In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America 9780813545141

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IN SPUTNIK’S SHADOW

IN SPUTNIK’S SHADOW The President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America Z u oy u e W a n g

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wang, Zuoyue, 1963– In Sputnik’s shadow : the President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America / Zuoyue Wang. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8135-4331-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Science and state—United States—History—20th century. 2. United States. President’s Science Advisory Committee. 3. Sputnik satellites. 4. Cold War. 5. United States— Politics and government—1953–1961. I. Title. Q127.U6W365 2008 338.973'0609045—dc22 2007035777 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2008 by Zuoyue Wang All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America

To Xu Liangying and Lawrence Badash, My Mentors

Contents List of Illustrations — ix Preface — xi Note to the Reader — xv Abbreviations Used in Text — xvii

Introduction — 1

Part I

Prelude: Before Sputnik

1

American Public Science, 1863–1945 — 13

2

The Origins of Technological Skepticism, 1945–1950 — 23

3

Mobilizing Science for the Korean War under Truman, 1950–1952 — 32

4

Science and the National Security State under Eisenhower, 1952–1957 — 42

Part II

Ike, Sputnik, and the Rise of PSAC

5

Eisenhower, Sputnik, and the Creation of PSAC, 1957 — 71

6

PSAC and the Launching of NASA, 1957–1960 — 88

7

Military Technology, 1957–1960 — 100

8

The Search for a Nuclear Test Ban, 1957–1960 — 120

9

The Politics of Big Science, 1957–1960 — 142

10

Part III

The Control of Science Policy under Eisenhower, 1957–1960 — 158

The Politics of Technological Skepticism

11

Science at the New Frontier under Kennedy, 1960–1963 — 183

12

Responding to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, 1962–1963 — 199

13

Testing the Limits, 1961–1963 — 219

14

“Scientists for Johnson,” 1964 — 236 vii

viii

Contents

15

PSAC, the Vietnam War, and the ABM Debate, 1964–1968 — 258

16

The Politics of Technological Dissent under Nixon, 1969–1973 — 287 Epilogue — 311 Conclusion — 318 Appendix — 325 Abbreviations Used in Notes — 329 Notes — 333 Bibliography — 419 Index — 443

Illustrations 4.1. President Eisenhower meeting with the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization, 1954. — 50 10.1. President Eisenhower holding his last meeting with the President’s Science Advisory Committee, 1960. — 174 11.1. President Kennedy meeting with the President’s Science Advisory Committee, 1961. — 189 14.1. President Johnson meeting with science adviser Donald Hornig and his predecessor Jerome Wiesner. — 237

ix

Preface Even though I grew up on the other side of the Iron Curtain, I did not escape the shadow of Sputnik. Just as it sent a shock wave of apprehension through the West in the bitterly divided Cold War, the satellite stirred a great euphoria for the socialist system in the East. In China, Communist leader Mao Zedong, armed with party scientists’ supposed “scientific proofs” (dissidents had been crushed months earlier in the Anti-Rightist purge), launched the country into an ambitious but ultimately disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign of rapid industrialization and agricultural collectivization. My own parents barely survived the resultant famine, but millions of others were not so lucky. When I was born in 1963, the so-called years of natural disasters were just over but their effects could still be felt. Officially, however, Sputnik and the Great Leap Forward remained positive milestones of the march of communism in China during the decade of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) when I went to school. It was not until I went to college that I learned on my own—as physics majors we were not taught much beyond technical subjects—the full-scale destruction of the campaign and not until I turned from physics to the history of science in my graduate studies did I understand the crucial role that Sputnik played during the Cold War. This book, however, did not start as a study of the impact of Sputnik per se. It had its origin partly in my own political baptism when I took part in a debate between liberal and conservative scientists over the relationship between science and politics in China in the early 1980s. At the time I was a graduate student at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, studying the history of modern physics with historian of science Xu Liangying and astrophysicist Fang Lizhi. Their advocacy of science and democracy as the pillars of modern society had a great appeal to young people of my generation. When Fang and Xu were attacked by party philosophers for deviating from orthodox Marxism in their historical interpretation of modern science, my fellow graduate students and I joined in the fray on our mentors’ side.1 The experience left me with two questions, one historical and the other political: What had shaped the relationship between scientists and the state in history in different cultural and national contexts? What should be the proper role of science in a democratic society? By the time Xu and especially Fang were embroiled in Chinese politics leading to the Tiananmen Square tragedy in 1989, I was already in the United States as a PhD candidate at the University of California trying to decide on a dissertation topic with these two questions in mind. With fresh memories of the tension between the Chinese scientists and the state and with growing interest in American science and society in mind, I eventually chose, under the wise guidance of my advisor Lawrence Badash, to xi

xii

Preface

examine the role of American scientists in national and international politics in the post-Sputnik era through a study of the experience of the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). At the time, not all PSAC-related documents had been declassified; even today some still remain classified. Enough of them have now been opened, however, to enable one to piece together at least a first draft of the committee’s history in broad historical context. In addition, in the early 1990s Professor Badash introduced me to Glenn T. Seaborg, the Nobel chemistry laureate at Berkeley, to help him write his memoirs as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission for the decade of 1961–1971. Even though Dr. Seaborg passed away in 1999 before finishing that memoir (an autobiography that he wrote with the help of his son Eric did appear in 2001), the access to his papers and journals that he so generously gave me allowed me to gain a unique perspective on PSAC from that of a committee member as well as the head of a major federal agency.2 Taking advantage of all these available sources and the opportunities to interview a number of former PSAC scientists and staff members, I thus started my own journey to understand PSAC and the politics of science in Cold War America, with this book as its result. What I have found, as I have tried to argue in the book, is that the most important contribution of PSAC was not its advice to the government on what technology could do, but, rather, what it could not do. It is this sense of technological skepticism, I believe, that we still need in our own age of global technological enthusiasm and renewed American militarism if we are to prevent future Great Leap Forwards and escape the various shadows of Sputnik. My journey toward the completion of this book has been a long but not a lonely one. My greatest debts are to Professor Xu, who introduced me to the history of science, provided me with support and encouragement, and above all, by his own courageous advocacy of human rights, offered a model, for me and many others, of what it means to be a socially responsible intellectual; and to Professor Badash, who likewise has not only guided my professional growth as a historian of science and my progress on this book, but also infl uenced in many ways my thinking about American science and society with his scholarship and his social activism on behalf of justice and civil liberty. I am fortunate to have had them as my mentors and proudly dedicate this book to them. This book benefited from the interviews that I have conducted with former PSAC members and others associated with it as listed in the Appendix, and many of them—especially William O. Baker, Richard Garwin, Wolfgang Panofsky, and Glenn Seaborg—also kindly gave me access to their files. I thank them all for their time, interest, and valuable information and insights. With gratitude and admiration I also acknowledge the excellent professional assistance I have received from archivists and colleagues in all the archives that I have visited, especially Robin Chandler, then at the SLAC Archives; Marjorie H. Cianlante at the National Archives; Judith Goodstein at the Caltech Archives; Shannon Jarett at the Johnson Library; Dwight E. Strandberg at the Eisenhower Library, and Roger Launius, then at the NASA History Office.

