(C) Common Dreams
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Seymour Melman, 86, Dies; Spurred Antiwar Movement [1]
['Jennifer Bayot']
Date: 2004-12-18
Seymour Melman, a Columbia University scholar who helped galvanize the antiwar movement from the 1950's on with analyses of the social costs of military spending, died on Dec. 16 at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.
The cause appeared to be an aneurysm, said Benjamin Abrams, his research assistant.
Dr. Melman, an economist who taught industrial engineering at Columbia, was a leading advocate of disarmament for nearly half a century. He opposed nuclear weapons almost from their inception and he opposed the current war in Iraq.
A longtime co-chairman of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, he emphasized arguments that military spending diverted resources from health care, public housing and education.
In speeches, editorials, scholarly articles and close to a dozen books, he criticized the stockpiling of nuclear weapons and maintained that the United States and the Soviet Union were draining their economies for little more than the ability to destroy each other hundreds of times over. He popularized the use of the word "overkill" to describe the buildup. "Isn't 1,250 times overkill enough?" he wrote in a 1964 letter to The New York Times. "Since the Soviets by similar calculation can overkill the United States only 145 times, are we to believe that any advantage exists here for either side?"
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/18/obituaries/seymour-melman-86-dies-spurred-antiwar-movement.html
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