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Physicist Ralph Lapp was part of the Manhattan Project, and long served as a nuclear specialist for the Defense Department. In recent years, however, he has severed connections with all Government projects and thus is free to speak out on U.S. nuclear and weapons policies. Speak out he does. Last week at the University of Washington, Lapp not only criticized the U.S. decision to deploy a thin anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defense system, but also pointed out the damage the system could wreak on the very population it was intended to protect...
Calling the ABM move a political decision made to "deprive the Republicans of a defense issue," Lapp suggested that the U.S. should instead use its long-established deterrent policy to protect itself against possible ICBM attack by China in the 1970s. His proposal: a China Polaris patrol armed with high-yield nuclear weapons programmed to hit specific Chinese targets...
Spectacular Pancake. There were potential dangers, Lapp warned, in the U.S. ABM system, which will use Spartan missiles armed with one-megaton warheads to intercept incoming ICBMs high above the atmosphere and smaller, faster Sprint missiles to intercept in the atmosphere any missiles that evade the Spartans...
...Lapp took strong issue with the Pentagon's Dr. Finn Larsen, who last month insisted that the population below would scarcely notice the explosions of Spartan and Sprint warheads, and that at worst humans might suffer temporary blindness if they were looking directly at the flash. Exploded 100 miles above New Brunswick, N.J., Lapp said, a one-megaton weapon would create a spectacular, incandescent fire-pancake 50 miles up so large that it would overlap both New York and Philadelphia...
Within the scientific community itself, few dispute the imperative to explore space. But there are some scientists who are frankly jealous of the money that space commands. Nuclear Physicist Ralph Lapp contrasts the $1.3 billion NASA has spent on lunar and planetary science with the modest $76 million the National Science Foundation has to distribute among 5,000 scientists in such fields as astronomy, earth science, oceanography and physics. He quotes one geophysicist: "Sheer lunacy! We are spending more on Mars than we are on studying the earth." Columbia's Professor I. I. Rabi, a Nobel prizewinning physicist...