Four of the University's nine Nobel laureate faculty members signed a statement last Tuesday before the State of the Union address condemning a "preventive" war against Iraq.
The short declaration cautions that a war with Iraq would undermine U.S. national interests.
"Military operations against Iraq may indeed lead to a relatively swift victory in the short term. But war is characterized by surprise, human loss, and unintended consequences," the statement reads.
The faculty member Nobel laureates signing the statement included: physicists Val Fitch H00, who won in 1980; Philip Anderson (1997); and Joseph Taylor (1993), who is also dean of the faculty. Electrical engineering professor and laureate Daniel Tsui also signed the statement (1998).
Laureates only
The statement was only open to laureates in economics and the sciences.
"If anyone feels strongly against an issue, then he will sign onto any statement to that effect," Fitch said.
Harold Varmus, a 1989 winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine who received an honorary University degree in 1999 and currently is CEO and president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, also signed the statement.
"Even with a victory, we believe that the medical, economic, environmental, moral, spiritual, political and legal consequences of an American preventive attack on Iraq would undermine, not protect, U.S. security and standing in the world," the statement says.
Petition origin
The petition was the brainchild of Walter Kohn, a chemistry professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
He contacted his fellow Nobel laureates over a week ago about writing a statement against a war with Iraq.
This, however, is not the first time the laureates have banded together for a cause. In 2000, 100 laureates, including three Princeton professors, issued a statement about the environment at the centennial celebration of the Nobel Prize.
In addition, 50 laureates supported a message to President Clinton against a missile defense program.
"Once you win a big prize, you are solicited by many groups of people," Fitch explained. "You have to be careful and only sign statements that you feel most strongly about."
Forty-one of the 130 laureates in science and economics chose to take part in this statement.
Other famous signers of the statement include economist George Akerlof and atomic bomb architect Hans Bethe.
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