[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 32 (Tuesday, March 2, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2146-S2147]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
DR. GLENN T. SEABORG
Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise today to salute a
pioneering scientist and a great American, Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg, who
died on February 25 at the age of 86. Although a chemist by training,
Dr. Seaborg is best remembered for his contributions to nuclear
physics. Dr. Seaborg was the co-discoverer of plutonium, and led a
research team which created a total of nine elements, all of which are
heavier than uranium. For this he was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Chemistry in 1951 which he shared with Dr. Edwin M. McMillan.
In 1942, as a member of the Manhattan Project, Dr. Seaborg was
assigned to a laboratory at the University of Chicago. There he headed
a unit that worked to isolate plutonium from uranium--the fuel used in
the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. After the war ended, Dr. Seaborg
returned to the University of California at Berkeley until 1961, when,
at the request of President John F. Kennedy, he became chairman of the
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). It was a position he held for ten
years, spanning three administrations. Dr. Seaborg was the first
scientist to direct the Commission. It was in this capacity that Dr.
Seaborg acted as an advisor to the U.S. negotiator, Averell Harriman,
in talks that led to the Limited Test Ban Treaty and was an advocate
for the peaceful use of atomic energy.
Dr. Seaborg kept a journal while chairman of the AEC. The journal
consisted of a diary written at home each evening, correspondence,
announcements, minutes, and the like. He was careful about classified
matters; nothing was included that could not be made public, and the
journal was reviewed by the AEC before his departure in 1971.
Nevertheless, more than a decade after his departure from the AEC, the
Department of Energy subjected two copies of Dr. Seaborg's journals--
one of which it had borrowed--to a number of classification reviews. He
came unannounced to my Senate office in September of 1997 to tell me of
the problems he was having getting his journal released, saying it was
something he wished to have resolved prior to his death. I introduced a
bill to return to Dr. Seaborg his journal in its original, unredacted
form but to no avail, so bureaucracy triumphed. It was never returned.
Now he has left us without having the satisfaction of resolving the
fate of his journal. It is devastating that a man who gave so much of
his life to his country was so outrageously treated by his own
government.
Dr. Seaborg continued to lead a productive life until the very end.
After his tenure as chairman of the AEC, Dr. Seaborg returned to the
University of California at Berkeley where he was a University
Professor--the highest academic distinction--and later a professor in
the university's graduate school of education as a result of his
concern about the quality of science education. He was the director of
the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and until his death its director
emeritus.
And there were well deserved accolades. In 1991 Dr. Seaborg was
awarded the nation's highest award for scientific achievement, the
National Medal of Science. In 1997 the International Union of Pure and
Applied Chemistry named an element after a living person for the first
time. Thus element 106 became Seaborgium (Sg), and Dr. Seaborg was
immortalized as a permanent part of the periodic table to which he had
already added so much.
So today I remember Dr. Seaborg for his contributions to nuclear
physics, and I salute him for his service as chairman of the Atomic
Energy Commission. Dr. Seaborg's family is in my prayers at this time
of great loss; his wife of 57 years, Helen, and five of their six
children: Lynne Annette Seaborg, Cobb, David Seaborg, Stephen Seaborg,
John Eric Seaborg, and Dianne Karole Seaborg. Their son Peter Glenn
Seaborg died in May of 1997.
Mr. President, I ask that Dr. Seaborg's obituary, which appeared in
the Washington Post on Saturday, February 27, 1999, be printed in the
Record.
The obituary follows:
[From the Washington Post, Feb. 27, 1999]
Nobel-Winning Chemist Glenn Seaborg Dies
(By Bart Barnes)
Glenn T. Seaborg, 86, the chemist whose work leading to the
discovery of plutonium won a Nobel Prize and helped bring
about the nuclear age, died Feb. 25 at his home near
Berkeley, Calif.
He had been convalescing since suffering a stroke in August
while being honored at a meeting in Boston of the American
Chemical Society.
Dr. Seaborg was a major player on the team of scientists
that developed the world's first atomic bomb used in warfare,
which was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945, in
the closing days of World War II. His research was later a
critical element in the peacetime operation of nuclear power
plants.
For 10 years, during the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon
administrations, he was chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission. It was a period of Cold War tension and mounting
international anxiety over the nuclear arms race. As the
president's primary nuclear adviser, Dr. Seaborg participated
in negotiations that led to the Limited Nuclear Test Ban
Treaty of 1963, and he was an articulate and forceful
advocate for the peaceful use of atomic energy.
A former chancellor of the University of California at
Berkeley, Dr. Seaborg returned to the university as a
chemistry professor on leaving the AEC chairmanship in 1971.
It was at the Berkeley laboratories three decades earlier
that he created from uranium a previously unknown element
that he called plutonium. The amount was infinitesimally
small, about a millionth of a millionth of an ounce, and it
could not be seen with the naked eye.
The process by which this was achieved--the transmutation
of uranium into plutonium by bombarding it with neutrons--
would win the 1951 Nobel Prize in chemistry, which Dr.
Seaborg shared with a Berkeley colleague, Edwin M. McMillan.
A form of this new element--known as plutonium 239--was found
to undergo fission and to release great energy when bombarded
by slow neutrons.
That, Dr. Seaborg would say later, gave plutonium 239 ``the
potential for serving as the explosive ingredient for a
nuclear bomb.''
In 1942, at the age of 30, Dr. Seaborg took a leave of
absence from the University of California to join the
Manhattan Project, the code name for the U.S. World War II
effort to develop an atomic bomb. Since Nazi Germany was
believed to be engaged in a similar effort, the project was
given the highest wartime priority.
