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Prof. Robert J. Aumann, the Israeli-American co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. (Photo: Hebrew University)
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| By Associated Press December 7, 2005 |
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The founder of the Nobel Prizes wanted to reward those who work for disarmament, but one of this year's laureates said Wednesday that military readiness may be a better way to prevent war.
"I think what we have learned is that peace may be kept not by reducing the level of armaments but by maintaining the level of armaments," said Israeli-American Robert J. Aumann, co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Aumann and American Thomas C. Schelling won the economics award for using so-called game theory to explain major political and economic conflicts. The theory can be used to describe how actors make decisions by sizing up their opponents and anticipating their moves, while projecting an image of their own power, much like the Americans and Soviets did in the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.
"The peace was kept in the long dark years of the Cold War, because ... 24 hours a day, there were airplanes in the air carrying nuclear weapons," Aumann, 75, told reporters as a week of Nobel festivities kicked off in Stockholm.
Although prize founder Alfred Nobel wrote in his will that the peace prize should honor work "for the abolition or reduction in standing armies," he might have agreed with at least part of Aumann's theory.
The Swedish industrialist dreamed that his 1866 invention, dynamite, might result in weapons so terrible that war would become impossible.
"On the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops," Nobel said in 1891.
This year's peace prize went to Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency he leads.
The winners have a full program of lectures, news conferences, and receptions before the award ceremonies on Saturday.
Their research is often so complex that explaining its significance to nonscientists can be more difficult than winning the prize.
"People will be innovative and come up with new ideas of what can be done with it," physics prize co-winner Theodor W. Haensch of Germany said about his research on how the quantum nature of light can affect its behavior. "I think in a way we have opened up a new hunting ground. And it's too early to tell what game will show up."
Haensch shared the prize with Americans Roy J. Glauber and John L. Hall.
The medicine award went to Australians Barry J. Marshall and Robin Warren, while Americans Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock and Frenchman Yves Chauvin won the chemistry prize.
The Nobel Prize in literature went to British playwright and poet Harold Pinter, but he canceled his trip to Stockholm because of poor health.
The awards were announced in October, and are always presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896. The science awards are handed out in Stockholm, while the Nobel Peace Prize is presented in Oslo, Norway.
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