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Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Peace in 1962 for organizing an international
campaign to ban nuclear bomb testing, culminating in a
petition to the United Nations signed by approximately
10,000 scientists in 49 countries demanding an immediate end
to nuclear weapon testing. This and his persistent appeals
to the superpower leaders, explaining the malignancies and
birth malformations that radioactive fallout would bring,
and asserting that man has no right to destroy the
world, paved the way for the signing of the nuclear test ban
treaty by Kennedy and Khrushchev, which Pauling helped
draft. When President Kennedy invited him to a dinner
honoring Nobel Laureates, the professor spent the day of the
reception demonstrating outside the White House against
atomic bomb tests and that evening danced with the First
Lady at the reception. Pauling also refused to lend his
genius to the development of the atomic bomb during the
second world war, despite intense pressure from the federal
government and the alluring prospect of unlimited funding
and prestige. In 1946 he was asked to serve on the Emergency
Committee of Atomic Scientists by its chairman, Professor
Einstein. Pauling’s principled stand in resisting nuclear
proliferation and weapons experimentation during the
irrational excesses of the McCarthy era made him a target of
federal investigatory committees and violent threats, and
caused him to be denied a passport to travel oversees and
branded a communist spy. His engagement and leadership in
the cause of world peace, including writing a book titled
No More War (1958) along with his nutritional research,
establish him in my opinion as one of the 20th century's
great humanitarians. |