I wanted to know what the world was made of.
I found that doing theoretical physics
was just compelling more than anything else I knew.
Sidney Drell's quest to better understand
the fundamental forces that make up our universe
led him to Stanford where for more than
forty years he taught
and pursued his theoretical studies.
The great laboratories
that were started right after World War II thrived. 
Accelerators of high-energy physics 
were being built
and whole new worlds to explore.
Probing what the world was made of
in terms of elementary particles in the forces that
bind them together
was an exceedingly exciting thing.
In 1960 Drell joined with
other prominent academic scientists to
counter potential U.S. security threats
from the emerging technologies.
To try it avoid the nightmare of a nuclear war
was equally compelling as trying to have
the dream of discovering
what structure of nature was.
We were up against a
a country that was quite hostile
toward us ideologically in the Soviet Union. 
And they had an Iron Curtain.
And it was very hard to know what was
going on there.
The only way to find out was you have
some ways to pierce the Iron Curtain
and we did that with electronic
reconnaissance satellites in space.
It was very important to do that
because the more you understand,
the more likely you are to behave rationally.
I believe it's almost a miracle that
we've had this incredibly
effective and terrible weapon and we've not used it
for sixty-seven years.
I think that is
a cause for optimism.
We create new technologies that affect
conditions of life
and survival on Earth. 
I think as a community
we have an obligation to help society
understand
the implications of these new
technologies that result
from our discoveries.
