Physics is Fun Memoires of Richard Wilson Version of September 25th 2009

NIGEC
When I was a student at Oxford, wither the last year of undergraduate work or the first year of graduate work, I went to the lectures on meteorology by Professor Dobson. I still have my notes of his lectures. I became aware that the earth is a greenhouse, When I arranged a special session on Energy policy at an American Physical Society meeting in Cambridge, MA in January 1972 or 1973, I got someone to discuss the issue. I found later that Glenn Seaborg had mentioned possible global warming at a Congressional hearing on nuclear energy a year or two before. In 1977,1978, 1999, and 2000 my friend Nino Zichichi asked me to join Professor Fernando Amman in running an ‘International School of Energetics” in Erice, Sicily, and one of the issues we emphasized then was the absence of greenhouse gases when nuclear energy is used.
About that time, my friend Leonard Hamilton, an epidemiologist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, from whom I had a small subcontract for work on air pollution and risks generally, suggested that we invite Kevin Mullen from the Policy Division of US Department of Energy to spend a couple of years with us. DOE would pay half his salary and BNL would increase our subcontract for the other half. This seemed fine. But DOE was slow at billing, and when BNL wanted a full accounting by December 31st , Harvard had not yet received a request for Kevin’s salary. I tried to get Dr Edmund Crouch’s salary (which had been paid by a grant from a foundation, put instead on the BNL contract, but although it was well within the scope of the contract BNL objected. I had no help from either the Kennedy School Administration or Harvard’s Office of Research Contracts who should have found a way of accruing the money.. So I lost that $30,000 or so. Then DOE came in with the request (late) to pay Kevin’s half salary. I was stuck. I put little bits of his salary on various other funds. Kevin pushed me into running a short course for Risk Analysis. He did the organization and we had over 60 people the first time: VPs of companies and Assistant Secretaries of government agencies. The participants paid. I put 2 months of Kevin’s salary on that project and so on. We ran the course for a couple of years from the Kennedy School which was an administrative hassle, but then I decided to organize it as one of the short courses in the School of Public Health. I stepped out of the organization in about 1992, but it remains, 40 years later, as a very successful short course and makes money for the school of public health.
Kevin never forgot how I had to scrape to meet the Harvard commitment and compared it with the ease with which money can go to National Laboratories, particular if there appears to be a surplus in the DOE budget at the end of a year. So when a representative from Davis, California, and representative Lindy Boggs (Chairman of the House Energy Committee) of Louisiana, wanted a project, he suggested a National Risk Analysis Center with a branch at Harvard. One idea was that DOE could give money to the new Center as easily as to a national laboratory and then pass on to the universities in the region. This project later was moved out of the policy section at DOE to the Science section under Dr Ari Patrinos, and became the National Institute for Global Environment Change (NIGEC) with 4 - later 5 regional centers in UC Davis, Tulane University (Louisiana), University of Indiana and one to be decided in the northeast for which Harvard competed. After a lot of work in 1989 the National Institute of Global Environmental Change (486) started and I became the Director of the Northeast Regional Center from 1990-1994.
The change in the NIGEC mandate from policy to science came as NIGEC started in the summer of 1989. This seems to have been decided in the Department of Energy when the program was put under the Office of Science with Dr Ari Patrinos in charge. While the first 3 regional Centers at Tulane University, UC Davis, and University of Indiana were congressionally mandated, Harvard has a policy of not accepting congressionally mandated (pork barrel) funds. So the Northeast Center was open to competition. Fortunately we had an excellent group of people in the Cambridge area, and Dr Steven Wofsy was, and is, particularly important. We decided to have 4 prongs. One based on the Harvard Forest on how northeastern forests, which are still recovering from the deforestation that went on till the end of the 19th century, soak up carbon dioxide (for which Steve was looking for money) together with SUNY - Albany and the University of New Hampshire, A policy section I headed with help from Professors Fiering and Rogers at the Division of Applied Sciences, Harvard University, scientists from Carnegie Mellon University, and MIT. A third on basic Science with Mike McElroy of Earth and Planetary Sciences involvement from MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and I cannot remember the 4th. The fact that we were trying to integrate workers on climate change in the northeast somewhat helped us win the Center. Also, there is no doubt that Steve’s work was the most important. Unfortunately the choice of the first national director, located at UC Davis was not a good one.
