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

Visits to the Middle East.

My visits to the Middle East became a large part of my life after 1978. They were not all about pure physics. They were not all about oil. They were not all about Palestinian/Israeli strife. They were not all about collecting stamps. They were not all about redressing wrongs. They were not all about adventure. They were not all about curiosity. They were not all stimulated by the Arabian Nights. Or by Elroy Flecker’s “Hassan, the Confectioner of Baghdad.” Not only because I wanted to travel the “Golden Road to Samarkand”. They were not all missionary. They were not all about my desire to see a railway, as Cecil Rhodes would say, from Cape to Cairo, or one from Constantinople east to India. They were about all of these things. In short I was, and am, a dreamer. These dreams and my understanding of the reality deserve this separate section of my memories.

Of course anyone learning ancient history at all learns about the “cradle of civilization”. Of the land of Mesopotamia. That Abraham was born in Ur of the Chaldees a little NW of Basra. Bible studies inevitably teach us about Nebuchanezzar, King of Babylon who conquered Jerusalem. We heard of Cyrus the Persian. Of course we knew about the attempted Persian conquest of Greece with the valiant, unsuccessful resistance of the Athenians at Marathon and the famous run to warn the Athenian citizens..
My first knowledge of Iranian-Iraqi difficulties came from reading, in the ancient Greek, at age 11 or 12 Xenophon’s famous war story: “the retreat to the sea”. Xenophon was leading an army of about 10,000 mercenary Greek soldiers, fighting for the Iraqis (Medes) against the Iranians (Persians). The Iranians (Persians) won and Xenophon had the task of extracting his army through enemy territory. Breaking the ordinary communication channels to the Mediterranean, he set out north across Asia Minor (Anatolia) in hope of finding a friendly Greek town on the southern borders of the Black Sea. The army was, of course “living off the land” and the local tribes were not usually welcoming. I remember the last page in particular. As the men saw Black Sea in front of them they cried out “Thalassa, Thalassa!” (The sea, the sea). When I first reached the Pacific Ocean in summer 1951 I also cried out “Thalassa!”. That reading was also an indirect way of learning about the sexual behavior of men deprived for a long period of association with women. But Mesopotamia of 3,000 years ago seemed unrelated to the modern world.
Of course, since I was brought up as a Unitarian I was aware of the doctrinal differences between various Christian groups but far less aware of other religions from other places. At Colet Court school and later at St Paul’s school we had morning prayers, with a hymn or two. If I had wished it, I could have been excused from attending and waiting in another room. I preferred to stay with the majority and when the prayer or hymn, as it often did with “In the name of the father, the son and the holy ghost” I was just silent. It became a sort of game to listen carefully to such doctrinal statements which, for me were, and are, absurdities. Thirty per cent of the boys in St. Paul’s school and I believe somewhat less in Colet Court, did not attend morning prayer. These included Sikhs and Hindus from India. Moslems also from India, boys from Persia. Mixed in also were Roman Catholics who objected to any religious statement of Church of England origin. But I mostly remember the Jews. Many were refugees from Germany, and as I now know, from Eastern Europe too. They were less exotic than the boys from India. They looked just like us! It was only after I met many Moslems that I realize that in religion, Jews, Moslems and Christians have a lot in common. In principle, rich men and poor men kneel down and pray side by side. The Moslem practice is, in my limited experience, better in this. When prayer time came in a private house, everyone knelt where he was - literally master and servant side by side facing Mecca. I would sit quietly at the back and meditate. I will never forget a businessman in Alexandria stopping at 4 pm, pulling a prayer rug from his brief case, kneeling down and praying on the sidewalk ignoring everyone around. But as we all know, there are many people who are only Christians on Sundays. I assume that there are also Moslems who only practice their religion when it is convenient.
