The RFF Forum for 1959 took the form of six public lectures and decision programs this winter. The fields of research successively considered were these: in January, Genetics, then Weather Modification; February, Mineral Exploration and Chemical Technology; and finally Nuclear Energy and Outer Space, in March. Even these few briefed passages from the first two programs may serve in some part to indicate how spheres of inquiry once considered far removed are drawn into merging circles of common concern, under impact of related findings in this Atomic Age.
To What End?
A third fewer farm people produced over 55 percent more farm products in 1958 than in 1938, while the US population increased a little more than a third. But how much further can the process go? In the United States? In the World?
—Oris V. Wells
Genetic Differentials
World population now increases at the rate of about 48 million a year. Probably 30 million are births where the income per capita is less than one tenth that of the United States and where the percentage of illiteracy is more than half. These 30 million, born into areas where the people have seen their misery steadily increasing year by year, will, as their numbers soar, become the most powerful political force in the world.
Ten years hence there will be at least one and a third billion people whose standard of living, already low, will have gone down as the standard of living in the United States, Western Europe, the Soviet Union, Canada, and Australia will have gone up.
The dropping of the atom bomb is not probable but the terrific tension resulting from this growing discrepancy is certain.
—Henry A. Wallace
Most Frightening
In the discussion period, Mr. Beadle, who of had flown here from England to present the opening paper of the Forum, was asked if he could clarify by apparent divergences of scientific opinion on the effects upon human populations of fallout from nuclear explosions. This was his reply:
If the products of nuclear devices—weapons, reactors, and others—are not contained, they pollute man's environment and will surely increase his mutation rate. No mutations arising in this way may be transmitted to future generations if they occur in the germ plasm prior to reproduction. With present methods and current levels of testing, it is calculated that the mutation rate in man may be creased by as much as one percent...
"This is a small increase, but it means that for every 100 mutations without testing something like 101 may occur with it ... In terms of absolute numbers of new transmitted mutations per generation on a world basis, it may affect as many as 200,000 individuals...
"There is a considerable uncertainty in these calculations, and geneticists cannot now say how these mutations will be distributed with respect to the various categories of final effects. Some will be eliminated in ways that will cause little damage in terms of human suffering or social burden. Others will surely be more serious.
"The relative importance attached to the genetic hazards resulting from nuclear weapons testing tends to vary among individuals — including geneticists and other scientists—according to their attitudes toward military, political, moral and other aspects of the nuclear weapons problem. Those who believe that ultimate survival is likely to depend on great capability in nuclear weapons tend to minimize the genetic cost in testing them. On the other hand, those who hold that abolishment of nuclear weapons is both desirable and attainable as a means of averting global catastrophe are inclined to use genetic hazards of testing as one of their important arguments. That summarizes the genetic side of the problem, it seems to me.
"Speaking now as a citizen, I look upon the continued buildup of nuclear weapons as a most frightening business, partly because testing them creates hazards, but mainly because having them by more and more nations constitutes a risk of all-out war that seems in-tolerable to me. I sincerely hope, therefore, that an effective way to reverse present trends will be found—and soon."
Of Weather and Climate
The basic paper on Weather Modification, at the second session of the Forum, was presented by Horace R. Byers. "Rainmaking quackery or pagan ritual," he remarked in opening, dates from the Stone Age, and the beginning of scientific weather modification from 1946 only. At present: "In Cloud physics we have a case of Where people tried to run before they had learned to walk. Now we need desperately to go through some of the beginning steps." Even so—
"As we find ourselves releasing thermonuclear energy in amounts of the same order of magnitude as the energy released by small tropical storms, we cannot help but think that weather modification, not just cloud modification, is com-ing within our grasp."
Beyond that, climate modification is a demonstrable possibility, made manifest in 1883 by an Act of God. Then—
The Volcano Krakatoa
in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra spewed forth the greatest eruption of modern times. The volcanic dust was noticeable in the atmosphere for more than three years. It modified the weather of most of the Earth to the extent of lowering the average annual temperature observed at stations then in existence by about 1° F. Similar effects have been observed from other great eruptions...
The Ruptured Troposphere
"The first thermonuclear explosion in the Marshall Islands in 1954," said Senator Clinton P. Anderson in his supporting paper, "not only vaporized a small coral island, it ruptured the troposphere, spewing into the stratosphere countless tons of radioactive debris. We have proof that this debris is being precipitated in both hemispheres..
"Just as it may have seemed that something was at last to be done about the weather, along came an invisible radioactive rain to invade our bones, affect our genes and thus tamper with our evolution...
"Many military experts may regard the ICBM as the ultimate weapon, but weather warfare may well be. .. What if it lay in the power of another country to deny us at will our drinking water or our wheat crop, to alternately freeze us or burn us up; to flood our cities and scorch our farms?"
Program Note: The three who lectured on Genetics are especially notable products of Land Grant Universities. George Beadle, now on leave from the California Institute of Technology as a visiting professor at Oxford, took his first degrees at the University of Nebraska; Henry A. Wallace at Iowa State; Oris Wells, of the Agricultural Marketing Service, at New Mexico A and M.
Horace R. Byers is head of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Chicago. Clinton Anderson, formerly Secretary of Agriculture and since Senator from New Mexico, serves as Alternate Chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.
Their entire papers, and fourteen others presented later in the Forum, are being made into a book to be published this year by The Johns Hopkins Press.
A version of this article appeared in print in the May 1959 issue of Resources magazine.
