Linus Pauling: Dr. Teller has said that peace cannot be obtained by wishing for it. I agree completely. I am working for it. We have to
work for it. We are not going to achieve peace without starting to solve with world's problems by developing international
law and making international agreements that are safe, safe for every nation in the world, that do justice to all the nations
of the world.
But we need to work, we need to put into the work, the effort for these international agreements an amount of work that is
comparable to that of the 40 billion dollars a year that we put into armaments. We need to have great amounts of discussion,
conferences between scientists and specialists of all sorts of America and Russia, top level conferences - but also lower
conferences - until a satisfactory agreement has been reached.
The Russians have proposed that there be a cessation, an agreement, to stop bomb tests, with a satisfactory system of controls
and inspection. And we have proposed that there be the same sort of agreement, including also the stopping of further stockpiling
of atomic weapons. I have verified this with Mr. Stassen, in a talk with him last month. Now, I am sure that it is possible
to achieve a reasonable compromise between these that will be acceptable to all nations, that will decrease the danger of
the outbreak of a cataclysmic war, will also stop the damage that is being done to future generations and to the health of
human beings who are now living.
About Khrushchev saying that "We shall bury you." We have to get along wtih the Russians, or be killed. The estimates made
by Dr. Kellogg in his testimony before the Congressional Subcommittee on Radiation Damage was that an attack on the United
States with 250 nuclear weapons would lead to 72 million people killed at the end of 2 months, 21 million seriously injured,
58 million still living. Hundreds of millions of people would be killed.
Dr. Teller would like to see nuclear wars fought in such a way that not so many people are killed, only the young men - the
tens of millions, perhaps, of young men who make up our armies - and those few tens of millions perhaps rather than hundreds
of millions of civilians who cannot be protected against that, even with an expensive system of underground shelters.
I didn't interpret the statement that Khrushchev made, "We shall bury you," in the way that Dr. Teller did. It seems to me
from its context, that he was saying that socialism, communism, in the world, will bury capitalism, not by war, but just through
the development of the political systems in various contries. I of course do not want this to happen. I don't like this idea.
I believe that we need to have different kinds of political systems, that we need to have different nations. But the way to
settle the problem of the differences is not to kill off most of the people in the world, or a large fraction of the people
in the world with these terrible nuclear weapons.