In our family we were aghast at the rise of Naziism and the persecution of the Jews in central Europe. It was many years before I realized the England was far from pure in this regard. We learned about William the Conqueror at school but I don’t remember being taught that he brought Jews from France to run the banking system because Christians would not lend money at usury at that time. Nor did we learn at school that Richard killed 500 Jews accidentally soon after his coronation; because he thought that a delegation that came to welcome him as king was trying to kill him. Nor did we learn that Edward I exiled the rest of English Jewry to Spain. These racist facts were not taught in the elementary history but we were taught merely that anything English is good. But I still believe the English were more tolerant in this and other respects than people in many other countries. I had not heard of Zionism or saw any reason why Jews would want to return to a land where the present population were not friendly. Of my school friends, only one, Aubrey Sampson, was in 1943 openly advocating a state of Israel. Soon after I got to Oxford I went to a lecture by Chaim Weiszman in which he spent most of his time explaining why he felt that it was vital to create a state of Israel in biblical Palestine as soon as world War II was over. He felt that there must be a place for the vast influx of Jewish refugees from eastern Europe to go. I asked the obvious question. “Why go to a land where there are already a lot of people, and most of them don’t want you there? Isn’t that asking for a repetition of just the trouble from which you want to escape?” As I remember the reply, it was simple. “For a good Jew there is no alternative”. I was partially convinced. Not convinced that the reply was, in itself, sensible, but convinced that enough people in the western world believed it to be so that it would be inevitable.
In St. Paul’s school I collected stamps, and bought some from a friend at Meadhurst, Bagnall. I remember some stamps that came from Kuwait. They were issued, I believe by the British Post Office in Cairo and over stamped Kuwait. Somewhat later I met Hani Qaddumi who went to Kuwait from Palestine about 1936, and naturalized while the numbers were still few, to set up their postal system. Then over stamping an Egyptian stamp was no longer the procedure.
The Middle East became closer to me when after world war II the British Army tried to bring peace, without colonialism, in various places. Former school friends were serving in the British Army in Palestine. I remember one friend, a year older than myself, whom I had met at one of our Hillend Boy Scout camps. He then joined some intelligence section in the army, and he described to me in 1947, maybe with some exaggeration, how he was fighting for his life when he was chased by terrorists from Irgun Zvai Leumi and had to jump into the harbor at Tel Aviv and swim across to escape them. But his need to escape was not all governed by purity of behaviour. He admitted torturing a 14 year old messenger for Irgun to get information from him. I had just started graduate school when I heard of the bombing of the King David hotel from a survivor. Whereas it was likely that Palestinian Arabs had been responsible for terrorist attacks in the late 20s and late 30s, by now the attacks were from Jewish terrorist groups who were opposed to a division of the country according to the British 1936 white paper. It was unclear to me what division was going to be acceptable to the Jewish and Palestinian people. It seemed to me at the time that Britain was better off getting out from there.

I was glad when Ernest Bevin, foreign secretary, asked the UN what to do when the 25 year old mandate for the British to run Palestine came to an end and said, both formally and informally, that it was a United Nations problem. I only recently understood why Jewish groups hated Bevin. I reread Fadhel Jamali’s memoirs and his account of meeting with Bevin and Creech-Jones at the time. Bevin would have preferred to just give independence to the majority group who were Palestinians. But Bevin gave in to US pressure on establishing Israel. I understood and still understand better why Palestinians hated him and blamed the British. As the Palestinian terrorist said to the confused “heroine” in Carré’s “The Little Drummer Girl” just before he is killed, “You are the English who gave away my country”. We had given away a country we did not own. But to whom did we give it? Bearing in mind Chaim Weiszman’s response to my question at his lecture, it seemed clear to me then that the western nations who started the UN would insist on a state of Israel. This they did, but they should also have insisted on a far better arrangement for the displaced Palestinians than they were willing to consider. They could very easily at that time have put firm limits on what they would consider appropriate for Israel. The UN has consistently failed in this respect over the years. In a large part, this failure was because the Israeli-Palestinian quarrel became a pawn in the cold war. I believed then in the 1950s, and now, in 2008, that it was the cold war that was ultimately responsible for the revolution in Iraq on July 14th 1958 from which the region has never recovered. But the cold war is now over and that does not explain the lack of spine in the UN when after a long delay the Arab countries in 2002 have finally stated their acceptance of resolution 242. Why do the nations of the UN now even countenance the effective rejection from the other side? As far as I know, none of my personal school or college friends emigrated to Israel. None of my Jewish friends and acquaintances who support Israel to the hilt want to live there.

