Solly Zuckerman: A Scientist Out of the Ordinary

by John Peyto (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $4.96

  'His great strength was in the application of scientific method to every problem that confronted him, many of them not seen as scientific.' George Porter, Nobel Prize winner 'He was huge...he has no counterpart in your country or in mine today.' Robert McNamara, sometime US Secretary of Defense Solly Zuckerman's early life in South Africa, much of it spent in the open, left him with a lifelong concern for the natural world. His mother, 'an overpowering taskmaster', bred in him the habit of questioning established wisdom. These pressures, having first made him an academic scientist, carried him, amazingly, into the higher reaches of Government both in Britain and America. No other foreigner would ever have been invited to attend meetings of the President's Science Advisory Committee. He advised particularly on strategy of bombing, the peril of nuclear weapons and the hazards caused by human numbers to the land, water and air on which we all depend. He has three main claims to be remembered, separately unusual, in combination unique. First there was his insistent advice to Air Chief Marshal Tedder and General Eisenhower that the security and success of the Normandy Landings required the paralysis of the French rail network which would otherwise be available to carry German reinforcements. Second was his part in dislodging the idea, current in NATO in 1960, that nuclear weapons could be used in war. If they were, there would be no winners. Thirdly, the existence in the University of East Anglia of a school of environmental sciences, as good as anything to be found in the world, is the product of his vision of forty years ago. The key to Solly Zuckerman was the breadth of his science and the personal authority that made his advice count. 'He was unique,' wrote Lord Dainton. 'No scientist this century can match [his] influence on governments in peace or war. Embraced by the Establishment, he could stand aloof from it and be its severest critic.'