STANFORD UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

DEPARTMENT OF GENETICS

August 11, 1977

Dr. Henry W. Kendall

Union of Concerned Scientists
1208 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, Masachusetts 02138

Dear Dr. Kendall:

Thank you for your letter of July 29th and for inviting me to join in
your Declaration on the Nuclear Arms Race.

I am certainly sympathetic to the thrust of your effort and am generally
associated with these kinds of views. However, more often than not I have
regretted signing petitions and similar statements, and as an alternative would
prefer to use my own devices, media of expression and contacts in articulating
my views, even when, as in this instance, there is very little indeed to quarrel
with. However, please let me give the matter a bit more thought, and I will
respond further if I can make an exception.

My main oberservation at this time is that it is really quite futile
to attempt to influence the Executive branch directly through the public media.
On the other hand, in this case particularly, it may be Congress that needs
to be educated about the issues and about the extent of public support for an
arms~control-oriented policy approach. If you accept that logic, you may
wish to reconsider whether to emphasize the specific recommendations you
make under part III. There is some danger that you will become embroiled in
the details of such proposals to the detriment of your principal effort and to
the goal of sustaining support for other initiatives being forwarded by the
Administration.

For example, I, myself, would have put more specific stress on mutually
agreed limitations on missile-test firings, rather than rely on that outcome
as a by-product of your recommendation 2. Conversely, I would want to scruntinize
the detailed wording (not at all the spirit!) of that recommendation 2 before
espousing it in a formal public declaration. Nothing would be a greater set-
back to the building of mutual confidence in the reliability of arms control
agreements, than to have them so ambiguously worded that they lead to:
confusion of intention, disillusion and rejection later on. The problem of
defining what would constitute a "field test of a new Soviet weapon" is a
formidable one, and there ought to be no intrinsic ambiguity about the ground
rules of steps we may unilaterally announce.

AA Basar, ap wpuasy

DEPARTME''T OF GENETICS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305 « (415) 497-5052
Dr. Henry W. Kendall ~2- August 11, 1977

You might wish to stress even more than you do that time is running
out for verifiable strategic arms limitations: the technologies that are just
now coming to fruition are precisely those that might negate the observability
of the force levels on both sides. While I view the qualitative aspects of
the arms race as more serious than the quantitative, a global context in which
numerical verification has become doubtful may doom other efforts at dampening
the pace of new technologies. It may just illustrate the point that I could
not endorse your recommendation 2 without some (possibly difficult) formula
or other source of reassurance that mutual observability would be sustained
under its terms.

Yours sincerely,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics |

JL: ek-f