I do not know, and if I ever did I would have forgotten, who said what, and to whom, and why, about the relationship in that troubled “Holy” land. I don’t believe anyone will ever know. But some matters are clear. In the 1930s some Arab parents went to the hospital in Gaza, as others did to Beirut, to have their children born in a good hospital. The change between Gaza then, and Gaza now, is evident. All the cities on the Mediterranean coast were to some extent international tourist locations. But the Gaza of that time is no longer. No one in the world has a right to say: “ I am not responsible for the disastrous situation”. The enforced isolation starting in summer of 2007 is a demonstration of everyone’s failure. When I contemplate, as I do almost daily, whether mankind will destroy itself, with nuclear war or pestilence, I wonder whether the weak human race has any “right to exist”. It seems to me that is not a fundamental right but one which must be earned daily. We must earn it in Gaza, in the land that is holy to so much of the world. We must earn it in every place where there is human conflict.
In 1973 Department Chairman Bob Pound suggested that I give a special course on Energy and the Environment which had about 15-20 students. Then Dean Harvey Brooks, suggested that I team up with AJ Meyer, a senior lecturer in ht economics department, who ran a weekly seminar “Economics of Energy” . This seminar was one of three well known “gut“ courses for which it was easy to get credit. It was colloquially called “oil wells” by the undergraduates. Another gut course was, of course, Roger Revelle’s course on environment which stimulated Gore, and the third was, I believe about China. I added this seminar to my teaching duties. AJ, had taught economics at the America University of Beirut (AUB), and was then Deputy Director of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES). He brought in as seminar speakers the heads of oil companies and the oil ministers from the middle east. Many of them had been his students at AUB. They also gave donations to CMES which paid for the seminar speakers. I brought in coal experts, nuclear experts and tried to ensure that there was some environmental discussion. We would have a seminar at 4 pm. Discussion went on until perhaps 5.45 pm, and then we would adjourn. The enthusiasts reassembled in the faculty club at 6.30 pm for dinner and further discussion. This was an excellent routine which suited me fine. One of the students, or visitors, was a young banker, Usameh Jamali who was studying at the Fletcher School of Economics at Tufts University. AJ introduced me to Frank McFadzean, Chairman of Shell Transport and Trading, Abdlatif Yousef Al-Hamad, at that time Minister of Finance of Kuwait, James Akins, the US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Abdulhady Taher, Director of Petromin the Saudi Arabian oil company, and Zaki Yamani, Minister of Oil of Saudi Arabia. I was ready for what became another interesting chapter in my life.
In 1977 I got a visit from a Syrian who was Deputy Director of Kuwait’s Institute for Scientific Research. “Would I be willing to come and give some lectures, and discuss scientific activity at KISR?”. He was, apparently, talking for the Director, Dr Adnan Shihab Eldin. Adnan had gotten a PhD in nuclear chemistry in Seaborg’s group at UC Berkeley. My graduate student Bob Budnitz had gone to LBL from Harvard about 1970 and he and Adnan became friends. When Adnan was asked to return to Kuwait and run the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research he asked Bob to visit. Bob, who is Jewish, did not want to upset anyone in his or his wife’s Jewish family so he declined. But he suggested that Adnan contact me. Which Adnan did. My mind went back to 1949 when I just got my PhD. One position I was offered was to join the Anglo-Iranian oil company which had just got a concession in Kuwait. It had been an attractive offer. A salary equal to that of an Oxford Professor. Tax free. All accommodation paid for in Kuwait. A vacation trip back home for 3 months every 2 years with fares paid. In 1949 I looked up Kuwait in my father’s Encyclopedia Britannica. - 1897 edition if I remember aright. At that time (1897) Kuwait was known for pearl fishing and piracy. In 1949 I preferred to visit the USA but I was now going to see Kuwait at last. So began a series of visits which have been almost yearly and have brought me a host of friends.
I chose to go to Kuwait in Spring vacation 1978. I visited Grenoble for my parity violation experiments, and that March there was a spring school at Les Arcs, near the French-Italian border, where physicists assembled for a lecture or so in the morning, then skiing till dark, and physics again till serious drinking began after supper. Tom Quirk was presenting our muon scattering data from Fermilab. I turned up at the meeting for a day at Les Arcs to discuss the data with him. The night after my day’s visit there was a big snowfall. I had to leave soon after dawn and Tom helped me dig out my rental car. I drove through Annecy to Geneva airport to board the flight to Kuwait. There was probably a direct flight, but I thought that it would be interesting to pass through Beirut and see, at least from the air, what had been happening in Lebanon. On boarding the Middle Eastern Airlines plane, everyone had to identify his checked baggage sitting beside the plane before it could be loaded. One man had a very heavy carry on parcel. The contents became clear on security examination. Thinly wrapped, it was a couple of solid gold bars.
