Friday, April 9, 2010
The New START Treaty, signed yesterday in Prague by Obama and Medvedev,
extends bilateral arms reduction agreements between the U.S. and Russia
begun in 1991. It will limit operationally deployed nuclear warheads to
1,500, which is down nearly two-thirds from the first START treaty in
1991, and 30 percent lower than the 2002 Moscow Treaty. It also reduces
the number of delivery systems. Many thousands more nuclear weapons are
not deployed. Its difficult to explain to todays students how two
seemingly enlightened peoples could have gotten into a standoff based on
Mutually Assured Destruction. I cant even explain to myself how I came
to spend ten years of my life in the nuclear weapons program. Meanwhile,
Iran proudly unveils its new uranium centrifuges today.
As told by Kieron Humphrey on BBC News, Zambian farmer Elleman Mumbia
broke with local custom to practice scientific "conservation farming." His
tiny farm flourished. Some neighbors muttered about juju (voodoo), but he
has become something of a hero on national media. The BBC story stops
there, but a sadder chapter is being written. In his 1970 Nobel Peace
Prize acceptance speech, Norman Borlaug said, "We are dealing with two
opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic
power of human reproduction." K.H. von Hoffmann, who called my attention
to the BBC story, points out that Mr. Mumbia has six children (about
average in Zambia). The farm is too small to be subdivided. Most of his
children will look for jobs in the city and end up in the slums, as young
people are doing all over Africa.
The National Science Board, established by Congress as a national science
policy body, oversees NSF and provides independent science policy advice
to the President and Congress. It issues a huge biennial report, Science
and Engineering Indicators, which is a compendium of quantitative data on
the science enterprise around the world. The results are disturbing. In
their understanding of science, polls found, most Americans are falling
behind, even though much of the progress was made by American scientists
and engineers. Congress needs to hear these facts. Instead, poll
questions dealing with the origin of the universe and evolution were
simply excised from the report The board member who took the lead in
removing the text was John T. Bruer, a philosopher with close ties to the
Vatican. I hope that Science will publish the apocryphal text so we may
judge its relevance for ourselves.
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