Forty-one American Nobel laureates have signed a declaration opposing war with Iraq. The declaration was organised by Walter Kohn, a theoretical physicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and former adviser to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon. The signatories include 19 winners of the physics prize.
The declaration reads:
“The undersigned oppose a preventive war against Iraq without broad international support. Military operations against Iraq may indeed lead to a relatively swift victory in the short term. But war is characterized by surprise, human loss and unintended consequences. Even with a victory, we believe that the medical, economic, environmental, moral, spiritual, political and legal consequences of an American preventive attack on Iraq would undermine, not protect, US security and standing in the world.”
The signatories include Norman Ramsey, who worked on the Manhattan Project, and Charles Townes, a former research director of the Institute for Defense Analyses at the Pentagon. Townes was also chairman of a federal panel that studied nuclear warheads.
Kohn expects more laureates to sign this week but the current list of signatures is:
Physics
Philip W Anderson, Hans A Bethe, Nicolaas Bloembergen, Owen Chamberlain, Leon N Cooper, James W Cronin, Val L Fitch, Sheldon L Glashow, Leon M Lederman, Arno A Penzias, Martin L Perl, William D Phillips, Norman F Ramsey, Robert Schrieffer, Jack Steinberger, Joseph H Taylor Jr., Charles H Townes , Daniel C Tsui, Robert W Wilson
Chemistry
Paul Berg, Paul D Boyer, Robert F Curl Jr., Herbert A Hauptman, Alan J Heeger, Walter Kohn, Yuan T Lee, William N Lipscomb, Ahmed H Zewail
Economics
George A Akerlof, Lawrence R Klein, Daniel L McFadden, Franco Modigliani, William F Sharpe
Medicine
Robert F Furchgott, Roger Guillemin, Louis J Ignarro, Eric R Kandel, Har Gobind Khorana, Ferid Murad, George E Palade, Harold E Varmus
