#bulletin of the atomic scientists

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

"I tried to warn people. Except that the warning was not well received by everyone. A person accused me of being a “climate militant,” a suggestion that I’m embellishing extreme weather threats to drive an agenda. Another simply said that my predictions were “an exaggeration.”

But it wasn’t an exaggeration."

John Morales, atmospheric and environmental scientist and a fellow of the American Meteorological Society in an article of @TheBulletinOfTheAtomicScientists

[justapotato89]

"My guess is that we'll be able to read last night's election results in the geological record many millennia hence" - Bill McKibben

in "America elects a climate change denier (again)" by Jessica McKenzie

[denimbex1986]

'Blink and you’ll miss it.

In a scene in the new Oppenheimer film set right after the successful 1949 atomic bomb test by the USSR, there is a brief exchange between the film’s two main antagonists. Lewis Strauss, chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, asks J. Robert Oppenheimer what he thinks should be done now. “International control,” Oppenheimer immediately replies.

“You mean world government?” Strauss fires back.

It sounds like a throwaway line, or one of those accusations routinely hurled at those trying to make global institutions marginally more effective. But in this case, Chairman Strauss’ epithet was spot on.

The tremendous destruction of World War II, even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prompted a radical rethinking of the world political order. In particular, the idea of world government as the solution to the problem of war was placed front and center in this country’s foreign policy debate, and argued about passionately in diners, dorm rooms, and dinner parties all across the land. Unfortunately, however, the legions of moviegoers who buy tickets to Christopher Nolan’s otherwise excellent film this summer will have no idea that one of the leading proponents of that singular idea was J. Robert Oppenheimer.

After the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Oppenheimer threw himself into working to control nuclear weapons. Like other atomic scientists, he was fully aware that the Soviet Union would likely develop its own atom bombs in just a few years, and that time was short to prevent an unrestrained nuclear arms race. The movie refers to his activities as working for “international cooperation.” But his actual ideas were much deeper and more radical than those anodyne words imply.

In 1946, Oppenheimer participated in the development of a report for the secretary of state’s Committee on Atomic Energy about what might be done to control nuclear weapons. The report, which became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report but which was authored chiefly by Oppenheimer himself, proposed an international Atomic Development Agency that would have the sole right to mine and process uranium and to run reactors of any kind. This was a radical proposal, but, as its authors explained, they could see no alternative.

In June 1946, Oppenheimer published an article in The New York Times Magazine explaining the proposal to the public. The article discussed the relationship between peaceful and military uses of atomic energy, evaluated a couple of other ideas for controlling atomic weapons, and then discussed the proposed Atomic Development Agency.

It is here, in a section entitled “Sovereignty,” that we come across a striking passage:

“Many have said that without world government there could be no permanent peace, and without peace there would be atomic warfare. I think one must agree with this. Many have said that there could be no outlawry of weapons and no prevention of war unless international law could apply to the citizens of nations, as federal law does to citizens of states, or we have made manifest the fact that international control is not compatible with absolute national sovereignty. I think one must agree with this.”

Similarly, in a January 1948 article for Foreign Affairs magazine, Oppenheimer wrote:

“It is quite clear that in this field we would like to see patterns established which, if they were more generally extended, would constitute some of the most vital elements of a new international law: patterns not unrelated to the ideals which more generally and eloquently are expressed by the advocates of world government.”

From the vantage point of 2023, the remarkable thing about these passages is the apparent assumption that the reader is familiar with the idea of world government, and arguments for and against it, to the point where they can just be mentioned without explanation or elaboration. And for much of the public for much of the 1940s, this was probably true—as remarkable as it might seem to us today, when this notion is entirely absent from the international affairs debate.

Even before the end of the war, world government advocacy had become a prominent feature of the political conversation in America. In 1943, the businessman and Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie published a book called One World. The book sold 1.5 million copies in the four months following its release and played a key role in a blossoming of world federation advocacy—long before virtually anyone had heard of anything like an atomic bomb. To choose but one example, an organization known as the Student Federalists, founded in 1942 by a charismatic 16-year-old boy named Harris Wofford, over the next several years formed 367 chapters on high school and college campuses around the country. (Wofford went on to become a United States senator and a key civil rights aide in the White House of President John F. Kennedy.)