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xiii

I am deeply grateful to anonymous reviewers and a large number of mentors, colleagues, and friends who have kindly read parts or all of the manuscript during various stages of development and given me their constructive criticisms, especially Kai-Henrik Barth, Otis Graham, Jacob Hamblin, John Heilbron, Donald Hornig, Marcel LaFollette, Patrick McCray, Peter Neushul, Naomi Oreskes, Michael Osborne, Wolfgang Panofsky, George Rathjens, Jeffrey Stine, Peter Westwick, and Chris Young. Without implying their agreement with my interpretations, I thank them all, as I do the following for fruitful discussions or assistance: Cathryn Carson, Chen Hengliu, Robert Crease, Ronald Doel, Fan Dainian, Paul Forman, G. Allen Greb, Walter Grunden, Intaek Han, Gregg Herken, Elaine Kistiakowsky, John Krige, Li Peishan, Shidong Li, Liu Bing, Haiming Liu, Ronald Rainger, Michael Riordan, Bruce L. R. Smith, Steven Soter, Yunguang Tian, Mark Walker, Jessica Wang, Zhao Zhongli, and Benjamin Zulueta. I thank my colleagues at the California State Polytechnic University (Cal Poly), Pomona—especially John Moore, Daniel Lewis, and Mahmood Ibrahim in the History Department; Dean Barbara Way of the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences; Peggy Perry in the Faculty Center for Professional Development; and Kate Seifert in the library— for their support, and my students—especially Jolie Valentine, Fares Alhassen, Tokuo Nakamoto, and Paul Traska—for assistance, discussion, and, in Paul’s case, the Herculean job of preparing the index. Special thanks to Audra Wolfe, Kendra Boileau, and Doreen Valentine, my editors, and the production staff at Rutgers University Press, for their patience and support. A fellowship from the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) of the University of California enabled me to carry out the initial research and writing. I also thank the following institutions for travel and research grants: The American Institute for Physics’ Center for History of Physics, the Eisenhower Institute, the Kennedy Library, the Rockefeller Archives Center, the History Associates at UCSB, and the Faculty Center for Professional Development at Cal Poly Pomona. Finally, I want to thank my family—my wife Hui Shen, my daughter Sophie, and my son Kevin, as well as my parents and parents-in-law—for their love, understanding, sacrifices, and support. In particular, conversations with Hui about her experiences as a computer engineer have enriched my understanding of the role of science and technology in society, and in writing this book I have been inspired by the hope that that it might help, in however small a way, make the future world of our children and their generation a more livable one.

Note to the Reader To save space, books, book chapters, and journal articles are usually cited with the last name(s) of the author(s) and the year of publication. Full citation can be found in the bibliography. Abbreviations are usually used when citing primary source materials. A list of such abbreviations precedes the notes section. In case several sources for the same primary source material are available, efforts have been made to cite the most complete or the most widely available ones. Unless otherwise noted, interviews cited were by the author. See bibliography for a complete list of the interviews with details about dates and places.

xv

Abbreviations Used in Text AAAS ABM ACDA AEC AGS AICBM AID AIDS ANP APS ARPA ASAT Bev BNL BOB BTL Caltech CBS CBW CEA CERN CIA CIO COSPUP DCPG DDRE DDT DOD DSB DST EIR EOP FBI FCST FDA FPCB FY

American Association for the Advancement of Science Anti-ballistic missile Arms Control and Disarmament Agency Atomic Energy Commission alternating-gradient synchrotron Anti-intercontinental ballistic missile Agency for International Development Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion American Physical Society Advanced Research Projects Agency Anti-satellite weapons Billion-electron-volt Brookhaven National Laboratory Bureau of the Budget Bell Telephone Laboratories California Institute of Technology Columbia Broadcasting System Chemical and biological warfare or weapons Council of Economic Advisers European Organization for Nuclear Research Central Intelligence Agency Congress of Industrial Organizations Committee on Science and Public Policy Defense Communications Planning Group Director of defense research and engineering Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane Department of Defense Defense Science Board Department of Science and Technology Environmental Impact Reports Executive Office of the President Federal Bureau of Investigation Federal Council for Science and Technology Food and Drug Administration Federal Pest Control Board Fiscal Year xvii

xviii

Abbreviations Used in Text

GAC GNP HEW IBM ICBM ICSRD IDL IGY IOC IRBM JCAE JCS KIST MIT MURA NACA NAS NASA NATO NDEA NIE NIH NMD NORAD NRC NSB NSC NSF ODDRE ODM ODM-SAC OMB ONR OSRD OST OSTP PSAC PCAST R&D RDB SAGE SAMOS

General Advisory Committee Gross National Product Health, Education, and Welfare Department International Business Machines Intercontinental ballistic missile Interdepartmental Committee on Scientific Research and Development Interdisciplinary laboratories International Geophysical Year Initial operational capabilities Intermediate-range ballistic missile Joint Committee on Atomic Energy Joint Chiefs of Staff Korean Institute of Science and Technology Massachusetts Institute of Technology Midwestern Universities Research Association National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics National Academy of Sciences National Aeronautics and Space Administration North Atlantic Treaty Organization National Defense Education Act National Intelligence Estimate National Institutes of Health National Missile Defense North American Air Defense Command National Research Council National Science Board National Security Council National Science Foundation Office of Director of Defense Research and Engineering Office of Defense Mobilization Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization Office of Management and Budget Office of Naval Research Office of Scientific Research and Development Office of Science and Technology Office of Science and Technology Policy President’s Science Advisory Committee President’s Council (Committee) of Advisers on Science and Technology Research and Development Research and Development Board Semi-automatic ground environment Satellite and missile observation system

Abbreviations Used in Text

SAC SANE SDI SESPA SLAC SSC SST TCP TWG UC UCLA UNESCO USSR USDA WHSC WISE WSEG WWII ZGS

Strategic Air Command National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy Strategic Defense Initiative Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Actions Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Superconducting Super Collider Supersonic Transport Technological Capabilities Panel Technical Working Group University of California University of California, Los Angeles United Nations Education, Science, and Culture Organization Union of Soviet Socialist Republics United States Department of Agriculture White House Science Council Women in Science and Engineering Weapons Systems Evaluation Group World War II Zero-gradient synchrotron

xix

IN SPUTNIK’S SHADOW

Introduction When Dwight Eisenhower met with the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) on December 19, 1960 in the White House, he had much on his mind. A little over a month before, John F. Kennedy had defeated Vice President Richard Nixon in the presidential election. Eisenhower told the scientists that he had been so sure that Nixon would win the election that his thinking about the transition “had all been oriented toward that situation.” He now worried that Kennedy’s brand of liberalism would bring an activist administration, with “centralized dictation and attitude of omniscience.” PSAC, Eisenhower said, “could be an offset to such tendencies.” According to the notes taken by presidential assistant Andrew Goodpaster, The President said that he had a deep sense of obligation to this group. He noted that more and more he has tended to put science advice into more and more subjects of national policy. He thought that this body holds great infl uence in our federal system. Ours is not a system based upon centralized political direction and domination. Rather it is one which derives the initiative from groups such as this working with the government, but not components of the government. He stressed that he was deeply hopeful that this institution would not be lost under the new administration.1

During the hourlong meeting, Eisenhower did not elaborate on how PSAC (pee-sak), a group of about twenty prominent scientists and engineers that he had brought into the White House in 1957 to work on military technology, space policy, and arms control in the wake of Sputnik, could help curb the growth of big government. He spoke of his personal gratification for the group’s “most impressive” and “valuable” work, and for “the stimulation of thought he gained and the broadening and deepening of his own understanding.” Although he recognized the necessity for centralized government control during wartime emergencies, he believed that “for the long pull we must rely on free methods such as this [PSAC] rather than on some political head telling everyone just what to do.” George B. Kistiakowsky, the president’s special assistant for science and technology, or science adviser, and PSAC chairman, reassured Eisenhower that Kennedy’s transition team had already told him that they would retain PSAC and other elements of the science advisory system with only minor modifications.2 What exactly did PSAC scientists do to make Eisenhower “put science advice into more and more subjects of national policy”? Eisenhower himself provided a few hints in the years following his retirement. In his memoir, Eisenhower wrote affectionately of his science “wizards” who enlightened him on technical issues 1