As we came into Kuwait, in a sand storm, we flew over a small oil well. A 6 inch diameter pipe with a valve on top with a pipe running down toward the sea in the distance. A small “oasis” of 2-3 palm trees. A Bedouin with half a dozen sheep or goats, and at the side a small flare of natural gas. No pump like the wells I had seen in LA or Wyoming. I was told that unless they gave 1,000 bbl a day they would be turned off. I heard of wells in Texas still producing 15 bbl a day. I was in a different world and was all prepared to enjoy every minute of my time, and every interaction with the enormous number of new friends that I hoped to, and did, make.
Usameh Jamali was back in the middle east and working at the Organization for Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries. It was Usameh, then a bachelor, made sure that I missed no important facet of social life. He particularly knew all the expatriate Iraqis, who wanted to get as close as possible to Iraq without actually going there. I met a couple of Egyptians. I was also introduced to the Palestinians, living in an area of Kuwait called, obviously, the “West Bank”. On this first visit I was approached by Hisham Naquib a Palestinian who was Dean of Graduate studies at the University of Kuwait. Would I stay a little longer and review the program and the quality of the faculty? I had planned to spend a couple of days in Cairo on the way home to see the Pyramids, but visiting people has always been more interesting than vising places. I accepted of course. The pyramids had already waited 3,000 years for my visit; waiting a few years more would not be too hard.
After a few days at the University I was about to leave by a plane at 2 am. Usameh came around to the Sheraton hotel to bid me goodbye. As we were doing so at the bottom of the elevator a friend came by and started taking. I was introduced. Then another, and another. I became clear that these were the heads of all the Arab oil refineries, assembling for a meeting starting the following day in Kuwait. They were about to go to the 12th floor of the hotel to start the first informal session. That session consisted of opening a bottle of scotch in the Syrian’s hotel room. I was invited. As the lone American I knew from experience that I was personally responsible for each and every failure of US foreign policy. So I was prepared. One by one they attacked me for the fact that USA always supported Israel against the Arab countries. But I counter attacked. “You must realize” I said, “that Americans are a very generous, but also a very stupid and uneducated people. They do not know whether Kuwait is north or south of the Equator or whether Baghdad is East or west of Moscow. You ask them to be generous to Arab countries, and they will legitimately ask ‘which Arabs?’. They see Arabs fighting Arabs in Lebanon. Which group should they support? With no clear and unified voice they support the one country in the region which knows what it wants. Israel.” The conversation switched. It turned out that about half (including Usameh) had been at the American University of Beirut. “Ah! Lebanon! What a disaster!”. They all knew the principal problem of the Arab countries and peoples. They were, and are, unable to unite.
In 1979 I was again going to Grenoble for parity violation so again decided to go on to the middle east - this time not through Beirut. My host in Kuwait this time was the Organization for Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC). The director of OAPEC at the time was a Libyan, Ali Attigha. The Deputy Director was, I believe, an Egyptian, but as he retired he was replaced by Abdel Asiz Al-Wattari. Abdel Asiz was living his life upside down. In the late 1960s as a young man he was Oil Minister of Iraq. When the government changed about 1970 he decided it was wise to leave. Having been incorruptible, and thereby earned the enmity of Zaki Yamani of Saudi Arabia who he met at OPEC meetings, he had no money. So he worked for the Libyan Oil company for a couple of years to earn enough to go to London School of Economics and earn his PhD. Now he was in Kuwait with an Iraqi diplomatic passport. His wife, Haja was born of an Iraqi father and an Armenian mother. He had, at the time, two teen aged children now both in the USA. He became a good friend.
As noted elsewhere I was in CERN on sabbatical leave in May through December 1981 After a brief visit to Egypt, I went on to Kuwait again where Adnan had invited me to give a few lectures on Risk Analysis in January 1983. This I did, and then on to the meeting on proton stability in Bombay, India.
