UI professor concerned with the stars, first strikes

Fred Lamb's voice hitches with emotion as he recalls the time his parents asked their science-oriented teen-age son whether they should build a bomb shelter.

The Cold War was hot and the chances of an even hotter atomic shooting war between the United States and the former Soviet Union didn't seem like long odds, when Lamb, now a University of Illinois professor, went to the library in his hometown of Manhattan, Kan., to research his parents' question. Among other things, he waded into a government report on the effects of nuclear weapons.

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