2

i n s p ut n i k ’ s s h a d o w

and helped him control the space race.3 Then, on his deathbed in 1969, Eisenhower inquired about “my scientists” to the visiting James Killian, his first science adviser and PSAC chairman, commenting, “You know, Jim, this bunch of scientists was one of the few groups that I encountered in Washington who seemed to be there to help the country and not help themselves.”4 In Eisenhower’s eyes, PSAC appeared not only free of self-interest, but also a “good” scientific-technological elite that presented a counterbalance to the military-industrial complex that he would warn the nation of shortly in his famous farewell address.5 To what extent this perception corresponded to the reality of PSAC and American politics of science is a question of more than historical interest. As we enter a new era of technological enthusiasm, we need more than ever to scrutinize the historical forces still shaping our perceptions of what science and technology can and cannot do for social progress. What attracted Eisenhower the most about the PSAC group and made him put science advice into public policy was, I would argue in this book, not just their advice on what technology could do, but, more importantly, on what it could not do. To the extent that one can speak of a shared ethos of a committee of strongwilled individuals, and of an institution that underwent significant changes over one and a half decades, the most striking characteristic of PSAC was its strong sense of technological skepticism, which recognized the limits of technological solutions to social and political problems, both at home and abroad, during the Cold War. For most members, this consensus emerged out of their experiences of struggling with the question of nuclear weapons during and especially after World War II. The illusion of technological fixes, PSAC scientists believed, often led to not only a waste of societal resources on impractical developmental projects, such as the $1 billion failure to make a nuclear-powered airplane, but also, sometimes, dangerously misguided public policy, such as the perilous arms race and later the war in Vietnam. Thus, with any given project, the allure of the technological imperative must be tempered with a critical, independent evaluation of both its technical limitations and policy implications. Has the necessary basic research been completed and the project’s technical feasibility been proven before going into costly production? Has it passed a rigorous cost–benefit analysis? Can it fulfill its stated mission and, most important of all, does that mission make sense in the context of broad, long-term policy considerations? Indeed, one critical assumption that underlay PSAC scientists’ technological skepticism was their belief that technical issues could never be neatly and completely separated from social, economic, and political factors, and what was technically feasible was not always desirable in the broader context. This inseparability of the technical and the political led PSAC to break with the traditional injunction that experts should be “on tap, not on top” and to consider both technical and policy issues. Thus, in its critique of the nuclear-powered bomber, a poster child for technological excess, PSAC pointed to not only the fatal technical defects due to lack of basic research on materials and reactors and its unacceptable health and environmental risks, but also the lack of a justifiable mission. Similarly, in areas

Introduction

3

outside of military technology, such as space and arms control, PSAC produced critical and infl uential evaluations of American technological programs at the height of the Cold War. Crucially, Eisenhower agreed with PSAC on the need for science advising to integrate technical evaluations and policy considerations. Thus, under him and indeed under his profound infl uence, PSAC carried out investigations aimed at strengthening national security and, at the same time, controlling the arms race and space race with the Soviet Union and curbing the military-industrial complex. Unlimited technological development of nuclear weapons might increase American military strength, they argued, but would result in less national and international security due to the logic of the nuclear arms race. Ironically, as Sputnik helped make the Cold War a total war and usher in a new era of technological enthusiasm, PSAC’s became a rare, technically competent voice for moderation that matched Eisenhower’s own political and fiscal conservatism. They both, for example, questioned the glamour surrounding the two leading technologies in the post-Sputnik era—nuclear power and manned space exploration—as unrealistic and undisciplined hype. In essence, Eisenhower and PSAC were responding not only to Sputnik as a technological challenge, but even more as a symbol of the new technocratic push in its shadow.6 Who were these PSAC scientists? Although not always consistent or without internal dissension, most of them tended to be political liberals or moderates who had worked on either the atomic bomb or radar projects during World War II and continued to serve as consultants to the government on nuclear weapons and other technologies after the war. Most also had supported J. Robert Oppenheimer and James Conant in their tumultuous confl ict with physicists Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence over the H-bomb in late 1949. Even though PSAC was formally established in the White House only in 1957, most members had served on its predecessor, the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM-SAC), which had been created in 1951 amidst the Korean War crisis. Although not iconic figures or household names like Oppenheimer, who had served on the ODM-SAC, PSAC members during the late Eisenhower years were all scientists of stature, experience, and self-confidence, which enabled them to carry on stimulating discussions as intellectual equals not only among themselves, but also with high-ranking government officials, including President Eisenhower himself. The physicists dominated the committee with I. I. Rabi of Columbia, Hans A. Bethe of Cornell, Edward Purcell of Harvard, and John Bardeen of the University of Illinois, just to name a few of those who were or would become Nobel laureates. Other prominent physicists on the committee included James Fisk of Bell Labs, Wolfgang Panofsky of Stanford, Emanuel Piore of IBM, H. P. Robertson and Robert Bacher of Cal Tech, Lloyd V. Berkner of the Associated Universities Inc., Jerrold R. Zacharias of MIT, and Herbert F. York of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and later the Pentagon. The chemists held their own, with William O. Baker of Bell Labs, Donald F. Hornig of Princeton, Kistiakowsky of Harvard, and Glenn T. Seaborg of Berkeley, another Nobel laureate. Electrical engineers

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included Edwin Land, famed inventor of the Polaroid camera, and Jerome Wiesner of MIT. Physiologist and biophysicist Detlev W. Bronk of Rockefeller Institute was an ex officio member as president of the National Academy of Sciences. Trained in engineering administration, Killian of MIT was the only member of PSAC without any background in scientific research (or an advanced degree). Yet, Killian was so highly valued for his management skills that MIT had appointed him president in 1948, and Eisenhower picked him as his first special assistant to the president for science and technology, popularly known as the science adviser, and PSAC members elected him chair of the committee from 1957 to 1959. Clearly not all American scientists subscribed to PSAC’s technological skepticism. As perhaps the most prominent nuclear physicist of the day, Teller, for example, was conspicuously missing from the committee roster. Indeed, he would often make a formidable one-man anti-PSAC not only by battling the committee’s various arms control proposals but also by advocating technological fixes, especially nuclear energy, in all areas of national life. As a popular joke among physicists went, “You got a problem? Eddie’s got a bomb.”7 The split in the scientific community, which can be traced to the hydrogen bomb debate in 1949–1950, was not only over the direction of American nuclear policy, but also over whether technology offered a solution to social and political problems. Although neither Teller nor his most ardent followers ever made it into the PSAC system of science advising, they nevertheless wielded enormous infl uence in Congress and with the military establishment. PSAC remained a significant player in American public policy in the Kennedy and early Johnson years, producing, for example, two infl uential reports on the environmental impact of human activities, one vindicating Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1963 and another sounding an early alarm on global warming in 1965. However, its voice of technological skepticism soon was lost in the turbulent Vietnam War years under Johnson and Nixon. Initially and remarkably, some of the PSAC scientists tried to find technological solutions to the war, if not to win it, at least to moderate it, but most of these efforts ended in frustration or disillusionment. Eventually, many PSAC scientists came to agree with critics of the war outside of the committee that the American sense of technological superiority played a significant part in leading the country into the confl ict. When a number of PSAC members or alumni eventually came to clash openly with the Johnson and Nixon administrations over the antiballistic missile (ABM) system, the Supersonic Transport (SST), and the Vietnam War, these actions led to its marginalization and dissolution, by Nixon, in 1973. In a way, PSAC became a symbol of a unique kind of technological dissent both before and after its demise. Attacked from both the left and right, PSAC scientists did not always, or even usually, win the battles, despite early presidential endorsement. They often found themselves in the position of loyal opposition when they tried to curb the arms race, to advance various schemes of arms control, to articulate the cultural as well as practical values of science, and to ally themselves with the forces in the burgeoning modern environmental movement. Yet, PSAC’s brand of technological skepticism was neither a Luddite denial of the

