “the scientific world” would soon bring forward a class of weapons (he had in mind the so-called neutron bomb) that the Russians could never counter.

“As soon as he had sat down (Zuckerman relates), I rose and said that Teller was presuming when he said that he was speaking for the world of science. He was speaking, I said, only for himself and his small band of acolytes, in opposition to the majority of the defense scientists with whom I myself conferred. Neutron bombs were nuclear weapons and could not be used on a European battlefield without accepting at the outset that their use could well be countered not only by similar weapons but by other kinds of nuclear armament.” Later, during a break, Teller approached. “I will never forgive you for that,” Zuckerman records him as saying. “I replied that it would not make the slightest difference to me if he didn’t.”

For Zuckerman as for so many of his generation, World War II was the shaping experience. His first volume (“From Apes to Warlords,” Harper & Row, 1978) recounts his boyhood and education in South Africa, his clinical training in medicine in London, his decision to pursue research rather than practice, and his rising Oxford academic career and election to the anatomy chair in Birmingham in 1938 when only 34. Once the war started, however, he was swept into a line of research that changed his life--investigating the effects of weapons (in particular, air-delivered bombs) on human bodies. His systematic and ingenious experimental work overturned much conventional wisdom and placed him at the forefront of the first generation of military operations researchers and led him into much wider realms. By the end of the war, he was the principal adviser on targeting and analyst of bombing effects for the allied air forces in Europe. And “as someone who had had some success during the war years in applying scientific method to the analysis of a variety of novel problems,” he was for four decades following the war at the head of every British government’s list of those to call when it needed analysis and advice. Today, at 85, he still commutes regularly from his home near the North Sea to the Cabinet Office in London.

Zuckerman was never a proponent of the independent British nuclear force. His analyses of conventional war very early convinced him that the use of nuclear weapons would have effects much more horrendous than what for years was all but universally forecast. He found that military officers (a notable exception was his close friend, Adm. Lord Mountbatten, the chief of defense staff for much of his time in Whitehall) were particularly prone to minimize these likely effects. To Zuckerman--as to Robert McNamara or George Kennan--the destructive power of nuclear weapons meant that they could not rationally be used in warfare. Their only function, therefore, could be to deter nuclear use by others.

For the purpose of deterring the Soviet Union, Zuckerman thought, the large American force was more than sufficient. Small, independent forces like those of Britain and France would not add to deterrence and might in some circumstances actually bring on rather than forestall war. He therefore has consistently argued against enlarging (“modernizing”) the British force and in favor of measures, such as a complete ban on the testing of nuclear weapons, that would make it impossible for governments to develop new weapons that would heighten the illusion that they could successfully fight a nuclear war. For the most part, he did not prevail in these arguments. The prime ministers he served (with the exception of Margaret Thatcher) tended to agree with him. But the inertia of the British nuclear weapons establishment has been too powerful.

More than half of Zuckerman’s book is devoted to these and other defense issues. American readers will find there much good sense and many lessons applicable to the dilemmas of formulating defense policy in this country. They will also find many memorable anecdotes. One is irresistible: On a visit to Washington in September, 1962, Zuckerman was invited by President John F. Kennedy to come along on a tour of NASA space centers. “You’ll enjoy it,” Kennedy told him. “You’ll never again see so many billions of dollars being spent in so short a time.” When they reached Houston to witness a test-firing of the Saturn rocket, project chief Wernher von Braun introduced to the President his colleagues, most of them former German rocketeers like himself. Harold Brown, then the director of research in the Pentagon, turned to Zuckerman. “They haven’t had so grand a day since they were introduced to Hitler at Peenumunde,” he said.

By any standard, Zuckerman’s has been an unusually rewarding life. His account of it is well worth reading.