I received an invitation and visa to go to Beirut for a meeting on nuclear energy on the way home from the visit to Pakistan in January 1982. I rearranged my travel accordingly. The meeting was arranged, as had been the 1981 meeting in Grado, by the Egyptians with funding from Libya. There was nothing scientifically interesting about the meeting. But I remember that by this time the car had to meet me several hundred feet from the terminal and on the way into town we passed several check points without stopping. I am unsure how many groups had been appropriately paid off. I made a point of walking one evening through one of the Palestinian refugee camps, Shatila, I believe. It was about the size of Harvard yard and 10,000 people lived there. Six months later many thousands died there. Our little hotel was in West Beirut, the Moslem side. At the time there was no fighting and I asked whether it was safe to walk to the east to visit the American University of Beirut. “Yes,” was the answer. “But it is safer to walk across 2 miles south at the end of the red line”. That I did. All was peaceful. But 6 months later Beirut changed again when the Israeli army occupied it.
I came back to Cambridge in January 1982 ready to start my 3 ½ year stint as Department Chairman. But in March I was off to the Middle East again. Abdulaziz Al-Wattari was organizing the first Arab Energy Conference in Doha, Qatar. He invited me to talk about nuclear energy, at a session chaired by Ali Khalifa Al-Sabah, oil minister of Kuwait. I explained my view that the world was going to need nuclear energy, and that it in many ways it was ideally suited to them. As I had explained earlier in Egypt, they were developing a very competent technical elite who could run the systems. Many westerners were advocating solar energy. While not decrying this, I pointed out that maintenance would need, as the Egyptians had already found out, many more technically trained people. But I emphasized the absolute necessity of international collaboration. There seemed no way that the USA, for example, would permit a nuclear reactor on Arab soil which was not open to inspection by IAEA. The opening session of the conference was fascinating. In turn a representative of each Arab country, including of course the PLO, eloquently described firstly why his country was committed to Arab unity, and secondly why they fully supported their brothers in Palestine in their search for independence and freedom. After this stylized introduction, which I suspect was similar to introductions at most other Arab conferences, business could commence. Although it was stylized, I seemed to me then, as it does now, that it expressed a very deep yearning that influences almost every action a leading Arab will make.
While we were in Qatar, Libya had made a stupid attack on a US warship in the Mediterranean and th USA came back with a massive response, including what may well have been an attempt to kill Col. Qaddafi by an air attack. Few of the delegates liked Col. Qaddafi but they had to say something. The final session of the conference was delayed while the leaders wrangled. They came out with a bland condemnation of the attack by the USA and lukewarm support of Libya. While we were waiting I was sitting in the corridor next to Dr Munir Khan, Chairman of the Pakestani Atomic Energy Commission. His comment was more practical. ‘The next time you elect an actor as President,” he said, “please elect one with an Academy Award.”
Leaving Qatar, I went to another conference in Riyadh where I gave a talk on proton radiotherapy with the Harvard cyclotron. It seemed then, and it also sees now, sensible for the Saudis to spend some of their money on the best possible medical treatments. The Chairman of the meeting was Dr Rida Obaid, Director of the National Center for Science and Technology and later President of King Abdelaziz University in Jeddah. But I specifically wanted to talk to him about a proposal, made by a Yugoslavian (Serbian) scientist, Bogden Maglic, to build a multibillion dollar science complex in Jeddah. But by this time, Bogden Maglic was already known to me and to some others as a charlatan. I had known him since 1958 when he was a graduate student in physics at MIT. His PhD advisor was Bernard Feld who suggested using photographic emulsions to look at the Coulomb interference in proton scattering from carbon, using the Harvard cyclotron. I asked my graduate student Arthur Kuckes to run the cyclotron for Bogden’s exposures. Arthur came to me in excitement. “His experiment cannot work,” he said. “The multiple scattering in the target is greater than the dip in the scattering due to Coulomb interference”. I checked. Arthur was right. I called Bernie Feld and warned him. The next thing I found was a letter published in Physical Review by Feld and Bogden Maglic finding (incorrectly) the coulomb interference! Rightly or wrongly I did nothing. Incidentally, Henry Kendall later blamed me personally for this mistake! Bogden went to Berkeley where by looking at bubble chamber data he found the omega meson. This was a correct discovery, perhaps his last. Then his career went down. He found that there was a nonexistent split in the rho resonance, and after becoming a group leader in CERN proceeded, about 1968, to find a series of excited mesons, on the Reggae trajectories as predicted, but all completely bogus. This had all become clear in 1972 some ten years before when several searches for the “split A2" failed to find the split. In 1982 Maglic was advertizing “migma fusion” whereby colliding beams of heavy ions would collide, with a “luminosity” about a billion times greater that was being achieved with electron-electron or proton-proton rings.