Introduction

5

value of technology, nor a radical indictment of it as the source of modern social ills, as brought forth by such humanistic critics as Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul. Yes, they consciously tapped into the undercurrent of anxiety in the age of technological enthusiasm, and their technological critique might have contributed to the countercultural movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and even the postmodern questioning of science and technology. However, the radical relativism and the endorsement of irrationality would certainly have seemed alien to these leaders of the scientific community. Indeed, PSAC scientists often advocated technological skepticism as a way to redeem science from its perceived immoral association with nuclear weapons, as symbolized by the destruction of Hiroshima, and, later in the Vietnam War era, with American technological arrogance, environmental degradation, and the militarization of American society. As scientists, they recognized the often revolutionary potentials of technological changes and advised the government on measures they believed would strengthen national security and achieve other desirable objectives. Indeed, for many of the PSAC scientists, what unified their professional life and their advising to the government was their pursuit and promotion of a technological rationality that centered on critical thinking. Rationality, to them, should not stop at the technical but should be extended into the policy arena as well. Thus theirs was not an argument against technology, but one for appropriate technology, for a broadened concept of technological rationality that encouraged technological development not for its own sake but for its benefits in achieving social, political, cultural, and economic goals in a democratic society. By insisting on looking at the “big picture” whenever they examined a particular technology, they abandoned a purely technical approach to the evaluation of technology and adopted instead what historian of technology Thomas P. Hughes calls the systems approach to technology.8

Why Should We Care About PSAC? Since PSAC’s demise, six presidents, several generations of American scientists, and the public at large have had to deal with increasingly more complex interactions among science, technology, and society both during and after the Cold War. Are PSAC’s experiences still relevant to us as we enter into a new era of technological promises, symbolized by information technology, biotechnology, and high-tech warfare—“shock and awe”—amidst renewed foreign adventures in Iraq and elsewhere after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack? I believe that they are and that a historical study of PSAC is important not only for its inherent value in understanding a scientific institution that linked science, technology, and politics in Cold War America, but also for the lessons that its history holds for us today as a precedent of healthy technological skepticism in an era of technological enthusiasm. Although PSAC was abolished decades ago and the Cold War has finally ended, the tension between technological enthusiasm and skepticism with which PSAC grappled during the Cold War has not left us. PSAC also deserves our attention as a key institution at the interface between the scientific community and the broader polity during the Cold War.9 As historian

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Sally Gregory Kohlstedt argues, institutional histories can be a powerful “point of convergence” of intellectual, social, and cultural history of science.10 Studies of scientific institutions, including laboratories, academies, and societies, have long held a key place in the history of science and blossomed especially in recent years.11 PSAC’s history fits this pattern but also represents a departure: it did not conduct scientific research on its own; its membership often shifted; its express purpose was not to represent the scientific community, but to serve the needs of the government, and yet it played a key part in the political economy of American science. By examining its history in depth, this study should help shed light on the relationship between science and the American state. The committee might have seemed a small stage, but it offered a rich and fascinating showcase of the drama of Cold War American science, featuring colorful characters ranging from I. I. Rabi to Richard Garwin and covering issues from missile defense and environmental protection to science education and oceanography. Intellectually, perhaps the greatest value of focusing on PSAC as a scientific institution is the possibility of making connections between the different aspects of its activities to help form a big picture of the science–state interaction. Many writers, including PSAC alumni, have written on various parts of the PSAC experience, often as part of a concerted effort to restore it in the White House. These studies usually divided the activities of PSAC, and science advising in general, into two distinct categories: science in policy, on the one hand, which referred to the scientists’ use of their expertise to solve technical problems in public policy, or “what can science do for the government,” and, on the other hand, policy for science, which dealt with the federal government’s funding of scientific research, that is, “what government can do for science.”12 Such a division is useful, but it tends to give rise to a false dichotomy and make science and policy neatly separable arenas, masking the dynamics of the politics of American science during the Cold War. The two sides of presidential science advising were in fact intimately related to each other. It is a major contention of this study that instead of simply “speaking the truth to power,” as some scholars have characterized the process of presidential science advising, PSAC helped forge complex links between the Cold War and American science, often not without considerations of institutional self-interest.13 Fitting into the politics of post-New Deal American liberalism, American scientists became one interest group among many. For their part, PSAC members became prominent players at the interface between science and state during a time when an overwhelming share of the funding for American science came from the federal government. As such they became “public scientists” who took as their duty to justify and strengthen both the moral and material support for the scientific enterprise from the public and the state. When James Killian called PSAC a “beachhead” of science in government, he was referring to not only science in policy but also policy for science.14 At the same time, the American state, especially that part of it responsible for national security, increasingly relied on science and technology as well. The resultant mutual dependency has led many scholars to debate, fruitfully, over who “used” whom in the Cold War political economy of science. This study

Introduction

7

contributes to that discussion, but an even more interesting question for me is how mediators such as the science advisers under study here acted to blur the boundary between the two sides, which were not monolithic to begin with.15

Scope and Themes of the Study This is, thus, a study of the social and political vicissitudes of an elite group of scientists in the broader context of modern America, especially during the Cold War. Chronologically, the book starts with a brief historical overview of the evolution of the relationship between American science and state through the first half of the twentieth century, which set the scene for a detailed examination of the ODMSAC (1951–1957) and PSAC (1957–1973). I examine how scientists gained infl uence during World War II, tried to redeem science during the “Red Scare” in the early 1950s, capitalized on the opportunities in the post-Sputnik period to intensify their dual drive to increase federal support of basic research and control the nuclear arms race, and, finally, grappled with the shifting social and political environment in the Vietnam War era. Institutionally PSAC was only one component of the vast post-Sputnik science advising system. By and large, I treat the science adviser, who always served as PSAC chairman on election, together with PSAC, but point out their differences when these occurred. The science adviser also headed, after 1959, the Federal Council for Science and Technology (FCST), and after 1962, the Office of Science and Technology (OST). Finally, in the epilogue, I touch on briefly the post-Nixon revival of presidential science advising, including the debate that led to the establishment of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in 1976, the President’s Committee of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) in the early 1990s under George H. W. Bush, and the National Science and Technology Council in the 1990s under Bill Clinton, as well as the intensified controversy over science and politics under George W. Bush. The sheer size of the operation of the PSAC system of science advising can be overwhelming. Spanning three decades if one starts from the creation of the ODM-SAC, it involved dozens of panels, hundreds of leading scientists and engineers, and the often overlooked staff members, who together worked on topics ranging from nuclear weapons to Big Science to pesticides to the Vietnam War.16 Instead of trying for an exhaustive treatment, I have chosen to be selective in my coverage. Several case studies are examined in detail to provide depth in this largely chronological treatment. These cases look at PSAC’s role in the establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the debate over military technology policy, the search for a nuclear test ban, the funding of the Stanford linear electron accelerator, the shaping of the Apollo moon-landing project, the Kennedy administration’s response to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and the debates over the Vietnam War, ABM, and SST in the Johnson and Nixon years.17 Again, the tension between technological enthusiasm and skepticism provides a connection between these seemingly disparate cases and allows one to explore the intricate interplay of science, technology, and public policy in post-Sputnik Cold War America.

