Jorge E. Hirsch

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Jorge E. Hirsch is a physics professor (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1980) who does research and teaching at the University of California, San Diego, USA. He became famous worldwide in 2005-2006 with his public warnings about the increasing risk of nuclear war due to what he claims is an unnecessarily aggressive military nuclear policy of the United States. He is also known for developing the h-index in 2005, an index for quantifying a scientist's publication productivity.

1 Research
2 Nuclear war analyses
3 Notes
4 External links

[edit] Research

Hirsch's scientific work is involved with understanding collective, large-scale properties of solids, such as superconductivity and ferromagnetism, based on explanations starting from the small-scale mechanisms.

[edit] Nuclear war analyses

Some examples of Hirsch's claims during early 2006 were that

Multiple pieces of independent evidence suggest that America is embarked in a premeditated path that will lead inexorably to the use of nuclear weapons against Iran in the very near future^[1]

and that

neither the media nor Congress are bringing up the inconvenient little fact that the military option will necessarily lead to the use of nuclear weapons against Iran.^[2]

He also speculated that in order to justify an attack on Iran using nuclear weapons, US authorities might make a false, but difficult to disprove, claim that Iranian biologists are trying to develop a strain of the H5N1 avian flu virus which would be transmissible from human to human, and which would be transported to Europe by birds migrating north with the onset of the northern summer of 2006.^[3] However, given the fact that such a strain has already emerged in Southeast Asia and is documented by WHO, such a hypothesis seems obsolute by now.|3|

In April 2006, Hirsch initiated a letter to President George W. Bush, co-signed by twelve other physicists, warning of the dangers of using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. The letter, dated April 17, was in response to articles in The New Yorker and The Washington Post that indicated the Pentagon was actively considering such options.