Bok's Letter on Referendum

On November 8th. Cambridge residents will be asked to vote on "The Nuclear-Free Cambridge Act," Questions Two on the follows. This Act provided, "No power, expectation university, laboratory, institution or other entity shall, within the City of Cambridge, engage in work the purpose of which is the research, development, testing, evaluation, production, maintenance, storage, transportation an or disposal of nuclear weapons or the components of nuclear weapons," Violators will be find of imprisoned, and Cambridge residents can also bring civil unit.

I am strongly opposed to this initiative and have grave doubts about its constitutionality. Still, I would not make a public statement on the subject were it not for one fact. The Act explicitly prohibits research and thus forces us to consider how far a community can go in restricting the kinds of inquiry that may go on in a university. This is an issue of such importance to Harvard that I felt compelled to call attention to it and make my views known.

To the best of my knowledge, Harvard is not engaged in any scientific research to develop nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, by flatly prohibiting research on nuclear weapons and their components, the Act could literally be read to extend even to the work of our professors and students on arms negotiations, the nuclear arms race, and the avoidance of nuclear war. Granted, proponents of the Act probably did not intend this result, and a later section of the Act does exclude "basic research, the purpose of which is not to work toward the development of nuclear weapons," Even no, at time some of Harvard's work on arms negotiations and arms control does not fall within the literal terms of this exclusion, since it is not "basic research." Moreover, the terms of the Act would certainly seem to apply to any professor whose writings advocated the development of new or larger nuclear weapons systems. Thus, the Act seems intolerably vague for a criminal states and may well violate the First Amendment.

Whether or not Harvard professor are affected by the Act, it is a dangerous precedent for a local community, or any governmental body, to forbid particular kinds of research because they might lead to dangerous or undesirable consequences. Granted, governments have the power to regulate the regulation of knowledge in order to protect the public from harm. But it is quite a different matter for a government to forbid the acquisition of knowledge. Our traditions of free speech and free inquiry are born of a conviction that governments are poor censors and ultimately serve us badly when they try to decide what kinds of knowledge are too dangerous to acquire. Opponents will argue that nuclear weapons are a special case because of their awesome power of destruction. Yet claims of this kind hardly justify the Act before us. Its provisions would go so far as to prohibit research to discover better safety mechanisms for avoiding nuclear accidents, research to improve capabilities for defense that could reduce the temptation to resort to preemptive nuclear striken, and research that might help prevent other nations from gaining a weapons superiority that could have critical destabilizing effects.

In short, research on nuclear weapons, the almost all research, can find to knowledge that has good and bad applications, Recognizing the contributions that free inquiry can make to human advancement, we have united over many years to allow research to go forward and not to deny the possibility of progress altogether. Even in the face of strong protest and warnings of grave consequences to follow, we have chosen not to prohibit inquiry but to work through democratic procedures to enact laws that prevent knowledge from being used in undesirable ways. This tradition has been vital to our universities and has served our society well through the years.

I recognize that some proponents of the initiative believe strongly that the Act will send a much-needed "message" to Washington emphasizing the importance of serious steps to curb the arms race. I sympathize with these underlying concerns. And yet, there are other ways to "send a message" to Washington that do not endanger the jobs of Cambridge residents or infringe upon academic freedom or subject professors to the threat of civil suit or criminal prosecution for carrying on their research. I hope that you will join me in defending our tradition of free inquiry even as we work for other measures that will reduce the threat of nuclear war.