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Several themes have emerged from this study that might be usefully highlighted here. First, PSAC’s technological skepticism presumed and capitalized on a distinction between science and technology. To accomplish their dual goal of controlling the arms race and promoting basic research, PSAC, following a long tradition of American public scientists, engaged in what the sociologists of science called “boundary work”: they negotiated the boundary between science and technology (or between basic and applied research), and that between expertise and politics or policy.18 Adapting the famous Vannevar Bush doctrine about basic research as “the pacesetter” to technological progress for the Cold War political environment, PSAC scientists formulated what might be called a “negative assembly-line model” to highlight the critical importance of basic research. Instead of showing science’s positive contributions toward technological progress, PSAC focused on the role of basic research in evaluating technology, or, more important, in showing the limits of technology. A technological project would fail if the basic research necessary for the technology to work—knowledge on high-temperature materials for the making of a nuclear-powered airplane, for example—was not yet done. In this connection, perhaps the most surprising finding is that PSAC members, and many other American scientists, justified federal support of science not so much for science’s and scientists’ direct, positive technical contributions to the Cold War effort as for their value in detecting and correcting the deficiencies of technologies. In other words, PSAC tried to redeem the values of science by banking on the utility of scientists’ technological skepticism. Capitalizing on its key position in science in policy, PSAC, perhaps more than any other group, helped boost the national expenditure for science in the aftermath of the Sputnik shock. Of course this did not mean that the more traditional justification for science funding based on promises of direct and positive technological payoffs ceased to exist; it remained a strong argument, especially in Congress. Yet, the Cold War gave rise to new rationales. In addition to highlighting the importance of technological evaluation, the Cold War also pushed national prestige as a powerful justification for funding science, including the $100 million Stanford accelerator, in the wake of Sputnik. Thus, PSAC’s history is a part of the history of the Cold War not only because PSAC played a key part in defense and space policy in that period, but also because its justification of federal funding for science reflected the profound impact of the Cold War on American life. Inasmuch as PSAC scientists, most of whom came from academia, benefited institutionally from the science–state partnership they advocated, they were not as pure or disinterested as Eisenhower thought. Indeed, in pointing out the limits of various technological fixes to social and political problems, PSAC scientists often advocated increased government support for basic research as, at least partly, a remedy for the perceived technological deficiencies. Thus, basic research was justified not only as a source of new technological initiatives, as Vannevar Bush had argued, but perhaps more important, as a way to prevent the government from going into blind alleys in costly applied research and development. In many ways, PSAC advocated basic research as a way

Introduction

9

to compensate for the lack of a market mechanism in the command economy that characterized defense research and development, crucial for the development of a sound and economical system of military technology. Thus, promotion of basic research formed an integral part of PSAC’s technological skepticism, which conveniently linked the Cold War needs of technological evaluation and the funding of American science. Ironically, in PSAC’s evaluations of various military technologies, nuclear test ban schemes, and space programs and projects, PSAC scientists often employed their engineering skills more than their scientific, theoretical expertise. In other words, science in policy was often technology policy, whereas policy for science corresponds to the conventional meaning of science policy. In essence I am carrying the thesis of the historian of science Peter Galison—that American scientists depended more on technology than usually recognized in postwar science—from the laboratory to the arena of public policymaking.19 It was no wonder that some of the scientists most infl uential in PSAC were experimentalists. Scientific brilliance certainly helped, especially when the prestige of scientists was used to legitimate policies. However, in the everyday life of a science adviser in the trench, technical proficiency probably counted more than the scientific discoveries on which the science advisers made their reputations.20 This study also reveals the extent to which PSAC was engaged in boundary work on what was technical and what was political. We will see, for example, during the investigation on the technical feasibility of policing a nuclear test ban, that at various stages PSAC members tried to use, alternatively, its claim to “technical” expertise to fend off “political” oppositions, and its insistence to go beyond narrow “technical” considerations to justify its policy recommendations. We will also see how, eventually, PSAC scientists came to repudiate the technological approach to both the arms race and arms control. “The United States will have to make,” they concluded in 1960, “a purely political decision” regarding the risks and benefits of a test ban.21 Their recognition of the necessity to view scientific and technological solutions within a social and political context underlined their insistence on examining not only the means, but also the ends of technological programs of the government. It was this insistence on examining the broader social and political implications of technology that led PSAC on its road to dissent under Johnson and Nixon. In the end, PSAC scientists might be said to have shared both the thinking and fates of technological dissidents in other national and political contexts, such as the Russian engineer Peter Palchinsky that Loren Graham has so eloquently chronicled.22 This book thus serves two purposes: it is the first full-length history of the rise and fall of PSAC, and at the same time an inquiry into the role of scientists as technological skeptics in America during the Cold War and beyond. Its primary aim is neither to celebrate nor condemn wholesale the scientists under study, but rather to understand what motivated them in their interactions with the American state and what the contour of those interactions in turn reveals about the place of science and technology in that particular period of American history. It is a study

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in the history of science in that it examines the evolution of the political environment, social status, and public images of American science and scientists. It is a study in American history as it explores a professional community’s role in American national policy and the growth of big government. As an investigation into the ways science and state reshaped each other during the global ideological confl ict from Eisenhower to Nixon, this is also a vital part of Cold War history suitable for transnational comparative analyses.

1

American Public Science, 1863–1945

When the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957, the feat did more than herald the space age. It also put the spotlight of world attention on the role of science, technology, and their practitioners in the Cold War. Widely viewed as a crowning achievement of Soviet socialism, the satellite launch challenged the perception of Russian technological backwardness, putting an immediate end to the American joke that the Soviets could not sneak a nuclear “suitcase bomb” into the country because they had not perfected the suitcase. Instead, the American public now cried over an apparent U.S. inferiority in science and technology and worried about a menacing “missile gap” with the Soviets. Sputnik, although designated as a peaceful contribution to the International Geophysical Year, had carried all the geopolitical significance of a major military-technological project, as it glided into orbit atop a rocket designed to send a hydrogen bomb to its target. It led many, including President Dwight D. Eisenhower, to realize that a “total Cold War” had dawned in which science, technology, education, and the pursuit of national prestige ranked with military and economic strengths as vital forces.1 Facing an unprecedented challenge to his leadership, President Eisenhower made reform of science policy the centerpiece of his response. He quickly announced the appointment of James R. Killian, Jr., president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as his special assistant for science and technology, and the reconstitution of the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization, which had existed since the Korean War but fallen into obscurity, into the high-profile President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) to help him make government science and technology policy. In many ways, PSAC members became “public scientists” engaged in “public science”—a term used by the historian Frank M. Turner to characterize the attempt of prominent British scientists to justify public support for their profession at the turn of the twentieth century.2 There was, however, a key difference between Turner’s British public scientists and PSAC members: the latter were not only advocates for science in the public arena, but also active participants in government science and technology policy. Because Sputnik called into question the adequacy of both the government’s support for and use of science, PSAC scientists took on both “science in policy” to make science better serve the government’s needs and “policy for science” so that the government could support science effectively. As PSAC scientists gained infl uence under Eisenhower, controversies ensued over the proper role of expert advisers to the government. Convergence on a 13