The first, and only, test of Kevin Mullen’s basic idea came when the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) wanted to give Myron Fiering and Peter Rogers $200,000 to study the potential impact of global warming on the ACE work - dams and reservoirs and so on. It seems ideal that it should be additional money passed through NIGEC. It could get to NIGEC overnight, and be passed on to Harvard as appropriate.. But the National Director balked and said that the project would have to go through a lengthy review - by which time the fiscal year would be over and the money would be gone. I had some difficulty in welding my group on policy into a whole. We had at Harvard, myself, Professors Fiering and Rogers and a research fellow. I added a Senior Research fellow from Carnegie Mellon, and a couple of Research Scientists from Wood Hole Oceanographic Institutions, and someone from Yale. So when I went on sabbatical leave in 1994 and the overall budget was cut to accommodate a 5th regional center at the University of Wyoming, I abandoned the attempt to keep a coherent policy group; we abolished the policy prong and Steve Wofsy, by that time a Professor, took over. NIGEC lasted another 10 years.
The NIGEC experience got me well acquainted with a rival set of arguments. On one side are the scientists who argue that global warming is happening and it will be dangerous. On the other side, those who argue that the evidence is not rigorous and the probably is not urgent. This is one more example of the fundamental dilemma of science in public policy. To what extent should one demand rigorous scientific proof before acting?
But I never forgot the discussions of the best policy alternatives if one decides to take preventive action. I note one alternative in particular. Scientists understand that carbon comes out of the ground in only a few places. Coal mines. Oil wells. Natural Gas fields, and even travels through recognized ports of entry. Within a year all the carbon is burnt and becomes carbon dioxide, but the time scale for carbon dioxide to change the climate is decades. This suggests that addressing carbon as it enters the surface pool is a far simpler, and cheaper, method of control than taxes or specific laws. Klaus Lackner enthused me about this again in 1998 and we have written about it since (809, 899, 902). The amount of carbon can be limited by demanding a permit to bring carbon out of the ground, and steadily reducing the number of permits, by carbon taxes or a cap and trade system with a steadily reducing cap. Putting carbon back into the ground in a permanent way (sequestration) can be addressed by issuing a certificate of sequestration as being the negative of a permit. Both Klaus Lackner and I prefer permits because they are more fair, but economists tend to prefer a cap and trade system because the existing “polluters” do not immediately have to change their ways. Strange it seems to me that in 2008, that there is not one law or proposed law on the statute books in the world that recognizes this simplicity of the carbon cycle. The 2006 report of Sir Nicolas Stern to the UK government does not discuss it. Nobel Peace prize winner Al Gore seems not to understand it although his mentor, my colleague and friend Roger Revelle, agreed 30 years ago that it was a good idea. It seems important to urge this continually - as I am doing.
Armenia and Azerbaijan; May 25-29, 1991
I made my first visit to Armenia in 1965 as a part of a one month “Academy” exchange visit to the USSR. There I gave lectures at the Physics Institute in a building which now houses the US Embassy. I met a number of physicists. I had met Valentine (Valodya) Kharitonov, a Russian, in the Kiev meeting in 1959 and sent him 40 reports on the building of the Cambridge Electron Accelerator which they proposed to, and did, copy. I met Hamlet Badalyan a native Armenian and Sam Kheifetz, who although from the area was Jewish. The teen aged daughter of Sam Kheifetz, Leeka Kmheifetz, guided us on a couple of sightseeing tours. Later, in the 1980s, I met Leeka at a meeting on effects of radiation in Colorado. She had come to the USA in the 1970s with her parents, and became an epidemiologist. We went to Lake Sevan, north of the capital Yerevan, where there was a monastery on an island in the middle of the lake. We went to an old church at Gegard and to the cathedral, the center of the Armenian religion at Echmiadzin. At Echmiadzin I became aware of the Armenian genocide about which I had known next to nothing before. Strangely, I was until then unaware of the number of ethnic Armenians in Watertown, MA or around Fresno, CA whose ancestors had fled the genocide. I read up on this afterwards and realized how much my education had been missing. I became aware of the genocide of 1916, and earlier awful behavior of the Turks in 1897. I read Toynbee who was, I believe, the first person to call the Turkish behavior a genocide - as indeed it was. I remember Hitler’s purported remark in 1934 when discussing his planned extermination of the Jews. “Who remembers the Armenians?”
