January 18, 1966

Mrs. Edith Smolt

P. O. Box 221

Summerland, California

Dear Mrs. Smolt:

I thank you for your letters, the enclosed material, and the check. It was a pleasure to see you, if only for a few minutes.

The article that you mention as being enclosed with your first letter was not there, and I do not know what it was about.

The possibility of a nuclear-powered desalination plant close to the city of Santa Barbara is a disturbing one. I am opposed to the construction of any large nuclear plants in populated areas. I think that these plants are hazardous, and that the hazard should be kept to a minimum by locating them far from thickly populated areas.

I am returning the government bulletin on Nutritive Value of Foods and the other material to you herewith. I am sure that a proper diet is important for health. I supplement my own diet by vitamins that I purchase from Safeway — I think that these vitamin preparations are as good as the more expensive ones. I was on a special diet for a number of years. My wife knows a great deal about nutrition.

Sincerely yours,

Linus Pauling

mjh

P.S. I see that you have a handwritten note about atomic accident, Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 6, 1965. I don't think that it is proper to call that accident an atomic accident. It was an accident in a physics laboratory, in which there was a liquid hydrogen bubble chamber, not a nuclear reactor. However, there have been a number of accidents with nuclear reactors. Three men were killed in such an accident in Idaho. I have a book on this subject.

January 18, 1966

Dr. Peter Pauling

University Chemistry Department

University College

Gower Street WC 1

London WC 1, England

Dear Peter:

Mama and I were very pleased to have received your letter of 11 January. We had been wondering how you and Julia and the children were getting along.

We have both been troubled somewhat more than usually by colds this winter. I have had an infected sinus for about six weeks. I was given a course of antibiotics by a physician in Cambria, about three weeks ago, and last week the Santa Barbara Nose and Throat Specialist washed out one of my sinuses, introduced a sulfa drug into it, and gave me another course of antibiotics, which will be finished today. I feel much better, and hope that this ends the difficulty.

We are now spending about two weeks per month in Santa Barbara and then two weeks in Salmon Creek. Last week we were in Pasadena for three or four days. I introduced Senator Wayne Morse at a dinner at the Huntington, and then gave a short speech and introduced him at a meeting on Vietnam in the Pasadena Civic Auditorium — over 3,000 people, with several hundred turned away.

I am just doing the final bit on a short version of The Nature of the Chemical Bond, to be put out by Cornell University Press. I am writing some exercises, and hope to get finished today or tomorrow. Then I plan to continue work on the structure of nuclei, and probably in May or June to begin work on the preparation of the third edition of General Chemistry. Barclay is going to revise a few sections for me.

I have given up the idea of writing a high school chemistry text. I am willing to consider doing the job jointly with you, if you are really interested and will do a major part of the work. I am sure that the market is not saturated, and that a book somewhat livelier and shorter than the two cooperative productions now being widely used would have a good chance of success.

I think that I could work on this job at the same time that I am preparing the third edition of General Chemistry, and that this would be useful, in that I could plan the third edition of General Chemistry to fit onto the high school book and plan the high school book to be a satisfactory introduction to it. We would have first to outline the high school book, deciding on the topics to be taken up. I suggest that I would then dictate a draft of the various chapters, and that you would carry on from that point, revising, arranging about illustrations — getting photographs and having drawings made, and writing problems. I doubt that the job could be done in six months, and it is not clear from your letter whether you have six months in mind or a shorter or longer period. I do not think that we should tackle the problem if you were planning to come to Santa Barbara only for the summer — I would be willing to start out on it only if you would work for six months or a longer time.

On the other hand, I would like to propose giving a job to you, to help me in my research and writing, during the three months of the summer, if you would like to come over for just that period. I should probably want you to help me with my work on nuclear structure, but I am not sure about that.

I am sending you reprints of three of my papers on nuclear structure — the others are not available. I may have sent you a set already, in which case you can give this set to someone else.

If you come to California to work on the book, you should, I would think, settle down in Santa Barbara, in order to make use of the library of the University of California in Santa Barbara. I don't know what chance there would be for you to get an appointment at UCSB during the summer months, but there is the possibility of it, and a good possibility, I think, if you were to stay for a longer time.

I look forward to hearing from you about these matters. Mama and I would be very pleased to see you and Julia and the children again, and especially pleased, of course, to see you.

Much love,