Then in 1945, just a few months before the Trinity test, came Emery Reves’ The Anatomy of Peace. While Willkie’s book was a travelogue describing his voyage around the world, Reves’ was an extended logical argument that only law could create peace and only a world federation—a union of nations with a government taking care of issues that could not be handled at the national level—could create meaningful law that applied to individuals rather than governments. Indeed, Oppenheimer’s passage above could have easily been a summary of Reves’ book.

It is worth noting that both of these books were published before the United Nations Charter was more than a draft. (It was eventually signed on June 26, 1945, less than a month before the Trinity test.) The activism they inspired attempted to make the UN something more than an agglomeration of sovereign states that could sign treaties with each other, but in the end were subject to no law worthy of the name. Sovereignty meant that no state could be compelled to do anything it didn’t want to, and treaties could only be enforced by sanctions or war, not through legal action against individuals. (Citizens and various organizations could also take the government to court if it is not properly carrying out its functions, as they can in the U.S.)

It wasn’t just books. Beloved children’s book author and New Yorker editor E. B. White devoted a great many of his editorials to the problem of global anarchy. (These were later collected and published in a book called The Wild Flag: Editorials From The New Yorker on Federal World Government and Other Matters.) Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins, upon reading about Hiroshima, wrote a lengthy editorial for his magazine titled “Modern Man is Obsolete,” that passionately argued for immediate democratic world federation. “There is no need to talk of the difficulties in the way of world government,” wrote Cousins. “There is need only to ask if we can afford to do without it.”

In a similar vein Walter Lippmann, a founder of both The New Republic magazine and the Council on Foreign Relations, and a key player later in the Cuban Missile Crisis, wrote in 1946: “There are few in any country who now believe that war can be regulated or outlawed by the ordinary treaties among sovereign states. … No one can prove what will be the legislative, executive, and judicial organs of the world state … but there are ideas that shake the world, such as the ideal of the union of mankind under universal law.”

Even General Hap Arnold, the only U.S. Air Force officer ever to hold the rank of five stars and founder of the RAND Corporation, said in 1946: “The greatest need facing the world today is for international control of the human forces that make for war.” The atom bomb, he declared, presents “a tremendous argument for a world organization that will eliminate conflict. … We must make an end to all wars for good.”

And before the end of the decade, more than 50,000 Americans had joined the United World Federalists (UWF)—led for three years by a bright young man named Alan Cranston, who went on to serve as a four-term U.S. Senator from California. UWF has continued its operations to this very day and is now known as Citizens for Global Solutions.

A number of physicists also came to support world federation. “Conflicts in interest between great powers can be expected to arise in the future … and there is no world authority in existence that can adjudicate the case and enforce the decision,” said Leo Szilard, who first conceived the nuclear chain reaction. But humanity had at its disposal, he insisted, “the solution of the problem of permanent peace. … The issue that we have to face is not whether we can create a world government … (but) whether we can have such a world government without going through a third world war.”

But the most prominent and most active proponent of world government among scientists was Albert Einstein himself. He had always opposed nationalism, and supporting world federation was a natural extension. Einstein wrote articles, gave interviews, and helped found the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. The Student Federalists of Princeton, New Jersey, held meetings in his living room. And he served as the founding advisory board chair of the United World Federalists.

The type of world government that Einstein promoted would exclusively have power over security issues and a few internal circumstances that could lead to war. But this kind of limited world government was a must. “A new kind of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels,” he said. “Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. … In light of new knowledge … an eventual world state is not just desirable in the name of brotherhood; it is necessary for survival.”

Oppenheimer’s focus in the postwar years was more near-term. He worked for international control of nuclear matters—both weapons and civilian reactors that could be used to make weapons. But that international control was to take the form of an agency with a strict monopoly on such activities. His 1946 New York Times Magazine piece says about the plan: “It proposes that in the field of atomic energy there be set up a world government. That in this field there be renunciation of national sovereignty. That in this field there be no legal veto power. That in this field there be international law.”