At the time of the Armenian earthquake, in 1988 I believe, Gorbachev had begun his “perestroika”. There were demonstrations in Armenia asking that the area of Nogorny Karabagh be reallocated to Armenia instead of Azerbaijan, because most of its citizens were ethnic Armenians rather than ethnic Azeris. Five of the demonstrators were arrested. Gorbachev cut short a visit to Washington, DC, to go to the earthquake zone and offer help from the central government. He was met with cries: “free the Karabagh five.” That was politically too soon; and the central Communist Party had other issues and they did nothing. But demonstrations continued. About 150 ethnic Armenians were massacred in Sumgait on the Caspian sea just north of Baku. Centuries old ethnic squabbles, kept underground during the rigid Stalin era, resurfaced. Fighting broke out particularly at the end of April 1991
In May 1991, at the first International Andrei Sakharov Memorial Congress "Peace, Progress and Human Rights" an Armenian politician, whose name now escapes me, told the session on “the Rule of Law in USSR and Eastern Europe” about the fighting on the Armenian-Azeri border, particularly 5 weeks before. Elena Bonner had the idea of assembling a small ‘expert’ team from the conference as ‘fact finders”. Russians were not to go except as an interpreter. Alas we had no Muslim in the group. Adnan Shihab-Eldin would have liked to come along, but he had an important meeting with the Emir of Kuwait and had to get home. We stopped the conference an hour or so early to catch the flight to Yerevan.
At that time the Soviet Union was on the verge of breaking up. Aeroflot would only allow one plane at a time to go from Moscow to Yerevan, and the next would not leave till the first came back. They were afraid of being their airplanes being captured by the Armenians, as the Uzbeks did effectively in August later that year. All the planes were full. We entered this plane, put our bags in the hold, and walked up to the main deck. We arrived and about 8 of us stood in the aisle. Eight Armenians gave up their seats and stood in the aisle instead. The (woman) pilot came back and said something in Armenian which I assumed was “I will be damned if I will fly this plane with all you people standing”. I was assured by an Armenian that this indeed was effectively what she said. So all 8 sat down on the steps to the hold and we went to Armenia.
As a foreigner in the USSR I was always careful. I took no position on the political question of which administrative entity shall rule any individual person in the USSR and in particular of ethnic Armenian or ethnic Turkish origin. But as I pointed out a few days later to General Yazov, the Defense Minister of the USSR, the USSR was a member of the UN and signed various treaties including several on human rights. Azerbaijan and Armenia were, and unless explicitly rejected at the time of independence still are bound by these treaties, and are subject to all international laws on human rights. Since my scientific visit in 1966, the 50th anniversary of the genocide, I became acquainted with the turbulent history of the Armenian peoples and all the Caucasian peoples over the centuries. It was just after that the 1986 Armenia earthquake that the massacre occurred at Sumgait north of Baku. Whole Armenian families totaling a few hundred people were killed. It is noteworthy that in the late 19th century oil was discovered near Baku and oil engineers, both Armenian and Russian, emigrated there. Lev Landau, the famous physicist was born here, to a Russian father After Sumgait many Armenians and Russians had left Azerbaijan, some by semi forced ejection supervised by the USSR army . I report on one exodus from Getaushen (Tchaikend), below.
By 1991 there were perhaps hundreds of thousands of innocent refugees from both sides. Azeris in Armenia were deported. Armenians in Azerbaijan were being deported. We all agreed that no aspect of the centuries old history with its millions of individual tragedies, is justification for any violation of human rights by either the government of Armenia or the government of Azerbaijan. These governments have the duty to protect the citizens within their territories no matter what their ethnic origin. But as the USSR was falling apart the USSR was having trouble insisting upon it.
The leader of this "group of experts" was Baroness Cox (Lady Caroline but always at her insistence just Caroline) of Queensbury, at that time Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords, United Kingdom. She had been raised to the peerage by Margaret Thatcher because of her fine nursing work in Africa where she was well known for objecting to the slavery that the Sudanese arabs use to subjugate the peripheral populations. We had visas for Erevan and Baku, approval from the USSR, but promises of protection only from the authorities of Armenia. We therefore started our visit in Erevan, Armenia. Although the protection of Azerbaijan authorities was lacking a third small group went to Baku and got no further. Our group went north and another went south to the border of Navechian, an Azeri region half inside Armenia. I and five others went north to a town north of Voskepar . We were shown a small radar station, destroyed a month before, which had been used for guidance of aircraft crossing into Karabagh from Armenia. We interviewed villagers in Voskepar and the regional head of the Armenian KGB. In one case, some of the group talked to a senior Army officer.

