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An Open Letter to Dr. Harold C. Urey Chicago University

558 No. Kenmore Ave., Los Angeles 4, Calif. August 29, 1946

Dear Dr. Urey:

    Your declaration in the first issue of Air Affairs, widely quoted in the current press, to the effect that the United States might have to engage deliberately in a war of world-conquest to prevent other nations from developing and using atomic weapons, is a shocking statement to emanate from the mind of a leading scientist.  

    Millions of people the world over are looking to modern Science for a way out of the present dilemma.  Men and women in all walks of life, in humble and leading positions, still have trust in the genuinely international character of Science, in its world-wide cultural appeal, and its comradeship of impersonal research for the sake of pure knowledge.  

    To be sure, this trust on the part of many has received a stunning blow during the war years, when innumerable scientists leagued their efforts with political and military cliques, to produce “bigger and better” methods of human destruction.  We may generously ascribe this to a situation which compelled them to act in this way.  But it is unfortunately impossible to imagine that your own recent statement was made because you had been compelled by higher authority to make it.  

    We have in mind the appeal made on May 23, 1946 by Dr. Albert Einstein, as Chairman of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, Princeton, New Jersey.  From its text it would appear that you yourself, together with several other leading men of Science, endorsed Dr. Einstein in his fervid expression of the urgent need that exists today for changing “our modes of thinking”, and of establishing a “new type of thinking essential if mankind is to survive and move towards higher levels”.  

    It is hard to believe that your recent statement does justice to the objectives which your own collaborator, Dr. Einstein, had in view.  Do you really think that you have helped in promoting that “new type of thinking” which many of us have expected from the world of enlightened scientists, so as to counteract the arrogant conceit of swashbuckling militarism, and other exploiters of the human race?  Do you think that you have contributed this day to the raising of human thought to those “higher levels” envisioned by Albert Einstein and many others?

    We believe that the readers of your statement should receive from you some insurance that you did not mean just exactly what your