Word: physicist
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Last week a commission of the National Science Foundation met with 150 administrators and teachers at the Fernbank Science Center outside Atlanta to add up the implications of those doleful figures. "There is a crisis in precollege math and science education," said N.S.F. Director Edward Knapp, a physicist by training. "Our universities are not getting enough adequately prepared persons to ensure our continued technological achievements...
...worse, the pressure on the A.E.C. to prove the potential of nuclear power led it to ignore many important safety concerns. As early as 1953, physicist Edward Teller, the leading nuclear weapons expert at the time, told a congressional committee that "We have been extremely fortunate in that accidents in nuclear reactors have not caused any fatalities. With expanding applications of nuclear reactions and nuclear power, it cannot be expected that this unbroken record will be maintained." Yet Teller's warnings that "a release of [radioactive materials from a reactor] in a city or densely populated area would lead...
...sound as Dense Pack may seem in the Pentagon's hard sell, many scientists believe it is fatally flawed. Says IBM Physicist Richard Garwin: "Fratricide may well be true, but it is irrelevant because it can be defeated." The Soviets, for example, could avoid Fratricide by dropping a single warhead at a time, beginning with the southern end of the Wyoming strip, at a rate of one every 20 to 40 sec. Strategists call such a barrage Slow Walk. The Pentagon says that the first detonations would leave so many particles in the atmosphere that the incoming warheads would...
...Pentagon retorts that incredibly precise timing would be needed: the missiles would have to explode within a millionth of a second of one another to avoid Fratricide-a capability, U.S. intelligence sources optimistically estimate, that will not be achieved by the Soviets for at least ten years. Says Berkeley Physicist Charles Townes, a key Pentagon adviser: "The Soviets are resourceful guys, fully capable of developing ways to counter Dense Pack sooner than anybody expects...
...Glashow decides to pick a university on the basis of money alone. It will be a very quick choice, and one that will keep the physicist a good deal warmer in the winter. But in choosing between a Harvard paycheck and a Texas A&M paycheck. Glashow is not only confronted with two disparate salary policies, but also with the two diametrically opposite educational philosophies they reflect...