Intense fighting had taken place between Voskepar and the neighboring Azeri village of Nishki-Voskepara . Fighting had starte 18 months before, and more recently between April 27th to May 6th 1991. It is perhaps worthy of note that Armenia refused to sign the new Union treaty of April 23rd. There were Soviet internal troops on both sides of the border. On the Armenian side under Captain Baginski and on the Azerbaijani side under Colonel Makarichin. The villagers in Voskepar trusted and entertained Captain Baginski's troops.

On April 27th 1991 firing started from the Azerbaijan side on cars on the Armenian side of the border. The drivers fled on foot. When it was dark, the deputy mayor of the town went to the road junction, to cope with the cars. A Soviet armored car was there and called by radio for instructions: "We are under fire; what shall we do?" "Do not fire". The chief of the regional KGB, Lev Arisimovich, (surname not readable from my notes) gave us "hearsay" evidence that Captain Baginsky was told that this troops would be fired on if they got involved. Three days later the regiment of Soviet internal troops on the Armenian side withdrew. This date was given to us in Voskepar but confirmed by a Soviet general in Erevan.It is perhaps important to note that officers in the Red Army, the USSR army, were mostly Russians. Many Yera sbefore men came from distant republics. When they were needed to keep order in Mongolia, for example, the troops would come from elsewhere; Estonia for example. When order was needed in Azerbaijan the troops might be from Siberia. But, I was told, this changed after the debacle in Afghanistan as middle class Russian families objected to their sons dying in a distant place. Gorbachev made this change in a concession to Yeltsin. So now the soviet troops in Azerbaijan were Azeri.
A detachment (25 or 29 I am not sure which) of Armenian militia, under orders of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Armenia, were coming to Voskepar by a back road at 5 a.m. on 6th May when they were ambushed by two Soviet army helicopters. Eleven were killed and the rest taken prisoner. The Armenians believe the prisoners have been handed over to the Azeri OMON, a local militia group. We saw about six damaged houses in Voskepar. In addition, 20 houses were burned out (by gasoline) and a church near the border with Azerbaijan. No villager dared to go there since.
The whole group, including myself, met refugees from the town of Getaushen (Tchaikend) (3000 inhabitants) who had been deported from western Azerbaijan during the previous month. Among the refugees we met families of ethnic-Armenians held prisoner in Azerbaijan. We met Armenian physicians who had gone to Nagorny-Karabakh to treat the sick. The physicians had been jailed and beaten. We photographed their bruises. A group going to Navechian was told by a (Russian) Soviet army officer who said, among other things, that there were some orders that his men would not obey. When together, we compared notes and corrected minor discrepancies.
There was a remarkable consistency between the stories of individual villagers, and of others. I believe, that this consistency attests to the truth of their stories. During the deportations there were numerous civil rights violations of several types:
- killings

- multiple killings

- beatings

- forced abductions and imprisonments

- rapes

- stealing of property and livestock or buying for an insulting price (a car for 2 roubles!)

- obtaining "voluntary" requests to leave Azerbaijan at gunpoint or by other threats

- tearing ears of girls by forcible removal of earrings.

