Word: fieser
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Thirty years later, in June 1972, Fieser wrote a letter to President Nixon about the way the United States was using his invention in Indochina. "It seems to me desirable," he wrote, "to try to promote an international agreement to outlaw further use of naplam or naplam-type munitions...
...Fieser received a reply the next month from Edward E. David Jr., Nixon's science advisor. David wrote that the uses of napalm by the U.S. army in Indochina were "difficult to predict or control," but assured Fieser that "your suggestion will be given very careful attention...
...brush-off from Nixon," Fieser says. But he still doesn't regret having invented napalm; the United State's use of it to burn people, rather than buildings, is what bothers him. "When we were developing napalm," he says, "we never thought of any anti-personnel use. We were thinking in terms of wooden structures, factories...
...Fieser first began working on developing new weapons for the U.S. military in late 1940, more than a year before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. He was 40 at the time and one of a group of young professors--organized in part by President Emeritus James Bryant Conant '14, a chemist like Fieser--asked by the government to work in secret on weaponry. The government, Conant and all the professors involved took for granted that the United State's eventual entry into the war was inevitable...
...didn't like the idea of poison gases," Fieser says, "but I swallowed my pride and took the assignment." However, during a delay in the work while new safety hoods were being installed in the Harvard labs to protect the scientists from the gases, Fieser got interested in incendiaries...