Why would this be significant? In a lengthier article published in 1946 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Oppenheimer wrote, “The problem that we are dealing with,” in seeking to prevent atomic war, “is the problem of the elimination of war.” Proposals for addressing nuclear issues were to be judged on whether they also advanced this goal. The article was titled “The Atom Bomb as a Great Force for Peace”—not because of the simplistic and banal argument that the bomb would make war too horrible to contemplate, but because its control would lay the foundation for a world government that truly could abolish war.

Even Edward Teller, accurately portrayed in the Oppenheimer film as pushing for the development of the immensely more destructive hydrogen bombs and eventually undercutting his colleague at the security hearings, appeared to embrace the idea! In 1948, he discussed the Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution, written by a committee of eminent scholars chaired by the chancellor of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and aimed at establishing a Federal Republic of the World. And Teller said about this enterprise: “[America’s] present necessary task of opposing Russia should not cause us to forget that in the long run we cannot win by working against something. Instead we must work for something. We must work for World Government.”

And in his 1948 Foreign Affairs article, again Oppenheimer maintained: “If the atomic bomb was to have meaning in the contemporary world, it would have to be in showing that not modern man, not navies, not ground forces, but war itself was obsolete.”

At the end of this essay, Oppenheimer returned to the noble aspirations that so many held in the shattering initial weeks after Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. “The aim of those who would work for the establishment of peace,” he insisted, “must be to maintain what was sound in the early hopes, and by all means in their power to look to their eventual realization. It is necessarily denied to us in these days to see at what time, to what immediate ends, in what context, and in what manner of world, we may return again to the great issues touched on by the international control of atomic energy. … (But) this is seed we take with us, traveling to a land we cannot see, to plant in new soil.”

Should we consider all this just a mere historical curiosity? Is anything about these conversations eight long decades ago relevant to the challenges of the 21st Century? As politically unlikely as it might now appear, might something like a genuine world republic provide humanity with the kinds of tools it will require to get a grip on existential perils like the climate emergency, runaway artificial intelligence, and who knows what kinds of new weapons of mass extermination that Oppenheimer’s heirs will almost surely invent in the decades and centuries to come?

The best possible answer to that is the same one purportedly given by China’s Premier Zhou Enlai in 1971, when asked by Henry Kissinger what he thought about the consequences of the French Revolution.

Mr. Zhou, the story goes, considered the question for a moment, and then replied: “I think it is too soon to tell.”'

[noneedtofearorhope]

This year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.

[...]

As Russia’s war on Ukraine continues, the last remaining nuclear weapons treaty between Russia and the United States, New START, stands in jeopardy. Unless the two parties resume negotiations and find a basis for further reductions, the treaty will expire in February 2026. This would eliminate mutual inspections, deepen mistrust, spur a nuclear arms race, and heighten the possibility of a nuclear exchange.

[francoisege]

Minuit moins deux

Nous étions si fragiles…     “Veilleur, où en est la nuit?” (Es, 21, 11) Depuis le 25 janvier 2018, l’horloge de la fin du monde affichait minuit moins deux minutes (23H 58), pour la deuxième fois depuis sa création en 1947. Elle avait indiqué ce niveau d’alerte en 1953 quand l’URSS avait fait exploser sa première bombe à hydrogène et donné le signal de la course aux armements nucléaires. Le…

[walrusmagazine]

The Doomsday Clock: How Close Are We to the End of the World?

The annual assessment, released in January, feels more relevant than ever

After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945, the scientists behind the bomb decided to mark the dawn of the nuclear age with the creation of the Doomsday Clock. For the past seventy-five years, it has been set to alert humanity to how close we are to “midnight,” or total destruction, as a result of human-made technology. The clock has been moved twenty-four times over its history (backward eight times and forward sixteen), but with the war in Ukraine and the climate crisis, the annual assessment, released in January, now feels more relevant than ever. We asked Rachel Bronson, president and CEO of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—a Chicago-based nonprofit that assesses global security issues—to unravel the science behind the clock.

Read more at thewalrus.ca.

