Fusion for Peace -- A proposal from US and Iranian Physicists for Ending the Confrontation with Iran
By Eric J. Lerner, Dr. Hamid Yousefi and Dr. Morteza Habibi
We are hearing it again: we need to attack a Mid-Eastern nation to prevent it from getting weapons of mass destruction. The war, we are told again, will be quick and easy -- a surgical strike. Perhaps U.S. troops don't even need to get involved -- Israel will do the job. This time the target is Iran.
It may seem strange for the U.S., Israel, France, the UK, Russia or China, who have nuclear weapons in abundance, to be deciding that Iran must not have them. Setting that aside, we can all agree that it is desirable to stop the spread of nuclear weapons to more and more nations. But is yet another "pre-emptive" war the only way to achieve the goal? Does the path to peace really lie in using force to prevent a nation from going beyond dependence on oil and gas?
As physicists in Iran and the U.S., we are proposing an alternative: starting a scientific and engineering collaboration between the two countries that could, if successful, make uranium enrichment obsolete, block proliferation everywhere, liberate the world from oil, and open up a new source of cheap, clean unlimited energy. In the past three years, Iran has become a major player in the small, but growing, global effort to achieve aneutronic fusion power -- controlled nuclear fusion using fuels that produce no neutrons. Controlled fusion harnesses the power that heats the sun -- nuclear fusion -- as a source of energy for peaceful purposes. Fuels that don't produce neutrons are important because neutrons can be extremely destructive, damaging the structure of a fusion generator and inducing radioactivity.
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