Science Group Will Picket Research I-Labs at M.I.T.

The New York chapter of Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action (SESPA) will picket the M.I.T. Instrumentation Labs (I-Labs) tomorrow to protest weapons research.

"Our purpose is to bring moral and political pressure on men and women engaged in weapons work." Seymour Melman, professor of Industrial Engineering at Columiba University, author of Pentagon Capitalism and a member of the group, said yesterday.

SESPA demonstrators will picket at the main entrance of the M.I.T. administration building from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. tomorrow. The picketers will ask M.I.T. students and faculty members to take the SESPA pledge, which calls for non-participation in war research and weapons production.

The picket line will then move to the I-Labs, where the guidance mechanism for the Defense Department's controversial MIRV system is being developed.

"M.I.T. with its I-Labs and Lincoln Labs is probably the most important military research center in the U.S.," Melman said. "But the people at M.I.T. have not shown signs of taking any action about weapons research."

"We urge weapons researchers to abandon this work and to give up their security clearances," Roderick Wallace, a second-year graduate student in Physics at Columbia, said yesterday. SESPA will help them find other work, he added.

SESPA is a national organization of about 3000 scientists and engineers with autonomous chapters in New York; Boston; Chicago; Berkeley, Calif.; Palo Alto, Calif.; and Madison, Wisc.

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An M.I.T. based peace action group, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), does not support the SESPA demonstration or the SESPA pledge, Lee Grodzins, professor of Physics at M.I.T. and chairman of UCS, said yesterday.

"Absolute things like this pledge don't interest us," he added. "The defense problem is not such a cut-and-dried affair. I suspect no one in the Union of Concerned Scientists would work on MIRV, but as to the ABM, for instance, that depends on what kind of ABM. Probably about nine-tenths of us would work on a laser ABM."

"The SESPA demonstration seems to be an effort to stir the Union of Concerned Scientists into action," Noam Chomsky, professor of Linguistics at M.I.T., said yesterday. "I'm sympathetic to the demonstration; it's a good idea," he added.