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number of fundamental issues led President Eisenhower to rely more and more on his science advisers. However, as Killian later reflected, such an almost total trust sometimes made PSAC scientists and others uncomfortable: Eisenhower had an exaggerated confidence in the unbiased judgment of the scientists whom he called upon to help him. He somehow came to have a feeling that these advisers, by virtue of being scientists, were endowed with an objectivity in technical matters that he didn’t find in other advisers. Actually he overestimated our capacity for objectivity, particularly when we were asked to advise on controversial problems where elements of policy or politics were interlaced. Nevertheless, Eisenhower did have this somewhat naïve confidence in science advice.3

As Killian implied, not everyone agreed with Eisenhower about scientists’ objectivity. Before long, critics began to question whether PSAC scientists were there to serve the interest of the government, the needs of which often lay in practical technology, or the promotion of science, their own profession. Despite Eisenhower’s endorsement, PSAC scientists’ ventures into public policy drew criticisms, especially when they challenged presidential policies under Johnson and Nixon. Shouldn’t science advisers “stick to the facts” and render neutral, objective, technical judgments regardless of their political and social views? After all, policymaking involved much more than technical considerations and it was the prerogative of the policymaker to accept or reject science advice. In response, PSAC scientists, although agreeing on the need for independence in rendering technological evaluations, doubted that it was ever possible to draw a clear line between the technical and the political. Any attempt to adjudicate such complex issues in a purely technical setting—such as in a Science Court—would probably fail, they believed, because, as Killian pointed out, most issues in science advising “involve political, ethical, and scientific considerations in a way that they cannot be wholly disentangled.”4 Indeed, a central argument of this book is that the dialectics over what counted as the technical and the political drove the dynamics of American public science and science advising. The duality question, of course, predated Sputnik and reached far back into the American experience of integrating science and politics. Thus, before an analysis of post-Sputnik developments, a prehistory of the debate over the relations among science, technology, and public policy is necessary both to illustrate the scientists’ long-standing dilemma and to sketch out the intellectual and political landscape during the years when the generation of PSAC scientists came of age. As we will see, American public scientists often had to negotiate three overlapping boundaries: between science and the government, between science and technology, and between the technical and the political. To what extent did the question of duality condition scientists’ initial participation in public policy? Once they did begin to play a role in policy, how did their understanding of the relationship between science and technology shape their views of the potentials and limits of technological solutions to social and political

American Public Science, 1863–1945

15

problems? Finally, how did they defend crossing over from the technical to the political in the policy arena?

A Dual Allegiance? The problematic duality of American public scientists as servants to both the government and science accompanied some of the earliest experiments in institutionalized scientific advising. In 1863, during the Civil War, for example, a group of elite American scientists, the so-called Lazzaroni, managed to get Congress to pass and President Abraham Lincoln to sign an act to incorporate the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Although this charter only explicitly dealt with science-in-policy by authorizing the NAS to offer science advice “whenever called upon by any department of the Government,” its promoters clearly intended to advance the interest of American science as well by providing the United States with a “worthy counterpart” to the Royal Society of London and the French Academy.5 Indeed, by the early twentieth century, the NAS had largely evolved into an honorific society of scientific elites, ill prepared to serve the government’s needs when another crisis, World War I, came along. It took reformers within the academy to persuade its leadership and President Woodrow Wilson to establish the National Research Council (NRC), which, as the operating arm of the NAS, utilized scientists both inside and outside of the academy to conduct studies for the government.6 By the time a third crisis, the Great Depression, arrived in the 1930s, it was widely recognized that even the NRC had evolved more to serve scientific disciplines than the New Deal administration. Activist scientific leaders, once again, convinced the NAS leadership and President Franklin D. Roosevelt to create a Science Advisory Board (SAB) to help the government “deal with specific problems in the various departments” through the machinery of the NAS-NRC.7 Although the press dubbed it FDR’s “Scientific Cabinet,” the SAB was not quite an open invitation to scientists to participate in policymaking, and conservative members of the academy feared that it would open the door to political interference in science. Most prominent scientists, however, welcomed the move. They hoped that it would help to calm the so-called revolt against science, which blamed technological automation for unemployment, and to protect federal research programs that faced budget cuts. Chaired by Karl Compton, physicist and MIT president, the board was to operate for two years and without federal funds.8 In his new position, Compton soon emerged as a leading public scientist in America.9 When the NAS met at MIT in December 1933, Compton, in his welcome speech, predicted that the government’s need for expert advice, on the one hand, and the “competency and disinterestedness” of his group, on the other, would open ways for “further extending the prestige of the academy and its service to the public.” He hoped that his SAB would help counteract the technocracy movement, which had dramatized technological unemployment and had “unduly shaken public confidence in the basic services of science to society.” Specifically, he promised to cooperate with social scientists to create a permanent science advisory and policy mechanism so that “science and the government may better serve the public”

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and quiet the rising criticism of science and technology.10 In this spirit Compton proposed in 1934, on behalf of the SAB, that the federal government spend $75 million for academic research as a way to put science to work for national welfare and to ensure the “best possible advancement of science in America.”11 Compton underestimated the duality problem. Despite his professed disinterestedness and offer of cooperation, FDR’s brain trust of social scientists, who claimed to represent the interest of the government, dismissed the new board as a spokesman for the scientific community. Whereas Compton tried to position scientists as one of the many interest groups that began to dominate American politics after the onset of FDR’s New Deal liberalism and argue that science, as a driving force of American economy, deserved federal support, his reasoning failed to impress those infl uential around Roosevelt. The National Resources Board, dominated by social scientists and headed by Frederick A. Delano, the president’s uncle, not only challenged the size of Compton’s proposal, but also disputed the main value of scientific research. Research, especially in the social sciences, was needed not to produce more technological progress, but to aid national planning as a way to solve social and economic problems that had in part been caused by technological progress in the first place, they insisted.12 The social scientists’ argument prevailed, and, as a result, most of the requested funds went to direct relief efforts for the unemployed, not research scientists.13 It was not clear whether the fact that Compton had publicly supported President Hoover, FDR’s Republican rival, in the 1932 election colored Delano’s verdict on the scientists’ proposal.14 It certainly did not boost the scientists’ claim of disinterestedness. Neither did it bode well for Compton’s proposal for a permanent science advisory board as a “guardian” of the technical bureaus against possible political intrusions by the party in power.15 Again, FDR’s advisers rejected the proposal as a special pleading of the scientists, and established, instead, a Science Committee in the social scientists–dominated National Resources Board.16 Compared with the labor unions or the elderly population, American scientists, although enjoying considerable public prestige, were too small in number and their potential contributions to solving the practical problems of the Great Depression too remote yet to count much in American politics. To American public scientists, the SAB experiment proved a sobering reality check. Although traditional American faith in technological progress remained strong even in the depths of the Great Depression, few were willing to concede broad roles in public policy to scientists and engineers. Indeed, in 1935, when FDR directed federal agencies to turn to a new committee in the NAS on matters of “scientific research,” he specifically reserved “the consideration of the broader long time scientific problems of natural and human resources” for the Science Committee of the National Resources Committee (formerly Board). Frank Jewett, president of Bell Labs and a leader of the academy who had been deeply involved in the SAB saga, for one, felt “humiliated” by the order. A politically conservative scientist wary of the expansion of the federal government under the New Deal, Jewett resented FDR’s restrictions of the scientists’ role to “details of research problems

American Public Science, 1863–1945

17

of the government departments.” “I say this,” Jewett continued, “because of a feeling that if my training, experience and judgment were of any value to the scientific departments of the Government that value lies rather in the field of matters of scientific policies which may or may not embrace research, than in the narrower field of research alone.”17 It would not be the last time that a scientific adviser to the government was rebuffed in his search for a wider purview and policy role.

