[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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