Assigned to a laboratory at the University of Chicago, Dr.
Seaborg was chief of a Manhattan Project unit that was trying
to devise a way of isolating large amounts of plutonium from
uranium. By 1943, they had separated enough plutonium to send
samples to the Manhattan Project scientists working at the
laboratories at Los Alamos, N.M., where it was needed for
some crucial experiments.
To arrange for the return of the plutonium to the Chicago
laboratory, Dr. Seaborg had to devise a shortcut around the
cumbersome and top secret wartime security apparatus. Lacking
clearance to enter the Los Alamos laboratories, he took his
wife on a vacation to nearby Santa Fe, where one morning he
had breakfast with one of the Los Alamos physicists. At the
restaurant after the meal, the physicist handed over the
plutonium, which Dr. Seaborg placed in his suitcase and took
back to Chicago on a train.
By 1945, there had been enough plutonium produced to build
two atomic bombs, including the one dropped on Nagasaki,
Japan,
[[Page S2147]]
three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Shortly
thereafter, Japan capitulated and on Aug. 14, 1945, the war
ended.
In 1946, Dr. Seaborg returned to Berkeley as a full
professor, where he continued his prewar research on the
discovery of new elements. He was associate director of the
Lawrence Radiation Laboratory and chief of its nuclear
chemistry research section from 1954 to 1958. He became
chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley in
1958 and served in that capacity until his 1961 appointment
as chairman of the AEC.
Glenn Theodore Seaborg was born in the small mining town of
Ishpeming, on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. At the age of
10, he moved to a suburb of Los Angeles with his family. He
was first in his class and valedictorian in high school, and
in September 1929, he entered the University of California at
Los Angeles. To raise money for his college expenses he was a
stevedore, an apricot picker, a laboratory assistant at a
rubber company and an apprentice Linotype operator for the
Los Angeles Herald. He was an assistant in the UCLA chemistry
laboratory and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
On graduating from UCLA, he transferred to the University
of California's Berkeley campus where he had a teaching
assistantship and a fellowship to study nuclear chemistry
under the noted chemist, Gilbert N. Lewis. He received a
doctorate in chemistry at Berkeley in 1937, then became a
research associate under Lewis and later an instructor in
chemistry.
He was a popular classroom teacher, but it was in the
laboratory that Dr. Seaborg made his mark in the scientific
community. There his co-worker, McMillan, he demonstrated
that by bombarding uranium with neutrons, a new element--
heavier than uranium--could be identified and produced. He
called it neptunium after Neptune, the planet beyond Uranus
in the solar system.
Building on this demonstration, Dr. Seaborg directed a team
that employed a similar process to isolate the next of what
came to be known as the transurnium elements--those with
nuclei heavier than uranium, which had been the heaviest of
the known elements. This next new element was named
plutonium, after Pluto, the planet beyond Neptune in the
solar system.
This would become the critical element in the development
of atomic war weapons. After World War II, Dr. Seaborg
continued his work on transuranium elements in the Berkeley
laboratories, discovering substances later called
berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium,
nobelium and ``seaborgium,'' which was officially accepted
as the name for element 106 in August 1997.
In his presentation speech on the awarding of the 1951
Nobel Prize, A.F. Westgren of the Royal Swedish Academy said
Dr. Seaborg had ``written one of the most brilliant pages in
the history of discovery of chemical elements.''
As a member of the General Advisory Committee of the AEC,
Dr. Seaborg endorsed--reluctantly--the postwar crash program
that developed the hydrogen bomb.
``Although I deplore the prospect of our country's putting
a tremendous effort into the H-bomb, I must confess that I
have been unable to come to the conclusion that we should
not,'' he said.
On his appointment as chancellor of the University of
California at Berkeley in 1958, Dr. Seaborg gave up his
research work. For the next three years, he supervised what
Newsweek magazine called ``possibly the best faculty in the
United States.''
His 1961 appointment as AEC chairman made him the first
scientist to direct the commission, and he was an insider and
adviser to President Kennedy and U.S. negotiator Averell
Harriman in the talks with the Soviet Union that led to the
Limited Test Ban Treaty. Ratified by the Senate in September
1963, the treaty banned above-ground nuclear tests and
committed the United States and the Soviet Union to seeking
``discontinuance of all test explosions of nuclear weapons
for all time.'' For Dr. Seaborg, who had hoped for
comprehensive prohibition of nuclear tests, the treaty was
only a partial victory.
On leaving the AEC in summer 1971, Dr. Seaborg told NBC's
``Meet the Press'' that the commission's major achievement
under his leadership was ``the development of economic
nuclear power and the placement of that in the domain of
private enterprise.'' In addition to the Limited Nuclear Test
Ban Treaty, he also mentioned the start-up of the
International Atomic Energy Agency and the signing of the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
He observed, somewhat ruefully, that it was the Department
of the Defense, not the AEC, that had full control of the
U.S. nuclear weapons program.
On rejoining the faculty of the University of California at
Berkeley, following his departure from the AEC, Dr. Seaborg
held the rank of university professor--the highest academic
distinction. In 1983, concerned with the quality of science
education, he became a professor in the university's graduate
school of education.
He was a former president of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, and a recipient of the Enrico
Fermi Award of the AEC and the Priestly Medal of the American
Chemical Society. In 1991, he received the National Medal of
Science, the nation's highest award for scientific
achievement.
In 1942, Dr. Seaborg married Helen L. Griggs, with whom he
had four sons and two daughters. When his children were
young, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist was an enthusiastic
participant in family baseball, volleyball and basketball
games and in swimming contests.
One of his sons, Peter Glenn Seaborg, died in May of
1997.
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