Avoiding Apocalypse

This is the story of the astonishing sequence of events set in motion by the scientists' boycott of the Soviet Union.

Avoiding Apocalypse: How Science and Scientists Ended the Cold War tells the little-known story of the worldwide scientists’ boycott of the Soviet Union that set in motion an astonishing sequence of events. Starting simultaneously with the rise to power of an obscure Soviet bureaucrat named Mikhail Gorbachev, the scientists’ boycott led to the end not only of the Cold War but also of the Soviet Union itself.

The author is uniquely suited to tell this story. He has spent his professional career as a research physicist, first at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and then at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the two U. S. nuclear weapons design laboratories, helping to develop the science that has made technically possible a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), one linchpin of the Cold War stand-down. He is the author or co-author of nearly 100 peer-reviewed scientific publications, and the author (with Jon Larsen) of what has now become the standard graduate-level text book in the new field of physics that grew out of Cold War era nuclear weapons development, Extreme Physics, published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. He has also engaged in collaborative research at scientific research facilities in several other countries, including Russia, and has a world-wide following of his scientific publications.

In addition, he has held an appointed position as a Science Advisor in the U. S. Department of Energy in Washington, D. C. during the George H. W. Bush administration. He maintains many connections to the science policy community.

He also has been --- and continues as --- a Guest Lecturer at the University of California; and has written and published several Op-Ed columns on the issues presented in this book in different newspapers over the years. He is currently Co-Chair of Gettysburg Democracy For America. In this role he oversees the writing of two monthly Op-ed columns that appear in the Gettysburg Times daily newspaper.

He lives with his wife, Mary Frances, part-time in Livermore, California, and part-time in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.