Illustration by Irma Kniivila (irmaillustration.com)

[alanshemper]

On Tuesday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset the Doomsday Clock for 2023 to 90 seconds to midnight, warning the world is closer to global annihilation than ever before, in part due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since 1947, the Bulletin has maintained a Doomsday Clock to illustrate how close humanity is to the end of the world due to existential threats including nuclear war and the climate emergency. We speak with Frida Berrigan, longtime peace activist and nuclear weapons abolitionist, whose new cover story for In These Times is “How to Avoid Nuclear Stand-Offs That Threaten the Entire World.”

[spaceintruderdetector]

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists : Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, Inc. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

[gobcorend]

"Pandora's box had been opened and monsters had come out. But there had been something hidden at the bottom of Pandora's box. Something wonderful.

Hope."

-- Lisa Marie Rice in her book 'Breaking Danger'

[sudden-stops-kill]

'Special issue: Oppenheimer: The man behind the movie'

[tenth-sentence]

Its object was to explain the social and political consequences of the new source of power.

"Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists" - Robert Jungk, translated by James Cleugh

[meteorologistaustenlonek]

Project 2025: The right-wing conspiracy to torpedo global climate action

By Michael E. Mann

"In all likelihood, it would mean the end of meaningful global #climateaction at this critical juncture. The fate of our planet quite literally hangs in the balance. It’s something for all Americans to think about as they prepare for the pivotal 2024 election." --

Michael E. Mann is presidential distinguished professor and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at The University of Pennsylvania.-- Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

[mycstilleblog]

Reiner Brauns interessanter Vortrag "Wie ist Frieden in der Ukraine möglich?" in der Dortmunder Pauluskirche

Reiner Brauns Arbeit ist seit Jahrzehnten intensiv in der Friedensbewegung aktiv. Nicht zuletzt versteht er sich als Brückenbauer, um auch widerstreitende Positionen in der Sache zusammenzuführen. Willy Brandts Worte sind ihm Verpflichtung: «Der Frieden ist nicht alles, aber alles ist ohne den Frieden nichts.« Braun hat seinerzeit den „Krefelder Appell“ wesentlich mit initiiert. Diese Woche…

[denimbex1986]

'Moviegoers who watch the closing credits of Oppenheimer may notice a familiar name. Writer and director Christopher Nolan's three-hour biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project during World War II to develop the atomic bomb, ends with a thank-you to retired U.S. senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

Unrelated to Leahy's appearances in Nolan's Batman trilogy, this cinematic shout-out is about righting a decades-old injustice. Vermont's longest-serving U.S. senator played a critical role in clearing Oppenheimer's name 55 years after his death. And longtime Leahy staffer Tim Rieser deserves his own screen credit for the role he played in that process.

The Norwich native worked for Leahy for 37 years, mostly as his senior foreign policy aide on the Senate Appropriations Committee. Rieser's political savvy and deep relationships in Washington, D.C., earned him a level of influence rarely achieved by Capitol Hill staffers. In one of his final acts before Leahy retired in January, Rieser helped right a grievous wrong that ended Oppenheimer's career — one that, as viewers of Oppenheimer now know, was based on a lie.

In June 1954, at the height of the Red Scare, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission voted to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance. The decision was influenced by Oppenheimer's past association with communists and justified with the baseless allegation that he was a Soviet spy.

In actuality, Oppenheimer's fall from grace was a political hit job motivated by his opposition to U.S. development of the hydrogen bomb. Denying the physicist access to nuclear secrets effectively ended his government career and left a stain on his reputation that endured long after his death in 1967.

Nolan's blockbuster movie, which is based on the 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird, chronicles much of that previously untold story. But viewers may leave the theater thinking that Oppenheimer was never vindicated.

In fact, Rieser, 71, spent years working with Sherwin and Bird to do just that. His motivation wasn't just to remove a black mark from the history of one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. As he explained to Seven Days, Rieser also wanted to affirm the ongoing importance of protecting scientists who express their political views from becoming targets of government retribution.

The cause was personal for the former Vermont public defender, who lives in Arlington, Va., but still owns, with his siblings, their family home in Norwich. Rieser's parents, Leonard and Rosemary Rieser, worked on the Manhattan Project, knew Oppenheimer and had tremendous respect for him.

