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\'3;↓Q\CSTANFORD UNIVERSITY
\F3\CSTANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305
\F4



ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE LABORATORY\←L\-R\/'7;\+R\→.\→S   Telephone:
COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT\←S\→.415-497-4430
\F0\C18 January 1975




Professor Hans Bethe
Department of Physics
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York

Dear Professor Bethe:

\J	I was much impressed by your statement on nuclear power
as reported in today's \F1New York Times\F0.  I was also impressed
by your success in getting the statement noticed by the press, but
it still wasn't what the statement deserved.
\F2Can you send me a copy?\F0

	Enclosed is a statement on the energy situation
that was presented at the San Francisco hearings on \F1Project
Independence\F0.  Preparing the statement took almost until the
last minute, so the collection of signers is a somewhat
random collection of the engineers who were asked.  The
preparers were Professors Holt Ashley, Tom Connolly, Bill
Reynolds and myself.

	It seems to me that the country needs to get out of a rut
of passivity that finds disadvantages to every action intended to
relieve the energy crisis.  A first step should be to try to get
the scientific community into a more active state.\.

\←L\→S\←R\-L\/'2;\+L\→L
Sincerely yours,




John McCarthy
Director, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Professor of Computer Science
\←S\→L

\JP.S. After writing the above, I found in my mail a note from Joshua
Lederberg with a copy of a version of your statement.  If it is the
final one, I suppose I don't need another.  I hope you didn't include
his \F1enlargement\F0, because, for reasons stated in the enclosed letter to
him, it grants the point of view that has led to the inaction.  I enclose
also two reprints referred to in my letter to him.

	The draft he sent me of your statement ignores the issues
implicit in the \F1enlargement\F0.  This is quite proper, since
to answer them, e.g. as I did in my letter to him, would be a digression
from the issue of your statement as is the \F1enlargement\F0 itself.
Nevertheless, the points he makes are in the minds of many scientists, and
I wouldn't presume to guess your own position.  From my own point of view,
the gloomy tendency to believe present day life intolerable coupled with
the belief that things must get worse and that any proposed remedy has
disadvantages outweighing its advantages and is probably ill-motivated
anyway, is wrong, but it is a major intellectual phenomenon of our times,
and is quite prominent within the scientific community.  It can be combatted
by reason, and more readily within the scientific community than elsewhere,
but it has to be studied as an intellectual phenomenon.  Do you have any
ideas on this?  I do, but they are not written down, and I think I have
imposed on your patience enough for now.

	One final technical comment:  the present plans for the use of
nuclear energy seem to me both quantitatively and qualitatively insufficient.
If nuclear energy is to be used to convert coal to motor fuel and pipeline
gas, for example as proposed by Haefle, then reactors much larger than
any now proposed are required.  A reactor producing a substantial fraction
of the country's supply of a storable fuel should probably be up to 100
times as large as those built at present in order to keep costs down.
Is my impression correct that the nuclear industry is too busy defending itself
against attack to do research in such directions?  Incidentally, while the
U.S. can count on both coal and nuclear energy, for most of Europe and Japan,
nuclear energy is probably the \F2only\F1 real option.\.



cc: Joshua Lederberg

\F4JMC:pdp-10
file name: bethe.le1[let,jmc]:su-ai
references: lederb.le1[let,jmc]:su-ai,energy.st1[1,jmc]:su-ai