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executive were part of the agenda. Can the executive take the country to war without
Congressional approval? All of these things were behind the legislative drive of the best
of the senators. Cooper was one of them, so was Mansfield, and Fulbright, certainly, after
his conversion, post-Gulf of Tonkin, when he realized he had been lied to. George Aiken,
Phil Hart – the Senate was a great panoply of very thoughtful, senators who saw each
other as colleagues and even as brothers in a sense doing vitally important legislative
tasks.
Framework legislation was the first priority, and the always numerous necessary day-today
legislation was given its due place. There were other “framework” issues beyond
Vietnam. One of the most important had to do with nuclear weapons, and this is where I
really began my work on nuclear weaponry. The core issue then was, the ABM …
Q: The anti-ballistic missiles debate?
MILLER: Yes. The complicated AMB-ICBM – offensive weapons – NPT debate arises
in 1967, shortly after I come to the Senate. In 1967, a group of scientists who had built
our nuclear weaponry at Los Alamos and at other laboratories, in the early days under
Robert Oppenheimer, some of whom were presidential science advisors, were also the
leading physicists teaching at our major universities and laboratories. They believed that
the ABM if deployed would cause the escalation into a dangerous, uncontrollable arms
race. That was the danger they worried about. This group of nuclear physicists were
concerned that a technological plateau had been reached on both sides of the Iron curtain.
That it was time to stop and negotiate a halt and a downward trend. The weapons
scientists in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union had come to this conclusion through their
mutual contacts and discussions with each other – in the Soviet Union and the United
States. Andrei Sakharov, Evgeniy Velikhov, for example, on the Soviet side, with Hans
Bethe, W.K.H. Panofsky and Sid Drell, and Dick Garwin, Jack Ruina, Jerry Wiesner and
many others on the U.S. side. The discussions were mainly about the levels of their
respective technologies. Both sides agreed that a technological plateau or equilibrium had
been reached. It was agreed that a joint effort should be made to stop. They were the first
of the scientists to engage in informal, professional dialogue, on this paramount issue
affecting the security of the U.S. and the Soviet Union – and indeed the fate of the entire
earth. These first rank scientists in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union had conceived and
made the nuclear arsenals of both sides. They jointly decided that they had to go public,
and take this overriding issue affecting the control of nuclear weapons to the government
and the people. The most distinguished American physicists began to speak in detail
about their concerns, about the nuclear danger, decided it was necessary to come up to the
Hill. One of the first Senators they saw was Cooper. They reviewed the history of the
development of nuclear weapons and their fear that the nuclear arms race was spinning
out of control. I recall how a scientist of great brilliance and integrity convinced him, I
was there at the discussions with Dr. Panofsky, Wolfgang KH Panofsky, a little Hobbit of
a man, a wonderful character. He has since become a good friend. He was so lucid and so
accurate, so well-informed and so compelling that Cooper said, “You’re right. We have to
stop it.” Cooper was convinced, that the nuclear danger was the greatest threat we faced.
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