"It was probably the most memorable year of their lives," Rieser said of his parents' stint in Los Alamos, N.M. "My father, my mother and everybody else there just revered Oppenheimer. He was larger than life for people their age."

Leonard Rieser was 21 in 1943 when he graduated with a physics degree from the University of Chicago, site of the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. The following year, he got married, enlisted in the U.S. Army and, because of his knowledge of nuclear physics, was sent to Los Alamos.

The Riesers knew little about where they were going or what they'd do there. For more than a year, they couldn't disclose their whereabouts to family and friends or reveal their activities. While Rieser's mother ran the Los Alamos nursery school, his father worked alongside such scientists as Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi and Hans Bethe.

The Trinity test, the first-ever detonation of an atomic bomb, occurred on July 16, 1945, which was also the Riesers' first wedding anniversary. Leonard witnessed the blast from less than 20 miles away, face down in the sand.

After the war, Leonard took a teaching job at Dartmouth College, where he later became chair of the physics department, then dean of faculty and provost. When president Lyndon Johnson gave Oppenheimer the prestigious Enrico Fermi Award in 1963, Leonard invited the physicist to speak at Dartmouth and even hosted him at their home.

Tim Rieser, who was only 5 at the time, doesn't remember meeting Oppenheimer, but he grew up hearing stories about the Manhattan Project and still has his father's correspondence with the physicist.

He cannot recall his parents discussing Oppenheimer's blacklisting. "I can only assume ... that they must have been appalled," he said.

So were others in the scientific community. Shortly after the 1954 ruling, 500 scientists signed a letter urging the Atomic Energy Commission to reverse its decision. But it would fall to the next generation to take up that cause.

Bird related in his July 7 New Yorker article "Oppenheimer, Nullified and Vindicated" how Sherwin spent 25 years researching the Oppenheimer case before Bird joined him on the project in 2000. In 2010, with the Pulitzer under their belt, the two authors tried unsuccessfully to convince president Barack Obama's administration to reinstate Oppenheimer's security clearance.

Others made similar attempts. In 2011, senator Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) sent a 20-page memo urging Oppenheimer's vindication to secretary of energy Steven Chu, who was a scientist and cowinner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. Chu never acted on that memo, and Bingaman retired from the Senate in 2013.

Next, Sherwin and Bird approached Rieser, whom Bird had known for years. Their interest in the Vermont aide had nothing to do with his personal connection to Oppenheimer, of which neither was aware. (Coincidentally, Leonard Rieser had once hired Sherwin to teach at Dartmouth.)

The biographers' interest in Rieser was a political strategy: A seasoned Capitol Hill staffer, he worked for one of the most powerful Democrats in the Senate and had access to high-ranking officials in the Obama administration.

Rieser said it wasn't until he read American Prometheus that he grasped the scope of the miscarriage of justice done in 1954.

"Until then, I didn't know what had happened to Oppenheimer," he said. "I don't think many people did."

Uniquely Qualified

It's hard to imagine anyone else on Capitol Hill who could have brought to the task of clearing Oppenheimer the combination of political clout, governmental savvy, personal motivation and professional autonomy that Rieser did. Because Rieser had worked for Leahy since 1985, the senator knew his parents. After Leonard Rieser died and the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich renamed part of the museum in his honor, Leahy attended the dedication ceremony. And because the senator shared Rieser's view that Oppenheimer had been railroaded, he gave Rieser broad discretion on the project.

Rieser had earned a reputation as someone who knew how to get things done in Washington. He helped draft Leahy's 1992 signature legislation banning the sale of land mines. He was also an architect of the so-called Leahy Law, which outlawed the export of U.S. arms to countries that violate human rights with impunity — an effort that made Rieser the target of a character assassination campaign by Guatemala's then-president, Otto Pérez Molina. In her book Sweet Relief: The Marla Ruzicka Story, author Jennifer Abrahamson described Rieser as "the conscience of the Senate."

Rieser was known for his dogged persistence. In the New Yorker piece, Bird described him as "relentless."

After Alan Gross, a U.S. government contractor, was jailed in Cuba in 2009 and accused of spying, Rieser spent years using back-channel diplomacy to secure his release, making multiple trips to Havana and enlisting the help of Pope Francis. The effort succeeded in 2014. According to the New York Times, once the deal was finalized and Obama called Leahy to thank him, the Vermont senator told the president, "I could not have done it without Tim Rieser."