On the Boundary In their quest to promote science, American public scientists faced, besides the problem of dual allegiance, also what they regarded as widespread confusion between science and technology. In response, they campaigned not only to differentiate science from technology but also to establish scientific superiority by making a two-pronged argument: Although science was basic to technological development, scientists were not motivated by profits. Thus, the physicist Henry Rowland issued his famous 1883 “plea for pure science” for both its nobility and its technological benefits.18 Then, an “assembly-line model” of science serving as the source of technological innovations, first articulated by British scientists during World War I, became infl uential in the United States in the interwar years.19 For example, in the 1930s, American paleontologist John C. Merriam, president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and a member of the SAB, insisted that “Pure science is primary and indispensable,” and scientific curiosity, in contrast to profit making, was “the mother of invention.”20 Indeed, as a result of the scientists’ campaign, the belief in scientific superiority in this period became so ingrained in American society and culture that engineers began to define technology as applied science.21 The 1933 World’s Fair (“Century of Progress”) in Chicago captured this faith in pure science with its motto: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, and Man Conforms.”22 Notably, Lewis Mumford, a prominent American public intellectual and one of the fiercest critics of what he called megatechnics, put an important twist on the thesis of scientific superiority when he wrote approvingly in the 1930s about “a liberated scientific curiosity” as “a counterweight to the passionate desire to reduce all existence to terms of immediate profit and success.”23 It should be pointed out that such a clear-cut distinction between science and technology has come under question in recent scholarship in science and technology studies; close examination often reveals a deep intermixing at the boundary.24 Yet, the interesting question here is not whether the science–technology distinction existed in reality, but how scientists perceived such a difference and made political use of it. That a clear distinction existed between science and technology was doubted by few American scientists. Physicist I. I. Rabi, who served as associate director of the Rad Lab at MIT and consultant to Los Alamos during World War II, for example, once divided physics into two parts: the “science of physics” proper and the application of that science, which he called the “inheritance of technology.”25 World War II proved to many the validity of the assembly-line model, as academic physicists emerged as the heroes of military research and received credit for

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the making of radar, the proximity fuse, and above all, the atomic bomb. Even Vannevar Bush, the electrical engineer and director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) that was in charge of military technology during World War II, marveled at the surprising versatility of the physicists. “One would not expect a theoretical physicist with a decidedly philosophical turn of mind,” Bush said of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s performance as wartime director of Los Alamos, “to manage a complex affair of this sort.”26 What was less well appreciated was the fact that the physicists accomplished their feats partly by transforming themselves into engineers. “All science stopped during the war except the little bit that was done at Los Alamos,” recalled Richard Feynman, a talented young group leader at the bomb laboratory during World War II. “And that was not much science,” Feynman added, “it was mostly engineering.”27 Again, the British, who made crucial early breakthroughs in both the radar and the bomb projects, led the way in this transformation. “They—the British—had had great success with nuclear physicistturned-radio engineers,” commented Rabi, “and we followed suit.”28 How did physicists, commonly seen as long-haired ivory-tower types, successfully make the transition to versatile engineers? Rabi attributed it to physicists’ understanding of the physical world and their “great energy, vitality, self-confidence and arrogance.”29 Physicist-turned-historian S. S. Schweber pointed to the training of American physicists in the 1930s that emphasized engineering abilities and a proper balance between theory and experiment. Furthermore, in the hard times during the Depression, only the most enterprising experimentalists and most talented theoreticians survived the selection process and got to play key roles in the wartime research projects.30 The centrality of physicists in the bomb project also derived from the fact that the technology built closely on new discoveries in nuclear physics. Although building the bomb was largely an engineering feat, research was a crucial part of an approach that integrated science, engineering, and industry.31 As historians of science increasingly recognize, physics and its practitioners themselves were transformed by this wartime fusion. In the Big Science that emerged out of the war, instrumentation became central to scientific research, planning was modeled after industrial organization, and scientific and engineering staff interacted to create a new culture of physics.32 Such a new material culture of physics would prove to be crucial to the business of science advising as well.

Science and Politics During World War II Crucial for American public science, World War II not only demonstrated the technological potency of modern science, but also fulfilled Compton’s and Jewett’s dream of gaining entry for scientists into public policy. Bush and his OSRD succeeded where Compton and his SAB had failed by focusing not on policy for science, but on science in policy. The first step in this direction may well have been the prewar advisory relations scientists established with the military. In September 1940, for example, Rabi and several other prominent scientists, including John von Neumann and Harold Urey, organized the science advisory committee for the

American Public Science, 1863–1945

19

Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground.33 Independently, Bush and his supporters in the NAS, especially chemist and Harvard president James Conant, persuaded Roosevelt to establish first the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) and later the OSRD system of military research with direct congressional appropriations and independence from the armed forces. Bush himself became the de facto science adviser to President Roosevelt. The coming of the war both softened the FDR White House’s resistance to natural scientists and boosted the scientists’ bargaining power and self-confidence. The OSRD’s autonomy also ensured scientists’ independence, which, ironically, led to better cooperation with the military. When a naval officer asked Rabi to make a certain radar device but refused to tell him what it was for—“We prefer to talk about this in our swivel chairs in Washington”—Rabi knew exactly what to do: “I didn’t say anything. Neither did I do anything.” Finally the officers relented and the two sides worked together to produce “a fantastically great radar.” Fortunately, Rabi reflected, “our money did not come from the military directly” but from the OSRD.34 In a similar move in Washington, Bush persuaded Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations, to adopt a new, successful antisubmarine strategy by utilizing the radar. He also succeeded in getting scientists deployed as advisers at various levels of military operations.35 The prewar injunction of having scientists “on tap, but not on top” began to weaken. Resistance to scientists’ participation in public policy, however, did not disappear completely during World War II. It became an especially contentious issue in the atomic bomb project. In contrast to the Rad Lab, where Rabi and his colleagues found it both necessary and advantageous to mesh the technical aspects of designing radars with operational and policy considerations, the technical challenge in making the bomb was so overwhelming and the choices in its use were so few and so stark that it was plausible and even expedient to segregate the technical from the political, the making of the bomb from its use, and the scientists from the policymakers. Leo Szilard, the gadfly nuclear physicist who had drafted Albert Einstein’s famous letter to FDR in 1939 warning the government about the possibility of an atomic bomb, for example, faced strong official resistance when he campaigned against the bomb’s use on Japan in early 1945. James Byrnes, President Harry S. Truman’s personal representative on the high-level Interim Committee that was set up at the time to consider atomic policy, questioned not only Szilard’s argument, but also his conduct after a meeting in May: “His general demeanor and his desire to participate in policy-making made an undesirable impression on me.”36 The well-known debate between the Scientific Panel to the Interim Committee, headed by Oppenheimer, and the Franck Committee at the Met Lab in Chicago, under physicist James Franck, was as much about the proper role of scientists in policy as it was about the use of the bomb (the former supported it but the latter opposed it). On the one hand, the Franck Committee, as outsiders and dissenters, acknowledged their limitations in policy but emphasized the justification of their involvement: “We believe that our acquaintance with the scientific elements of the situation and prolonged preoccupation with its world-wide