We found no evidence, in spite of diligent enquiry, that anyone recently deported from the village of Getaushen left it voluntarily. Although most, if not all, of the beatings and killings were carried out by the Azerbaijan OMON, the Soviet Army was clearly not passive. They organized the initial surrounding of the village and then stood aside while the OMON terrorized the villagers. The Soviet Army arranged the transport of the villagers who were left on the Armenian side of the border with only the clothes they were wearing.
I got sunstroke and was sick just after that. I was taken to a restaurant where we rested. After resting over the lunchtime, I rejoined the party at the “eternal fire” commemorating the 1916 genocide. We then met in the office of the President, Ter-Petrossian, or Armenia. In the USSR they had a “hot” telephone where each president could talk to the Presidents of all other republics. Caroline Cox tried to call the President of Azerbaijan to make arrangements for a visit there. She got an assistant. He said so emphatically, in English, there is a war on, that Caroline dropped the phone! Photographs taken by a Japanese businessman in the party show that I was still far from well
We met again at the hotel that night. I realized that we had made a mistake in Voskepar. We had talked to the villagers in Voskepar but had not crossed the border. We had to talk to the people on the other side! To complete our picture, it was necessary to hear the views of the Azeri villagers in the neighboring village of Nishki-Voskepara in Azerbaijan and their OMON. Caroline, who had not been there the previous day, agreed to lead the group to go back the previous day. This time we flew direct to Voskepar, landing the helicopter on a sloping hillside. The Armenian villagers tried to persuade us not to go. "It is dangerous. We cannot protect you." When we were adamant they said: “we will come with you.” “No,” we said “It is more dangerous for you than for us.” The five of use left the villagers behind and set off to walk the 1,5 km to the abandoned church and the OMON headquarters in the school of Nishki-Voskepara just beyond. We had a white dishtowel on a stick as a sign of peace.
It seemed to take a year to walk that distance. One person stopped to pick up some spent USSR cartridges. “No,” said Caroline. “ Let us pick up souvenirs on the way back.” Soon two OMON militia could be seen outside the school on the hilltop, which we had been told, was the Azeri firing point. They had submachine guns, then 5, then 20. Caroline commented “what a crazy way of spending a fine afternoon.” My mind went back to the 7 seconds or so between the time, in 1944, that I saw a U1 missile head on just before it exploded across the street with its 1 -2 ton warhead. I commented that I thought it was safer to go on and pretend that we knew what we were doing than to turn around and be shot in the back. With no incident, we, four plus interpreter, passed the burnt out Armenian church, and climbed the hill to the waiting OMON and Azeri villagers. The Japanese business man with us, loaded with cameras, took a minute or so longer to reach the top of the hill.
We were taken further back to the village itself . Meeting us was Major Mablouda, a major in the OMON. The parents of Major Mablouda, an ethnic Turk, were sent from Georgia to Uzbekhistan in 1944 for which he blames Stalin and Mikoyan. Born in Ferghana in Uzbekhistan, in 1950, he had to leave in 1989 with the Uzbek uprisings. He was a Moslem but not an Uzbek. He arrived in Azerbaijan with no job but could use a gun. It is sad that there should be so many tragedies in the one family. But they do not justify revenge. We were shown the damage to the school and several houses caused by Armenian shells. We asked, but were given no dates of the damage and they seemed over a year old. On the whole, the older damage seemed greater in the Azeri side, but there was more and more recent damage on the Armenian side. The Major gave us a message for the Armenians.
"Tell them we will not give them an inch of our territory. When they were asking in a civil manner we gave them 200,000 hectares. By force they will not get an inch. If they are bad we will be bad. If they are good we will be good." He pointed out an Armenian farmer on the other side of the valley tending to his field. “We could shoot him but if he minds his own business we will not”. Other members of the group got similar statements in other locations.
The Azeris offered us food. I believe that we should have accepted, because breaking bread is so important. Incidentally, I first realized the implications of “breaking bread” when 12 years old when I saw the film starring Robert Donat, of “The Count of Monte Cristo”. The Count deliberately turns down eating anything at a party given by his former lady-love who had married one of the men who betrayed him. But Caroline told Major Mablouda that we had a helicopter waiting. We were driven back to the border in a bus which stopped 3 feet from the border and started to walk back to Voskepar. An Armenian car soon came down (the first for 18 months) and picked us up. We were offered, and accepted, food in Voskepar and when we went back to the helicopter. Caroline was given a fine bunch of flowers and we found that the helicopter was well equipped with a couple of cases of the best Armenian brandy. It was a fine day and I took a photograph, which did not come out well, of Mount Ararat as we came in to land in Yerevan.
Later that night we set of back to Moscow, reaching it at 4.30 am or so. Elena had arranged for us to meet Marshal Yazov, Defense Minister of the USSR in his office on the Wednesday at 10.30 am followed by a meeting in the Supreme Soviet with the Chairman thereof. Many of our group met with Marshal Yazov at the defense ministry. Caroline of course opened the discussion. But Marshal Yazov was stalling. So I broke in. “Yesterday we were in no man’s land between the Armenian militia and the Azeri militia and we have mud on our boots to prove it. It is not our business to decide whether the Armenians are right and the 17 men taken prisoner by your helicopters were policemen as the Armenians claim or terrorists as the Azeris claim. That is for you to decide by whatever legal procedures you have for such matters. But each and every one is a human being.” We then asked that each and every prisoner taken by the Soviet army be granted his civil rights regardless of his alleged crimes. Their civil rights included, but were and are not limited to:
- the right to hear a specific charge,

