Observations on nuclear

My friend Ed sold a book the other day - at Sotheby's in New York, for $23,000. Now he is promising to spend the money annoying the neighbours in the cause of world peace.

Ed Grothus is the most colourful resident of Los Alamos, the town on a New Mexico mountain top that is home to America's principal nuclear weapons laboratory. Once a technician at the lab but long since retired - he is 83 this week - he has turned himself into a one-man local peace movement, keeping up a string of provocative stunts expressing the visceral loathing he feels for the bombs he once helped to make.

Styling himself Don Eduardo de Los Alamos, he occasionally dresses as a cardinal to perform what he calls a "critical mass" in town. On Hiroshima Day, which is not otherwise marked by the locals, he sometimes parades with banners apologising for the bombing. And a few years ago he mailed a tin can marked "organic plutonium" to Bill Clinton in Washington, provoking a small alert at the White House and a swift police visit to the Grothus household.

Los Alamos being a one-employer town dedicated to the science of mass destruction (it is said to have the highest concentration of PhDs in the world), these activities tend to be frowned upon, even resented.

When he is not protesting and writing to newspapers, Ed makes a living running a warehouse and junkyard called the Black Hole, mainly trading in surplus office equipment from the laboratory - "nuclear recycling", as he puts it - and it was in a $25 bulk purchase at a local house clearance that he found the book.

A slim volume entitled Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, it was an early copy of the first official US publication about nuclear weapons, published within days of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks. What caught Ed's eye were the signatures on the flyleaf: Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, Otto Frisch, Philip Morrison, Louis Slotin, Stanislaw Ulam and many more - dozens of members of the glittering international team of physicists who, in great secrecy, designed those first bombs.

Whoever was the book's original owner had clearly worked his way through the cast of one of the most extraordinary stories of the Second World War, and of the history of science, studiously gathering their autographs. And this past week in New York a collector paid more than double the estimate for it.

What will Ed do with the money? He reports by e-mail that it will help fund the last great project of his life: two huge, 50ft "Doomsday Stones" which he is having inscribed with messages in many languages warning the world of the dangers of nuclear weapons. The inscription will begin "Welcome to Los Alamos", so he obviously has in mind for them a prime location on the approaches to town. Whether the local authorities will ever grant him one of those must be in doubt, but one thing is certain: he will cause as much irritation as he can campaigning for it.

In the meantime, he writes, "I'm having another slice of watermelon. I can afford it."

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