Henry W. Kendall

Constraints on the expansion of the global food supply.

The human race now appears to be getting close to the limits of global food productive capacity based on present technologies. Substantial damage already has been done to the biological and physical systems that we depend on for food production. This damage is continuing and in some areas is accelerating. Because of its direct impact on global food production, injury and loss of arable land has become one of the most urgent problems facing humanity. Of these problems, this is perhaps the most neglected. Controlling these damaging activities and increasing food production must now receive priority and resources commensurate with their importance if humanity is to avoid harsh difficulties in the decades ahead.

Accidental Nuclear War

If nuclear war breaks out in the coming decade or two, it will probably be by accident. The threat of a cold-blooded, calculated first strike is vanishing, but beneath the calm surface of constructive diplomacy among the traditional nuclear rivals lurks the danger of unpremeditated use of nuclear weapons. The accidental, unauthorized or inadvertent use of these weapons has become the most plausible path to nuclear war.

Bioengineering of Crops

The primary objectives of the World Bank’s international program are the alleviation of poverty, malnutrition and human misery in developing nations while encouraging and supporting a transition to environmentally sustainable activities. The issue of providing adequate food, based on sustainable agricultural practices, looms large in gaining these objectives, for failure in this area virtually guarantees failure to meet other objectives. It would make certain continued misery for many of our fellow human beings. Agricultural systems are already under stress and will become more so as populations continue to swell and the need for increased food supplies swells with them.

The Fallacy of Star Wars

The invention of nuclear weapons was the most dramatic technological breakthrough in military history. The destruction of Hiroshima, just six years after the discovery of nuclear fission, inaugurated the nuclear era. In 1945 only the United States could make atomic weapons, and the military muscle built to defeat fascism appeared ready to enforce a Pax Americana: the U.S. armed forces controlled the seas and airways that any potential attacker would have to cross. America was totally secure.

Deep Inelastic Scattering: Experiments on the Proton and the Observation of Scaling

In late 1967 the first of a long series of experiments on highly inelastic electron scattering was started at the two-mile accelerator at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) using liquid hydrogen and, later, liquid deuterium targets. Carried out by a collaboration from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and SLAC, the object was to look at large-energy-loss scatterTM ing of electrons from the nucleon (the generic name for the proton and neutron), a process soon to be dubbed deep inelastic scattering. Beam energies up to 21 GeV, the highest electron energies then available, and large electron fiuxes made it possible to study the nucleon to very much smaller distances than had previously been possible. Because quantum electrodynamics provides an explicit and well-understood description of the interaction of electrons with charges and magnetic moments, electron scattering had, by 1968, already been shown to

Tests of scaling of the proton electromagnetic structure functions

Abstract Deep-inelastic structure functions W 1 and W 2 have been extracted from electron-proton scattering cross sections that were measured in recent experiments at SLAC. The structure functions display deviations from scaling in the variable ω in the kinetic range 1.5 ⩽ ω ⩽ 3.0 and 2 ⩽ Q 2 ⩽ 15 GeV 2 .

Alternative Futures for the Department of Energy National Laboratories

The Department of Energy’s management of its program for dealing with the radioactive and hazardous wastes at its former nuclear weapons production sites and the national laboratories has been criticized for its expense and the slow pace of cleanup. The program is of great size and the problems that plague it, developed over decades, are acute and pervasive. Involving the national laboratories in more sweeping ways is an important part of a number of needed improvements.

Quenching the wild wells of Kuwait

We have attempted to provide an analysis of the problems and constraints related to controlling the types of wild wells encountered in Kuwait. We hope that new ways of dealing with such catastrophes will emerge from our discussion. But it is difficult to prepare for a disaster that is likely to happen to somebody else, in a community in which interests are divided and even opposed. In the case of Kuwait, there have certainly been missed opportunities. For instance, if a share in the future production of several wells had been given to one company (and that replicated tenfold), with the proviso that the methods used to control their wells would be available to be practiced by others, progress might have been made more rapidly and with higher confidence. As

The Failure of Nuclear Power

50 million a day was being lost in Kuwait, considerable money could have been saved by a fast response to the problem. Not only have important resources been destroyed by the action of Iraq, they have been unnecessarily squandered by an inability to permit technical measures to be implemented to control the wild wells of Kuwait.

Structure of the Proton and the Neutron

This article is concerned with one of the largest scale technological failures that has ever occurred in a major nation: the failure of nuclear power. Actively promoted in the period following World War II, nuclear power appeared to have unlimited prospects as a source of electricity. Today this promise is unfulfilled, the nuclear dream blighted. The public is no longer in favor of the technology, fearing catastrophic accident, and the electric utilities have long since abandoned new plant construction, owing to unreliable plant operation, uncontrolled costs, and public opposition. Nuclear power has caused severe financial troubles for numerous utilities and has left the country with far too many reactors which produce uneconomical electricity. The future seems to hold only a slow decline for nuclear power, possibly punctuated by a disruptive accident.