- the right to be held in a prison remote from the conflict with jailers who are not parties to the conflict,

- the right not to be beaten and to have medical care,

- the right to have legal representation including representation by international jurists,

- the right to communicate with their friends and families,

- the right to a prompt and fair trial.

Marshal Yazov said “Da” to each and every one. He agreed to look into this matter personally. Marshal Yazov kept his promise. By mid-July 1991 all the Armenian militiamen were released. They were asked to keep quiet, for awhile at least, about their incarceration. By mid-August Marshal Yazov was himself in jail as a result of being part of the abortive coup against Gorbachev..
Caroline went back to London and I stayed on for a physics conference in honor of Andrei Sakharov a couple of days later. Dr Boris Altshuler, son of Dr Lev Altshuler who measured the properties of plutonium metal under pressure, so important for bomb design, helped me draft a brief 15 minute report to describe our trip. I proposed a resolution with the following words:

In view of the evident involvement last month, of the Soviet Army on one side of the conflict, in violation of Soviet Law and of human rights, I suggest that this conference pass a resolution.

"Members of the 1st International Sakharov Conference on Physics, present at the afternoon meeting in Moscow on May 31, 1991, having heard the report of one of our number, Professor Richard Wilson of Harvard University, call upon Mikhail Gorbachev, President of the Soviet Union. We ask that he notice the obvious involvement of regular troops of the Soviet Army in gross violations of civil rights during the last five weeks. We ask that he call a halt to all mass deportations. We ask that he order that those persons forcibly deported from their ancestral villages be allowed to return home. Finally, we ask that the OMON troops be asked to withdraw from the border and preferably disband, and the Soviet troops be from other republics. Finally, we suggest that he invite UN observers to preserve the peace, and to protect the civil rights of all citizens of the region."
This was voted by a majority of those present (about 150) with one against and seven abstainers. Unfortunately Academician Keldysh, who was in the Chair, had not been briefed about what was happening. Gorbachev got a copy of the resolution by the next day. When I returned I sent a copy of my report to Allan Bromley, then Science advisor to President Bush, and I believe that President Bush saw a copy on Wednesday in the next week..
As noted above, an officer (Russian) of the Soviet 4th army in Azerbaijan told a member of our group in May 1991 that there were some orders that his army (being 80% Azeri troops) would not obey. In our meeting with Marshal Yazov, he told us a lot of what appeared to be irrelevant information; that he hoped to have all troops out of Germany and all nuclear and heavy weapons out of eastern Europe by the end of August 1991. I was particularly interested in this, but it seemed that no one else in our party recognized the significance of what he was saying, It seems likely in retrospect that Marshal Yazov was preoccupied by the problem of removing the tactical nuclear weapons from Azerbaijan. He was concerned that as the Soviet Union fell apart nuclear weapons would fall into the hands of people who were less cautious in their use than is vital for world peace. He could not favor Armenia till the weapons were safely on Russian soil. I have been told, orally, from US sources that there were many in Azerbaijan in May 1991 but they were all out by August 1991.
On Friday, May 31, 1991, five other members of the group met President Mutalibov of Azerbaijan for four hours in Baku. However, they were denied permission to visit Stepanakert or any other area of Azerbaijan with ethnic Armenians. However arrangements were made by the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union for them to visit at the end of July 1991. Baroness Cox accordingly led a group there at that time. Unfortunately I was with in the south of France and could not go at that time.
At the physics conference I made a suggestion with little hope that it would succeed. I had hoped that President Ter-Petrossian of Armenia and President Mutalibov of Azerbaijan visit these villages, and other points of conflict and side by side walk the same road, and reassure the villagers by their presence that fighting on both sides will cease. They did not do so. But I have been told that although 20,000 - 40,000 people lost their lives in the fighting around Nagorny Karabagh, no shots were fired between Voskepar and Nishki Voskepara. If true we accomplished something.