Rieser brought that same determination to the Oppenheimer cause. In the summer of 2016, he penned a letter from Leahy, cosigned by Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), asking Obama to reinstate Oppenheimer's security clearance. That letter landed on the desk of secretary of energy Ernest Moniz.

"He's a nuclear physicist," Rieser said, "so we thought, If there's anyone who would want to clear Oppenheimer's name, you would think it would be him."

But reversing a 1954 decision on the security clearance of a scientist who died in 1967 was more nettlesome than it looked at first. However corrupt and flawed that process had been, Rieser said, Oppenheimer had lied to a federal investigator.

At issue, he explained, was the so-called "Chevalier incident." Haakon Chevalier was a professor of French literature at the University Of California, Berkeley who met Oppenheimer in 1937. The two became friends, and, in 1943, Chevalier and his wife dined at the Oppenheimers' home.

That evening, Chevalier mentioned to Oppenheimer that the U.S. government wasn't sharing its nuclear secrets with the Soviets, who were U.S. allies at the time. When Chevalier told Oppenheimer that he knew of someone who could get that information to the Russians through back channels, Oppenheimer called the idea treasonous and ended the discussion.

Oppenheimer later disclosed that conversation to general Leslie Groves, the U.S. Army officer who oversaw the Manhattan Project, but he didn't reveal Chevalier's identity. When a federal investigator interrogated him about it, Oppenheimer concocted a fake story to protect his friend.

Why would such historical details matter decades after the fact?

"Moniz was afraid of creating a standard for Oppenheimer that was different from those seeking a security clearance today," explained Rieser, who has a security clearance himself. Though he vehemently disagreed with the Department of Energy's legal argument, Rieser understood why Moniz wouldn't want to set a precedent of giving preferential treatment to someone based merely on their public stature.

As a concession, Moniz renamed a DOE fellowship in honor of Oppenheimer, which wasn't at all what Bird, Sherwin and Rieser had sought. In the meantime, Donald Trump was elected president, at which point Bird and Sherwin essentially gave up the fight.

But not Rieser. He made little progress during the Trump years, which often had a skeptical, if not antagonistic, relationship with science and scientists.

"Generally, when I try to solve a problem, I do everything I can until I finally feel like I've exhausted everything I can possibly do," he said. "I also felt it was so outrageous what had been done to Oppenheimer. It was pure vindictiveness and politics."

Carrying the Day

To make his case, Rieser had to show the government why the Oppenheimer decision still matters — a quest with personal resonance. After the war, Rieser's father, like Oppenheimer, was conflicted about the way the atomic bomb had been used. Having visited Hiroshima, he devoted much of the rest of his life to advocating for strict controls on nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. Also like Oppenheimer, he once chaired the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit organization devoted to controlling nuclear weapons and other new technologies that can negatively affect humanity. Rieser was incensed that the government could exact retribution against scientists merely for expressing controversial or unpopular views.

"So when [Joe] Biden got elected," Rieser said, "I decided we should try again."

In June 2021, Rieser wrote a second letter to the DOE, signed by Leahy and the same three Democratic senators. When two months passed with no reply, he called "this guy I knew" at the department.

Ali Nouri had worked in the Senate for about a decade and had once sold Rieser a Ping-Pong table through Craigslist. After leaving the Hill, Nouri went to work for the Federation of American Scientists before Biden tapped him to be assistant secretary of congressional relations at the DOE.

Nouri replied to Rieser a few days later.

"'I think you're going to get the same answer,'" Rieser recalled Nouri telling him. "So I said, 'Then don't answer it. I'm going to write a different letter.'"

The underlying problem, Rieser explained, lay in the nature of the request. He couldn't ask the DOE simply to reinstate Oppenheimer's security clearance, because that would require a new hearing, one that was fair, impartial and, obviously, impossible, given that Oppenheimer is dead. Instead, Rieser decided to ask the department to "nullify" the 1954 decision.