But Bogden was extraordinarily persuasive. He had persuaded the President of Switzerland to give him Swiss citizenship. He had persuaded one of the Saudi princes to provide him with $10,000,000 to make a preliminary plan for the big laboratory of which he would be director. With this, Bogden had persuaded, with suitable consulting fees, a number of distinguished scientists, to support his proposal. I am glad to say John Adams, with whom I had discussed this a few months before I went to Jeddah declined. It was not a way either of us wanted to behave. Whatever one thought of Arabs, or of Saudi Arabia, we felt it would be dishonoring ourselves to become involved. Unfortunately not all physicists agreed and several including one Nobel Laureate, agreed to talk in defense of the plan.. I felt that I owed it to my Arab friends to expose this con game and opened a brief conversation with Rida Obad.. It turned out to be unnecessary. Rida Obad insisted up front that he had read all about Bogden’s career, and that he had asked the supporters of the proposal to come to Riyadh to describe all technical details. They, of course declined to do so. I hardly had to open my mouth! But, I became a friend of Rida Obaid. Then I spent a couple of days in Jeddah, giving a talk at the University before returning home. While there I met Bogden, maneuvering at higher levels than myself, but still basking in the sun by the side of the swimming pool.
A year or so later Carlo Rubbia got his Nobel prize, and as Department Chairman I held a small party at Harvard in Carlo’s honor. At Carlo’s request I kept it small. Bogden called up and demanded to know where it was. I stalled him and called Carlo. Do you want me to let Bogden come or shall I block him? “Let him come,” was Carlo’s reply. I was sitting next to Bogden’s latest wife who had also been charmed by Bogden and believed implicitly in his greatness. She came from a wealthy family and the adjective was clearly one of the reasons that Bogden was attracted to her. It did not seem an occasion to be brutally honest, but on the contrary it seemed an occasion to be evasive so I was. Bogden still persisted in his migma fusion for many years and persuaded Glenn Seaborg to be Chairman of his company. I kept quiet about this for some years until a mutual friend, Paul Lochak, convinced me that I owed it to Glenn, by now a good friend, to pull him back from the brink. This I did in the lobby of the Mayflower hotel in Washington over tea. Glenn outlined the list of new, non existent, particles that Bogden had found. Then he asked about magma fusion. At that moment Leon Lederman walked by. “Is there a chance that it will work?’ Glenn asked. ”Not a hope in hell!” was Leon’s prompt, and accurate, reply.
When in Qatar I talked to the Iraqi oil minister about the air raid on the Tuwaitha reactor and told him my opinion. “You have given up just a little of your sovereignty by signing the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). I think that was a good idea. But you have not gained the advantage from that because many countries still believe you want to make nuclear weapons.” I made a suggestion which has some similarities to the one I made to India and Pakistan a few months before. “If you have no intention of making nuclear weapons you should not only welcome IAEA inspections, you must demand them. You must invite the best nuclear scientists from the west and show them your facilities and ask for their help in peaceful activities.” The oil minister said that he knew nothing about the subject but would pass on my thoughts and ideas. Then in December I got a call from what used to be the Iraq embassy but was officially the Iraqi interests section of the Indian embassy. “When are you going to Baghdad?” So I went on December 27th just after a Christmas party for various friends, including Muhammed Al-Sabah, in our house. The purpose was to visit the Iraqi nuclear research center at Tuwaitha, to understand whether the claims of the Israelis that the reactor had been part of a nuclear bomb program were justified. I described the visit to Tuwaitha in an article in Nature which is number 295 in my list of references, and a more recent, retrospective discussion is was presented at a meeting in Erice, Sicily and is in reference 896 of my list of references. I was convinced that it was not a critical part of a bomb program. In particular it was not a part of a bomb program because it was not suited to making plutonium. I later became convinced that by their unjustified bombing the Israelis started a bomb program rather than stopped one.
