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.