Beginning in August 2021, Rieser drafted a third letter to Biden's secretary of energy, Jennifer Granholm. This one not only detailed the injustices and illegalities of the 1954 proceedings but also highlighted why the decision should be nullified. It read, in part:

Government scientists, whether renowned like Oppenheimer or a technician laboring in obscurity, including those who risk their careers to warn of safety concerns or to express unpopular opinions on matters of national security, need to know that they can do so freely and that their cases will be fairly reviewed based on facts, not personal animus or politics.

After more than a year of working on the letter, Rieser and Leahy got 42 other senators to sign it, including four Republicans: Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Ala).

Even with such bipartisan backing, Rieser said, he feared that the endorsement of 43 senators might not be enough to "carry the day." So he asked Thomas Mason, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, to pen a letter in support. Mason did so and got all seven surviving former directors of the Los Alamos lab to sign it, too.

Next, Rieser contacted the heads of the Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, American Physical Society and Federation of American Scientists. Though Sherwin had died of lung cancer in 2021, Rieser asked Bird and Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, to pen similar letters to the energy secretary. It didn't hurt that Nolan's Oppenheimer was scheduled for release the following year.

"What I've learned over the years in Congress," Rieser explained, "is, if you're going to take on a difficult problem, you have to use every ounce of energy you can muster and stick with it no matter how long it takes."

In late August 2022, Rieser compiled all the supporting materials into a binder, then bicycled down to the DOE headquarters and hand-delivered it to Nouri to present to Granholm.

"And then I waited," he said.

On December 16, 2022, Granholm issued a five-page order vacating the Atomic Energy Commission's 1954 decision against Oppenheimer. She wrote:

When Dr. Oppenheimer died in 1967, Senator J. William Fulbright took to the Senate floor and said "Let us remember not only what his special genius did for us; let us also remember what we did to him." Today we remember how the United States government treated a man who served it with the highest distinction. We remember that political motives have no proper place in matters of personnel security. And we remember that living up to our ideals requires unerring attention to the fair and consistent application of our laws.

"It had everything that I could have hoped for," Rieser said. "Granholm felt, as senator Leahy and I did, that this is as relevant today as it was 70 years ago."

Even after Oppenheimer's vindication, Rieser felt that his work wasn't done. Knowing that millions of people would see Oppenheimer, he suggested to Nolan, whom he knew through Bird and Leahy's Batman cameos, that he include an epilogue to that effect; he even suggested the wording.

Ultimately, Nolan didn't include it. While Rieser has no hard feelings about not getting thanked in the movie himself — Senate staffers are accustomed to letting their bosses take credit for their work — he wishes that viewers of the film knew the final outcome. As he put it, "It's important that people know there is another chapter, and an important one, albeit many, many years later."

Rieser, who now works as a senior adviser to Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) hasn't remained entirely in the shadows. In addition to being featured in last month's New Yorker piece, he will be in two forthcoming documentaries about Oppenheimer's life.

For one, Rieser was interviewed in the late physicist's New Mexico house. While sitting in Oppenheimer's living room, he remembers thinking, "If only my parents could have been here! None of us could ever have imagined that I would be doing such a thing. It's amazing how life does come full circle."'

[fractalist]

It is 90 seconds to midnight.

This year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.

...

The war’s effects are not limited to an increase in nuclear danger; they also undermine global efforts to combat climate change. Countries dependent on Russian oil and gas have sought to diversify their supplies and suppliers, leading to expanded investment in natural gas exactly when such investment should have been shrinking.

...

There is no clear pathway for forging a just peace that discourages future aggression under the shadow of nuclear weapons. But at a minimum, the United States must keep the door open to principled engagement with Moscow that reduces the dangerous increase in nuclear risk the war has fostered. One element of risk reduction could involve sustained, high-level US military-to-military contacts with Russia to reduce the likelihood of miscalculation. The US government, its NATO allies, and Ukraine have a multitude of channels for dialogue; they all should be explored. Finding a path to serious peace negotiations could go a long way toward reducing the risk of escalation. In this time of unprecedented global danger, concerted action is required, and every second counts.

Read the full statement here.

[dandelionjack]

somehow in light of recent geopolitical events i feel a little synchronicity in this house tonight