Professor of Public and International Affairs and Co-chair of the International Panel on Fissile Materials

by Phyllis Spiegel

Frank von Hippel, a professor of public and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, is known in scientific and political circles as an activist policy-physicist. For more than 30 years, his life—both professional and personal— has been dedicated, in great part, to the study of nuclear nonproliferation and arms control issues. Recognized and respected for his technical and philosophical expertise in this field, and his ability to communicate the facts as well as the dilemmas, he is sought after as a speaker by foreign governments, negotiating bodies, the U.S. Congress, and non-governmental groups.

Von Hippel said that few people are aware that his passion for his work may have been inherited from his maternal grandfather, James Franck, a renowned German-born American physicist who was a scientific leader in the Manhattan Project and warned that the use of the bomb in a surprise attack against Japan would make inevitable a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. His “Franck Report” to the War Department urged, as an alternative, a nuclear explosion in an unpopulated area to demonstrate the power of the bomb “before the eyes of representatives of all the United Nations,” and laid the basis for an international ban. This report, although failing to attain its main objective, still stands as a monument to the rejection by scientists of the use of science in works of destruction.

Franck shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1925 for research on the excitation and ionization of atoms by electron bombardment that verified Bohr’s theory that electron configurations in atoms exist at only certain discrete “quantum” energy levels. In 1933, he resigned his professorship at the University of Göttingen and left Germany in protest against Nazi policies.

As a boy and young man, Professor von Hippel knew his grandfather but said that they’d never discussed his role in the Manhattan Project. “As a youngster,” he said, “I was deeply impressed by my grandfather’s love of science, his interest in his grandchildren, and his unpretentious humanity.”

Professor von Hippel, who was born and raised in a suburb of Boston, did his undergraduate work at MIT and in 1962 earned a D.Phil. in theoretical physics at Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar. Before coming to Princeton in the mid ’70s, he did research in theoretical elementary particle physics at the University of Chicago and Cornell, and was an assistant professor of physics at Stanford.

The shift to what he calls public policy physics came after spending a year as a resident fellow at the National Academy of Science, where he organized an American Physical Society summer study on lightwater reactor safety. Since the early ’80s, his research has included contributions to the development of the analytical basis for deep cuts in U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles, ensuring that plutonium in spent nuclear reactor fuel is not separated out—a process which would make it available for weapons manufacture—and ending production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons.

Involved with disarmament proposals during the Reagan and G.H.W. Bush administrations, he published widely, testified before Congress, and made many trips to Moscow to brainstorm with scientists and government officials who were advising President Gorbachev on arms control issues.

In 1993, when he was invited to serve in the Clinton White House as assistant director of National Security in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Princeton granted him a two-year leave of absence. However, after 500 days, he found that he had accomplished all that he could in Washington and returned to working on the basis of new policy initiatives at Princeton and in collaboration with nongovernmental organizations.

He is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the American Physical Society’s Forum Award for Promoting the Understanding of the Relationship of Physics and Society, the Public Service Award from the Federation of American Scientists, a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Hilliard Roderick Prize for Excellence in Science, Arms Control, and International Security.

In 2006, a grant from the MacArthur Foundation funded the creation of the International Panel on Fissile Materials, a group of independent arms control and nonproliferation experts from 16 countries, to analyze the technical basis for policy initiatives to reduce global stocks of dangerous fissile materials and the number of sites where they are located. The second annual report has just been published and is available online at www.fissilematerials.org. Professor von Hippel is co-chairman of the panel with emeritus Professor R. Rajaraman of JawaharLal Nehru University in New Delhi, India.

Von Hippel said he would like to see “an increased level of national and international political debate on the dangers to the future of civilization from the huge number of nuclear weapons remaining from the Cold War—with thousands of warheads on missiles that are on hair-trigger alert. People need to be more proactive,” he said, “and we are trying to lay a basis for that—as has the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.”