On my return I found that I was in demand by the Armenian community in the USA who had heard of our activity very quickly. I had to give talks at the Armenian center in Watertown, and again in Belmont. I still get a complimentary copy of the Armenian newspaper published in Watertown. One incoming graduate student, of Armenian descent, specifically looked out for me as he arrived that fall. I still receive weekly the Armenian newspaper. I find it interesting that when the Republic of Georgia in summer 2008 started pushing against the Ossetians within their midst, and Russia militarily supported the Ossetians, the Armenian community was one of the few which supported Russia. There is a large Armenian group inside Georgia. Moreover neither they, nor I, forget that it was a Georgian, Josef Stalin, who wuled the USSR with a brtal iron hand for many years.
Armenia has few indigenous sources of energy. During the Soviet times, they got oil from the oil fields in Azerbaijan near Baku which is a field in which John R Rockefeller had invested some 100 years before. They also had hydropower which was much overused. The level of the water in Lake Sevan dropped markedly. The Monastery on an island in Lake Sevan that I had seen in 1965 had become part of the mainland in 1991. Armenia needs nuclear power for its independence. Two 550 Mwe light water power plants were built of the type VVER 550. The new Armenian politicians objected to the nuclear power plant both as being dangerous (Chernobyl had already occurred) and also a symbol of Russian domination. Elena Bonner and Andrei Sakharov emphasized the safety problems and the two plants were shut down. Elena soon realized that a change must be made. She asked me to prepare a proposal for a nuclear power safety committee to report to the President, Mr Ter-Petrossian. I chose the best safety experts I could. Bob Budnitz from Berkeley, Adolph Birkhofer from Munich, an Englishman from the Atomic Energy laboratory in Risley, Lancashire, UK and an earthquake expert from California. I added Artem Abagyan from Moscow - he had been born in Nogorny Karabagh.
Nothing happened for 2 years till Armenia applied for a loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). They set up a safety review committee in 1991 with most of the same membership - since they also knew the best people - and I went along for the first meeting representing the Sakharov Foundation. This time Andree came with me, and we went on afterwards to see the Kapitzas in Nikolina Gora. We sat down to dinner with 4 generations: Anna, Sergei, their daughter and granddaughter. The safety review of the Armenian reactor found several very clear problems. The reactor itself was well mounted on hydraulic buffers and would withstand any reasonable earthquake. But the control panel might fall down! Worse still emergency power was to be delivered by about 100 lead acid batteries in glass containers. The failure of even one of the glass containers would leave the reactor unprotected! A $500,000 gift from a wealthy Armenian American fixed that. But the source of emergency coolant water was unreliable and we all recommended that an emergency coolant water pond be quickly established. All but the last recommendations were soon carried out and in an interesting reversal, when the Russian Engineers came in from Moscow to restart unit 2, they were met with cheers - not the jeers of a few years before. The Armenians had accepted the smaller of the two risks they faced. On the one hand a “dangerous” nuclear power plant, and on the other hand a serious shortage of electricity. Americans have yet to fully accept that nuclear power is adequately safe.
There are those who would deny the fact of the genocide. Unfortunately the facts meet all the reasonable definitions. The fact that the Ottoman Empire was at war with Russia, which in turn controlled much of Armenia in the Caucasus is no excuse. A country must face up to the errors of the past in order to move forward. Turkey still refuses to do so. Interestingly the 1916 genocide was perpetrated by the group running the Ottoman Empire called the “Young Turks”, because these “youngsters” had turned out the previous government some 10 years before. In England and USA many people called any group opposing the elderly establishment “Young Turks”. When the spokesman for the CLEO group (Ed Thorndike) decided to form a committee of young people to criticize the decisions being made by us elders, he called it the “young Turks”. I objected at a group meeting with the words “Don’t you remember what they did? It was therefore with horror that I read in 2007 that Foxman, of the Anti-Defamation league, say that we did not really know whether a genocide took place. We should ask Turkey to open the records and encourage historians to look at them. A comparison of the exact words with the exact words of the President of Iran about the Holocaust is frightening. The president of Iran is rightly blamed for holocaust denial. Why is Foxman not equally blamed for genocide denial? Fortunately around the Boston area, where there are many Armenians, he is.