To: Dr. Pauling

From: Jonathan Rice, KQED; via telephone conversation with Cecil A. Thomas

Re: 4:30 TV appearance, February 20, 1953

They hope you can arrive at 4:00 p.m. and suggest you do the following

1. Avoid wearing a very dark suit.

2. Wear a shirt other than white, and if necessary, buy a dark one at their expense.

3. They are asking both Teller and you to write (preferably type) 100 words of introduction. They are doing this because they do not know how you would like to state your relationship to the UN petition and other matters and want to have it in your own words. This will be read by James Day, General Manager of the station, who will serve as moderator.

As you probably know, they are making prints of this program this weekend and sending it to educational TV stations all over the country.

The time will be divided as follows:

You will be the first speaker with 14 minutes.

Your second turn will be for 7 minutes.

The third time will be for 3 minutes.

Your last remarks will be between 2 & 4 minutes, depending on how much time is left.

There will be time cards available to indicate to you how much time is left as the program draws to a close.

THE ATOM

By Dr. Linus Pauling

An Excerpt from "Fallout and Disarmament" - A Debate between Linus Pauling and Edward Teller

I am a scientist. I am interested in the world, this wonderful world that we live in, and I am especially interested in human beings. This world that we live in is really a wonderful one, as we have found out through the discoveries of science.

The greatest of all these discoveries is the discovery of the way to release the great stores of energy that are in the nuclei of atoms. I think that this is going to make the world an even better place to live in. It is, of course, this discovery that also led to the development of nuclear weapons, atomic bombs, and hydrogen bombs.

These weapons are terrible. One great bomb that has been detonated has an explosive energy that is sixteen times greater than that of all of the explosives used in the Second World War.

I don't know how many of these bombs exist. The number such as ten thousand in the United States stock pile and a similar number in the Russian stock pile have been mentioned. I am sure that the United States has enough of these terrible weapons to destroy the world and that Russia has enough to do the same.

We must not have a nuclear war. We must begin to solve international disputes by the application of man's power of reason in a way that is worthy of the dignity of man. We must solve them by arbitration, negotiation, the development of international law, the making of international agreements that will do justice to all nations and to all peoples and will benefit all nations and all people. Now is the time to start.

I feel strongly about this. Some months ago, after I had given a talk in the Graham Memorial Chapel of Washington University in St. Louis, I was encouraged to prepare an appeal to stop bomb tests. Then after this appeal had been signed by more than two thousand American scientists in a period of two weeks, I began to get voluntary expressions of adherence to this appeal from scientists in other countries. I then wrote a few hundred letters to scientists in other countries whom I know and to those whose names I had got out of the scientific literature and reference books, and I received in a few months thousands more of answers, so that on the thirteenth of January of this year I was able to present a petition with nine thousand two hundred thirty-five signatures of scientists in forty-four countries, thirty-six Nobel Laureates, and one hundred one members of the American National Academy of Scientists to the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Radioactive fallout causes damage to the pool of human germ plasm that does result in the birth of an additional number of defective children. I have estimated that the amount of increase in the mutation rate as the result of radioactive fallout from testing carried on at the present rate is one per cent; a one per cent increase in the number of defective children who will be born in the future.

There are every year seventy-five million children born in the world. Two per cent of these children are seriously deficient because of heredity, bad genes, the bad genes that are in the pool of human germ plasm, partially due to the natural radioactivity of cosmic rays, and now being increased by fallout. Two per cent of seventy-five million is one and a half million seriously defective children born each year with various grave diseases that cause them to die shortly after birth or in early childhood, to have mental deficiency of serious physical defects that make them suffer all of their lives or live their lives in a mental institution. One per cent increase in this is fifteen thousand seriously defective children a year. According to my estimates, Dr. Beadle's estimates, and the estimates of Professor James F. Crow of the University of Wisconsin, another distinguished geneticist, this is the number that will be born each year when equilibrium is reached.

Moreover, the amount of testing at the present time corresponds to one large bomb, one superbomb with ten megatons of fission released. We can say, accordingly, that the man who gives the order to test a single large superbomb with high fission yield is dooming fifteen thousand seriously defective children to be born in later generations. Also, there are serious effects on the health of human beings now living, according to the information that is now available.

This is the opinion that I and many of my scientific colleagues, a great many, have..."