Top U.S. scientists back Iran deal in letter to Obama

Twenty-nine of the nation’s top scientists — including Nobel laureates, veteran makers of nuclear arms and former White House science advisers — wrote to President Obama on Saturday to praise the Iran deal, calling it innovative and stringent.

The letter, from some of the world’s most knowledgeable experts in the fields of nuclear weapons and arms control, arrives as Obama is lobbying Congress, the U.S. public and the nation’s allies to support the agreement.

The two-page letter may give the White House arguments a boost after the blow Obama suffered Thursday when Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., one of the most influential Jewish voices in Congress, announced he would oppose the deal, which calls for Iran to curb its nuclear program and allow inspections in return for an end to international oil and financial sanctions.

The first signature on the letter is from Richard Garwin, a physicist who helped design the world’s first hydrogen bomb and has long advised Washington on nuclear weapons and arms control.

Also signing is Siegfried Hecker, a Stanford professor who, from 1986 to 1997, directed the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb.

Other prominent signatories include Freeman Dyson of Princeton, Sidney Drell of Stanford and Rush Holt, a physicist and former member of Congress who now leads the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society.

Most of the 29 who signed the letter are physicists, and many of them have held what the government calls Q clearances — granting access to a special category of secret information that bears on the design of nuclear arms and is considered equivalent to the military’s top secret security clearance.

Many of them have advised Congress, the White House or federal agencies over the decades. For instance, Frank von Hippel, a Princeton physicist, served as assistant director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Clinton administration.

The five Nobel laureates who signed are Leon Cooper of Brown University; Sheldon Glashow of Boston University; David Gross of UC Santa Barbara; Burton Richter of Stanford; and Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.