I believe I stayed in the Baghdad Sheraton. One evening I sat at the bar and got into a conversation with a couple of young Iraqis. One, aged about 22, was a Captain in the army, the other his sergeant and aged about 18. Both were on leave from the fighting that was going on between Iraq and Iran. They told me that they had been fighting on the outskirts of Basra the previous week. Officially, the Iranians had not got that far. Both were Christians; I did not enquire about their denomination. But when walking on Friday evening I passed a Christian church. A 7th day Adventist church was holding services just after sunset on the Friday and the beginning of the seventh day. I went in. It was like an English non-conformist church with someone at the door welcoming anyone who wished to enter. The service was in Arabic, but a helpful lady translated for me. In the next pew were half a dozen Rumanian (Christian) oil experts. They had no helpful translator! I went to the souk and bought a little silver dish from a silversmith who had served in the Iraqi army in World War II and was proud of his service. I saw the monument to the Unknown Soldier, built after world War I. It was already apparent that Saddam’s war against Iran was costing him far more than he had expected. As I left at the end of the week I saw in the airport three plane loads of Korean construction workers who had been hired to redo the sewage system of Baghdad. They were going home. The rebuilding of the sewage system was canceled.
I then went on to Qatar where I had agreed to spend a week lecturing and helping the physics department at the University. There were two separate colleges in Qatar. The men’s University and the women’s university. The physics department in the men’s university was weak, but in the women’s University physics was bustling. I found two possible reasons. Qatari men who were qualified tended to go overseas for their education, whereas women going overseas alone were unusual if not actual sinners. Secondly, men could do what they wanted after classes, but for women, going to the University was the only acceptable social activity outside the home. Women would spend hours in the physics laboratory. One experiment we set up while I was there. Looking for annihilation radiation by two counters 180 degrees apart. On the Sabbath, I was asked to help set up an experiment on optical pumping bought from a British outfit. We got it working and then I was asked by the young lecturer to join his family for Sabbath dinner. It was interesting. The large, extended, family were not Qatari but came from Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. They had been there 25 years, since 1960 or earlier. One helped to set up the National Bank of Qatar. But he was a Lebanese/Palestinian and therefore a foreigner. When rules were formalized, he was not considered equal to a Qatari. Not allowed any longer to participate in the Bank or own land or property in Qatar. He asked me if I knew Colorado Boulevard in Los Angeles. I said no, but I knew Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. He had just bought an apartment building on a mortgage foreclosure. He could not own land in the country where he was born or in the country where he lived but he could own land in the USA a country that he had never seen! Whenever I think of the deep problems in the USA. I think of incidents like this where the USA still remains the dream and hope of so much of the world. The style of the meal was that the men were all in one room, and the women and girls in another room. The men were served by the boys from the next room.
Leaving Qatar, I went to Riyadh to attend a meeting chaired by Rida Obad. I cannot remember for sure what the overall thrust of the meeting was, but I talked about use of protons for radiotherapy. At Massachusetts General Hospital we had several patients from Saudi Arabia and I had the idea that they might like to build a cyclotron for the purpose. But this was premature. Then on to Jeddah where I talked to various people.
A year later I was asked to be on a committee of the King Faisal Foundation, chaired by Rida Obqid. That foundation was started by the sons of King Faisal for charitable purposes. They had decided to award a yearly prize for Science and this was the first time it was for physics. The Foundation had only sent requests for nominations to Arab Universities and as a result only got nominations from them. None of the nominees made sense. So the committee decided to postpone. Before we did so, I suggested a procedure that we invite all former Nobel Laureates in physics, and the heads of a couple of dozen prominent physics departments in the world. I was able to provide from memory and the High Energy Physics Diary addresses of all but one of the living Nobel Laureates. I could not do that now. Then I went on to Kuwait for a few days to see friends.. I believe it was on this trip that drivers from two Kuwaiti organizations, probably from the Arab Fund and the University, met me at the airport: As I got into my hotel room and had not even put my bag down, the telephone rang. It was Abdulaziz. “You have been in Riyadh. You must be dry. Come to my apartment for a drink!” That is friendship. I believe I first visited the University but I did, however, also visit the Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development. I was warmly greeted by Abdlatif Al-Hamad who become Chairman by that time, and we have remained friends ever since. A year later I went again to Riyadh to help choose the winner of the King Faisal prize. There were now several good nominations. I preferred Carlo Rubbia who had just found the Z0 and W particles. But I was outvoted and the nomination went to the two discoverers of the scanning tunneling microscope. That was also a good nomination, and predated by 18 months the award of the Nobel prize to the same two scientists.
