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1958
Nuclear Test-Ban Petition Pauling had joined the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists headed by Albert Einstein, after the atomic bomb, and began to speak out about the arms race. "[In 1957] there had been additional information released about damage done by radioactivity from testing of nuclear weapons, and by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. So... it got a tremendous response... when I said [in a convocation speech at Washington University in St. Louis] we have to stop the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere because hundreds of thousands of unborn children and people now living are being damaged. So with two other professors, Barry Commoner and Ed Condon, I decided to write a petition... We mimeographed it and sent it out to twenty-five scientists that we knew. They all sent it right back, signed. So then I got back to Pasadena and my wife and I and some of our students and others in the lab got busy and sent out hundreds of copies with the names of these first twenty-five signers. And within a month or two I had two thousand signatures of American scientists which I presented to [United Nations Secretary General] Dag Hammarskjold." Eventually, more than nine thousand scientists around the world signed the petition. |
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