Sidney Drell

The Partnership Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb Philip Taubman Harper: 496 pp., $29.99 The op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal caught the nuclear world by surprise. Not for the argument it made but for who was making it. The piece ran five years ago this month, under the headline "A World Free of Nuclear Weapons," and was written by a remarkable bipartisan quartet of political figures: former secretaries of State Henry A. Kissinger(Nixon)

The Partnership Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb Philip Taubman Harper: 496 pp., $29.99 The op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal caught the nuclear world by surprise. Not for the argument it made but for who was making it. The piece ran five years ago this month, under the headline "A World Free of Nuclear Weapons," and was written by a remarkable bipartisan quartet of political figures: former secretaries of State Henry A. Kissinger(Nixon)

In a move that could weaken the nation's ability to groom the experts needed for international arms control, physicist Sidney Drell abruptly resigned Monday as a co-director of the Stanford Center for International Security and Arms Control. Drell, one of the nation's top arms control experts and an internationally known scientist, quit his post because the university has balked at allowing the center to make appointments with the rank of professor.

In a move that could weaken the nation's ability to groom the experts needed for international arms control, physicist Sidney Drell abruptly resigned Monday as a co-director of the Stanford Center for International Security and Arms Control. Drell, one of the nation's top arms control experts and an internationally known scientist, quit his post because the university has balked at allowing the center to make appointments with the rank of professor.

It gets harder each day for the President to keep the real world from intruding on his dream of a shield against Soviet missiles, and his dream from intruding on the real world. It could get worse. Ronald Reagan seemed to promise the nation in March, 1983, that its scientists would figure out ways to raise a high-tech umbrella over the country so sturdy that nuclear weapons would bounce off it.

Former astronaut Sally Ride may be the next big name to quit the nation's top arms control center, putting pressure on Stanford University to change its policy on professorial appointments. Ride has refused all requests for interviews since joining the Stanford Center for International Security and Arms Control last year. But she did give a colleague, nuclear scientist Theodore Postol, permission to talk on her behalf.

In the year 1862, a trying--indeed a traumatic--time for our country, President Abraham Lincoln entreated the American people to "think anew and act anew." In his Op-Ed piece (Feb. 15) "Let Both Nations Share the Peace-Dividend Pie," Sidney Drell does precisely the same: He calls upon us to deal in hardheaded ways with new realities rather than remain trapped in softheaded patterns of thought and action that are no longer relevant. The essence of what he proposes boils down to mutually advantageous economic collaboration as replacement for the mutually counterproductive military competition (a race for "superiority" neither side could ever win)

In a Campus Correspondence column (Opinion, Jan. 10), Stanford senior Heather Willens discusses the excessive fraction of the nation's research and development budget that is spent for defense-related research. While I agree that this fraction is indeed too high, I must correct her misapprehension about the nature of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. I, and many others on the staff, would not choose to work here if indeed it were a laboratory devoted to defense-oriented nuclear research.

Physicist Sidney Drell is not the only teacher at Stanford University with a passionate commitment to sharing knowledge he regards as important to the world. But he is the only one who has resigned because the Stanford bureaucracy could not find a way to give professors in arms control the same sort of academic standing that they could get, say, in history or law.

The world's most famous political prisoner is 65 years old today. For Andrei D. Sakharov--physicist, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and human-rights activist--this anniversary also marks a poignant and infamous milestone: One-tenth of Sakharov's life has now been spent in internal exile, under house arrest. Other prisoners in the Soviet Union have suffered far worse physical punishment.

It gets harder each day for the President to keep the real world from intruding on his dream of a shield against Soviet missiles, and his dream from intruding on the real world. It could get worse. Ronald Reagan seemed to promise the nation in March, 1983, that its scientists would figure out ways to raise a high-tech umbrella over the country so sturdy that nuclear weapons would bounce off it.

Months ago Stanford University scheduled a three-day conference on East-West relations and arms control. An impressive list of speakers and panelists agreed to take part, none more impressive than Andrei D. Sakharov, physicist, Nobel laureate and a soft-spoken but relentless force in the fight for human rights in the Soviet Union. If he was not the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, his signature certainly appears on the birth certificate.

Last week a bucolic corner of the Stanford University campus produced one rather commonplace lesson: Never throw anything away just because it is not absolutely up to date. From that, though, will flow cosmic lessons almost beyond the imagining of ordinary folk, let alone their comprehension. As Burton Richter, director of Stanford's Linear Accelerator Center, puts it, what comes next will help scientists who are "trying to understand what's in the mind of God." The something not quite up to date is the 20-year-old accelerator, which Richter and a team of scientists modified for $115 million--peanuts in the big-science business where people think in billions--by adding a loop to the end of an existing 2-mile-long tunnel through which sub-atomic particles ride waves of electric power.