In April 2003 I was invited to the 25th anniversary of the University of Tunis by a Professor Larbi Bougerra, who taught chemistry at the University Larbi had attended the first energy school that Fernando Amman and I had run in Sicily - just across the strait from Tunis and Carthage. Andrée joined me. I gave special, well attended lectures at the Universities in Tunis and Monastir. We also were taken on a tour to Carthage and an old Roman town, Dougga, 100 km to the west. There were 12 foreign guests at the anniversary celebration; 6 French, and 6 others. Rida Obad. was there from Jeddah and it amused me to introduce him to my other Arab friends! Andrée and I were the only native English speakers. There was a special dinner and reception. Fadhel Jamali was invited as a special guest of the President, Habib Bourgiba to whom I was introduced. I also brought him a formal letter of greeting from Harvard University prepared by the Marshal’s office.
All this time I had been still peripherally involved with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. But then in late October or early November 1983 that AJ Meyer died. Professor Nadaf Safran, became director of the Middle Eastern Studies Center. He is Jewish, and I believe he was born in Egypt. I was scheduled to go to Saudi Arabia anyway in December 2003 for another meeting of the King Faisal Foundation prize committee. I stopped our President Derek Bok in Harvard Yard and asked whether it was OK for me to try to raise money from my Saudi and Kuwaiti friends for a memorial in honor of AJ Meyer. My idea at the time was a special fellowship program. Professors are interested in people. Deans and Presidents are interested in chairs, so it became a chair. Derek Bok answered me immediately, “Yes!”. I had also the support of John Dunlop, a Harvard economist who had been secretary of labor under President Nixon, and in the late 1970s was the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sceinces. John had for many yeras been chairman of a small economics advisory committee for the Saudi government. So I started soliciting. One of AJ’s close friends, Hasib Sabbagh, had already provided $200,000. I talked to the Saudi Minister of Planning in Riyadh. He was talking about a $10 million endowment. I went on to Kuwait and had breakfast with Abdlatif Al Hamad and his family. By that time Abdlatif had become Chairman of the Board and Executive Director of the Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development. I talked to Ali Khalifah Al-Sabah, oil Minister. He also was encouraging. I passed though London and called on AJ’s son Peter. I got back home, and got together with another of AJ’s friends Ed Brooking. We became pan handlers and started to write around. But then we found a wall of silence. It turned out that Professor Safran had written a letter to everyone on AJ Meyer’s address list asking them to contribute. Whether deliberately or not, he hired a secretary called A. Meyer which confused people. I know several recipients of his letter who told me that they were insulted. But I never saw the letter itself. But it effectively closed off most of the potential donors in the Middle East. So for that period I deliberately avoided contact with CMES.. During the next three years, many people in the Arab world from Morocco to Kuwait boycotted the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies. I call that the “period of confusion”. So for that period I deliberately avoided contact with CMES.
President Derek Bok wrote several people including me, a letter on January 19th 1984 asking that any approach be coordinated with Vice President Fred Glimp, who of course approved anything that I wanted to do. As I noted in a memo of May 1984 we had only collected $334,000. The appeal for the A.J. Meyer Endowment was part of the Harvard Campaign according to a memo of July 9th 1984. In order to avoid the “confusion” at CMES, it was to be a chair in Energy and Economic Development, located in the Kennedy School of Government. Collecting funds from the Middle East was not possible for the next 3 years. Meanwhile I also got a FAX from one of AJ’s Japanese friends, Mr Nakahara, Head of Toa Nenru Kogyo, K.K. in Tokyo, who asked me to call upon Mr Kaneo Nakamura at his business school reunion. I did so and a total of another $230,000 was made available from five different Japanese business men in late 1985. Including that, our total was about $800,000. I seemed unlikely to most people that we would get more. So contrary to my recommendation, and that of Ed Brooking and John Dunlop, the interest on what we collected was used for a lectureship in the extravagant Kennedy School way. The first AJ Meyer Lecturer was Zaki Yamani who had by this time retired as oil minister. There was of course a big reception, but there was a small dinner. Zaki, Bill Hogan and Robert Reich from the Kennedy School, Andr\ée and myself. This may have been the only time I talked to Robert Reich who soon thereafter went on to Washington to be Assistant Secretary of Labor and is now a professor at Brandeis University

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