Freeman Dyson Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Professor Dyson, welcome to Berkeley.
Thank you.
I thought we might begin with asking you why you wrote this book.
That's a complicated question. Mostly it was because I had written a book before which was quite successful, a book mostly about science, so I felt, "Well, I have an audience, maybe I should try to do something with it." The publishers, Harper and Row, were very supportive. In fact, they encouraged me very much to try again, to try this time to write about something important. So, I went ahead.
You say in the beginning of your book that your goal is to bring two communities together who are involved in the debate on nuclear weapons. One, the community of warriors, and the other, the community of victims. Could you address that dichotomy and what you hoped to achieve?
That was one of the main reasons I felt that it was worthwhile to try to write such a book. After all, there are hundreds of books about nuclear weapons, and what good could one more book do? That was the problem I faced.
The one thing that I have to offer that most people don't is that I'm seeing the problem from both sides. On the one hand, I'm a consultant for the Defense Department, I talk a lot with military people, I understand the way of thinking of military people. And I'm involved with the peace movement and with the ordinary citizens and housewives and doctors who have been protesting against nuclear weapons on moral grounds. I have a strong feeling that we won't make much progress unless these two groups of people can learn to talk to each other and understand each other and make common cause.
You write, "Our task is to choose the tools, the people, and the concepts that will enable us to give the world an effective push in the direction of survival whenever it comes to a fork in the road." I wanted to talk to you about that, what you meant there. One of the themes that emerges in your book is that, in looking at the problems of weapons and security, we have to think about the nature of man. You are suggesting that we have an ambivalence about war; we are both fascinated by it and horrified by it. Is that accurate?
Sure, that's the whole point. One should try to understand the deeper aspects of the problem. It's mainly not a technical problem; it's a human problem. We won't make much progress with it unless we understand why war has always been so attractive to us, why it has been such a deeply-rooted institution in almost all societies. So, a lot of my book is about that. It's about people rather than about things. The things are, in fact, the least important part of the problem. First comes human beings and second comes ideas and only third comes the weapons themselves.
At the heart of this conflict between the warriors and the victims is a non-recognition of the humanity on the other side?
Yes, certainly that's true. So many of my friends in the peace movement are just horrified at the idea that I can talk to those criminals in the Pentagon. Somehow they feel that those people are so evil one shouldn't even try to talk to them. Whereas the people in the Pentagon often have the feeling that the general public simply doesn't understand the problem, that they are messing around with things that they don't understand, and that one shouldn't take them seriously. So, on both sides there is a belittling of the people that are on the other side.
One thinks of Berkeley and J. Robert Oppenheimer. In your book you talk at length about Oppenheimer and his ambivalence about the work that he was doing in the Manhattan Project.
There wasn't much ambivalence there. No, that's not right. Oppenheimer was heart and soul behind what he was doing, and always remained so. He said explicitly he never regretted what he had done.
But there was an ambivalence that appeared later in his career, is that fair to say?
No, I don't think so. No, I don't think he was ever ambivalent. He was a warrior through and through.
Has he become, in other contexts, a symbol for what he was not? Because there is a fascination with his career that emphasizes the Renaissance Man qualities, the interest in classical Eastern literature and so on.
He was a scholar and, of course, a many-sided human being. The great irony was that the establishment to which he so desperately wanted to belong rejected him.
And they rejected him because of the inter-service rivalries about the kinds of weapon systems that he was proposing with regard to tactical weapons later?
Well, in part. That is a very complicated history and it's not worth just now getting into the details. There were many reasons why he was rejected, but primarily because he made too many enemies. It wasn't one enemy that got into the position of doing him, it was the combination of them all.
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