2019 Szilard Lectureship Award recipient - Scientists and Today’s Struggles Against Nuclear Weapons: What Would Szilard Do?

Long standing arms control and nonproliferation arrangements intended to forestall, halt, reverse and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons programs are unraveling and prospects for near-term progress on this critical issue appear bleak. Alongside ambitious plans for modernization and further development of nuclear arsenals and production complexes, for some states the conditions for nuclear weapons use seem to be broadening rather than shrinking. One potentially hopeful development, the 2017 United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, has elicited opposition rather than support from most nuclear-armed states. The turn away from restraint towards retrenchment of nuclear weapons and warfighting postures exposes some of the inherent contradictions in the project of arms control as a way to end the threat of nuclear war. This talk will look at what role scientists can play in the current conjuncture with a focus on lessons that might usefully be learned from the organizing initiatives involving Leo Szilard, a pioneer in efforts by physicists as citizen-scientists to transcend nationalism and to bring science and democracy to bear on the challenge of reducing and eliminating the risks from nuclear weapons.