PHILIP MORRISON, 1915-2005

Philip Morrison, the physicist, Manhattan Project veteran, arms
control activist and science educator, died over the weekend.

Like few others, Morrison's life embodied the travails of the nuclear
age and pointed beyond it. He personally assembled the first atomic
bomb and was among the first Americans to visit Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. He went on to become a leading critic of nuclear weapons
policy.

Having been a member of the Communist Party from 1936 to 1942, he was
also an object of suspicion and hostility that made his professional
life at Cornell University precarious throughout the 1950s. In 1953,
he was summoned to testify before the Senate Internal Security
Subcommittee, where he took the "diminished Fifth," i.e., he spoke
willingly about his own beliefs and opinions, not taking the Fifth
Amendment, but he declined to discuss the views of others. Life
Magazine published his picture in an article on America's fifty
leading "Dupes and Fellow Travelers." (cf. Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory
Tower, p. 151; Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety,
p. 274).

As one of the original atomic scientists, Morrison helped establish
the Federation of American Scientists in 1945 and was its chairman
from 1973 to 1976. Shortly before his death, he had agreed to
prepare an FAS obituary for his friend and colleague Hans Bethe, but
sadly did not complete it.

Aside from his own considerable scientific achievements, Morrison was
perhaps best known to the public as a science educator. His prolific
writings for Scientific American and other outlets helped teach
generations of readers to observe and to think.

See "Philip Morrison, 89, Builder of First Atom Bomb, Dies" by Dennis
Overbye, New York Times, April 26:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/26/science/26morrison.html

Morrison described the bombing of Hiroshima and anticipated the
effects of a future nuclear strike in a 1946 article entitled "If the
Bomb Gets Out of Hand" from the FAS bestseller of the time "One World
or None." It may be found here:

http://www.fas.org/oneworld/morrison.pdf