[Most of the 29 who signed the
letter are physicists, and many of them have held what the government calls Q
clearances — granting access to a special category of secret information that
bears on the design of nuclear arms and is considered equivalent to the
military’s top secret security clearance.]
Twenty-nine of the nation’s top
scientists — including Nobel laureates, veteran makers of nuclear arms and
former White House science advisers — wrote to President
Obama on Saturday to
praise the Iran deal, calling it innovative and
stringent.
The letter, from some of the world’s most knowledgeable experts
in the fields of nuclear
weapons and arms
control, arrives as Mr. Obama is lobbying Congress, the American public and the
nation’s allies to support the
agreement.
The two-page letter may give the White House arguments a
boost after the blow Mr. Obama suffered on Thursday when Senator Chuck Schumer
of New York, a Democrat and among the most influential Jewish voices in
Congress, announced he would oppose the
deal, which calls for Iran to curb its nuclear program and allow inspections in return for an
end to international oil and financial sanctions.
The first signature on the
letter is from Richard L. Garwin, a physicist who helped design the world’s
first hydrogen bomb and has long advised Washington
Also
signing is Siegfried S. Hecker, a Stanford professor who, from 1986 to 1997,
directed the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico
Other prominent signatories include Freeman Dyson of Princeton , Sidney Drell of Stanford and
Rush D. Holt, a physicist and former member of Congress who now leads the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest
general scientific society.
Most of the 29 who signed the letter are physicists, and many of
them have held what the government calls Q clearances — granting access to a
special category of secret information that bears on the design of nuclear arms
and is considered equivalent to the military’s top secret security clearance.
Many of them have advised Congress, the White House or federal
agencies over the decades. For instance, Frank von Hippel, a Princeton physicist, served as assistant
director for national security in the White House Office of Science and
Technology Policy during the Clinton
The
five Nobel laureates who signed are Leon N. Cooper of Brown University Boston University University of California Santa Barbara
The letter uses the words
“innovative” and “stringent” more than a half-dozen times, saying, for
instance, that the Iran accord has “more stringent constraints than any
previously negotiated nonproliferation framework.”
“We congratulate you and your team,” the letter says in its
opening to Mr. Obama, adding that the Iran Middle East and can serve as a guidepost for future nonproliferation
agreements.”
In a technical judgment that seemed more ominous than some other
assessments of Tehran Iran
Dr.
Garwin and Dr. Holt were the main organizers behind the group that wrote and
signed the letter, according to two of the letter’s signatories. The letter
comes amid a flurry of organized efforts by supporters and opponents of the
agreement to shape the public debate ahead of congressional action on the deal.
The body of the letter praises the technical features of the Iran Iran
It also focuses on whether Iran
The deal’s plan for resolving disputes, the letter says, greatly
mitigates “concerns about clandestine activities.” It hails the 24-day cap on
Iranian delays to site investigations as “unprecedented,” adding that the
agreement “will allow effective challenge inspection for the suspected
activities of greatest concern.”
It also welcomes as without precedent the deal’s explicit
banning of research on nuclear weapons “rather than only their manufacture,” as
established in the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, the top arms-control
agreement of the nuclear age.
The letter notes criticism that
the Iran Tehran