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political implications, imposes on us the obligation to offer to the committee some suggestions as to the possible solution of these grave problems.”37 On the other hand, the Oppenheimer panel, which also included physicists Arthur Compton, Ernest Lawrence, and Enrico Fermi, reversed the latter’s emphasis on scientists’ participation in policy: With regard to these general aspects of the use of atomic energy, it is clear that we, as scientific men, have no proprietary rights. It is true that we are among the few citizens who have had occasion to give thoughtful considerations to these problems during the past few years. We have, however, no claim to special competence in solving the political, social, and military problems which are presented by the advent of atomic power.38

Based on such a technical conception of scientists’ role, Oppenheimer also discouraged scientists at Los Alamos from signing Szilard’s separate petitions against the use of the bomb.39 Years later, Oppenheimer acknowledged that “we didn’t know beans about the military situation in Japan” or whether there were alternatives to an invasion or the bomb.40 The point is, however, that they, narrowly focusing on the use of the bomb as a technical question, did not attempt to find out about the Japanese situation or the context into which their technical advice would fall. Enforcing a production schedule at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer was following, as historian Charles Thorpe argues, an ethic of “soldierly duty.”41 Yet, to the Interim Committee, the Oppenheimer letter was unequivocal proof that technical demonstration as recommended by the Franck Committee would not work and that the bomb had to be used on cities. Furthermore, although Oppenheimer viewed the panel as purely advisory to the Interim Committee, Stimson apparently regarded it as representative of project scientists.42 Ironically, a sense of technological determinism that saw nuclear weapons inevitably reshaping the world underlined the reasoning of both the Oppenheimer panel and the Franck Committee. Both believed that the bomb, if technically possible, was bound to be made and, when it was, would inevitably revolutionize national and international politics. Nevertheless, there was a subtle but important difference between the two groups. Whereas the former believed that the technological and political momentum would almost dictate the use of the bomb, the latter thought that it was still possible to avoid such a step. By proposing various alternatives to the dropping of the bomb, the Franck Committee argued for the need and feasibility of human intervention in the development of technology as well as the limits of technological solutions to social and political problems. Science, the Franck Committee noted, could not devise a defense against the atomic bomb: “This protection can come only from the political organization of the world.”43 By questioning the inevitability of technological development and by advocating political activism on the part of the scientists, the Franck Committee sowed the seeds for a technological skepticism that would shape PSAC’s and other scientists’ understanding of the potentials and limitations of technology in the postwar era.44

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In the final days of World War II, however, many scientists working on the bomb, including those who would later become leaders in PSAC, knew little of the debate between the Franck Committee and the Oppenheimer panel. They were at Los Alamos continuing a collective technological push to make the bomb into a reality first. It culminated in the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Capping several years of intense teamwork, the experience of preparing the test further strengthened the bond that would later help to bind the principals together again as PSAC members. For example, George Kistiakowsky, the Russian-born chemist from Harvard in charge of the implosion program, remembered how his physicist colleague Hans Bethe and his own former student Donald Hornig helped him troubleshoot the last technical glitches during the tense hours before the test.45 Physicist Wolfgang Panofsky, another future member of PSAC, flew in an airplane 10,000 feet away from the tower to measure the bomb’s power, “having to trust the theoretical physicists who predicted that that was a safe place to be.”46 Yet, even Los Alamos could not escape the darker implications of their labor for long. When the bomb exploded with blinding light, thunderous sound, and overwhelming heat, scientists and nonscientists alike were awed both by the force of nature and the potency of theoretical science. At the moment, a sense of scientific and technological triumph prevailed. One witness reported that “Dr. Kistiakowsky, the impulsive Russian, threw his arms around Dr. Oppenheimer and embraced him with shouts of glee.”47 However, a mood of sober reflection soon set in about the implications of the bomb. Even at the test site, Conant had already thought of the end of the world, as did Kistiakowsky, his initial exuberance notwithstanding. “I am sure,” Kistiakowsky later said, “that at the end of the world—in the last millisecond of the earth’s existence—the last men will see what we saw.”48 Rabi similarly felt “a chill” about the bomb’s potential destructiveness; as an adviser to Oppenheimer, he had been uneasy about the bomb project from the beginning. Was this to be the “culmination of three centuries of physics,” he had asked Oppenheimer in 1943.49 For Feynman, the celebration of the test came to an abrupt end when he saw Robert Wilson, his physicist friend, “just sitting there moping”: I said, “What are you moping about?” He said, “It’s a terrible thing that we made.” I said, “But you started it. You got us into it.” You see, what happened to me—what happened to the rest of us—is we started for a good reason, then you’re working very hard to accomplish something and it’s a pleasure, it’s excitement. And you stop thinking, you know; you just stop.50

Trinity made scientists face the real-world consequences of their labor and think about their own social responsibility. The cathartic release of tension transformed the scientific community at Los Alamos, leading many scientists to lift their vision above the technical and into the political. Although supporting the use of the bomb to end the war, many believed that it should be put under international control after the war. Bethe, for example, “felt after the end of the Second World War

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that we had a great responsibility to explain atomic weapons, and to try and make the government do sensible things about atomic weapons.”51 The political activism that had originated with the Franck report now began to spread.

Conclusion Before the Sputnik shock turned American attention to science and technology, it was the atomic bomb that had the most impact on the relationship between science and society in the United States. When the atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus helping to end World War II, scientists at Los Alamos and elsewhere knew that they now stood at a crucial moment in the history of American public science. From the birth of the NAS during the Civil War to the rise and fall of the SAB in the Great Depression, the question of dual allegiance to science and government had long frustrated American scientists’ pursuit for a role in public policy. The bomb not only demonstrated the power of modern science and technology but also, evidently, the validity of the assembly-line model that highlighted the primacy of pure science, both of which should help public scientists justify future federal funding for scientific research. Of equal importance was the fact that the bomb enhanced the scientists’ public prestige and their relevance to the emerging national security state. Although the resistance to scientists’ role in social and political matters never completely disappeared, it was at least temporarily muted in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. Thus, by the end of World War II, the bomb made possible a new division of labor in the American scientific community. Although many scientists continued to concentrate on their science either as a personal preference—Feynman claimed to practice “active irresponsibility”—or as a matter of principle to leave the policy issues to the democratic process, a number of the wartime scientific leaders who would become PSAC members became involved in public policy as a way to exercise their social responsibility.52 Yet other public scientists would take on the additional duty to promote the public support of science, a move that had already been undertaken by the Oppenheimer panel when it advocated to the Interim Committee that, in the words of Lawrence, “Only by vigorously pursuing the necessary plant expansion and fundamental research, and by securing adequate government support could this nation stay out in front.” Here we see that both the rationale of science for national security and the science–military partnership carried seamlessly from wartime to peacetime. It marked one of the earliest efforts to link science in policy with policy for science.53 Clearly, for American public scientists, the postwar political, social, and technological developments held great and many promises.

2

The Origins of Technological Skepticism, 1945–1950

The years from the end of World War II to the beginning of the Korean War marked a key period in American scientists’ dual drive to justify public support of science and to control an increasingly dangerous nuclear arms race. For many scientists, including those who would be active in PSAC, the atomic bomb gave them both an opportunity and a reason to enter the political arena: the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led them to question the applications of their research and its implications for the future of the world. It started with the Scientists’ Movement for civilian and international control of atomic energy in 1945–1946, and ended with the controversy over the hydrogen bomb decision in 1949–1950, with the debate over the founding of the National Science Foundation (NSF) running in the background. Much has been written about these key events in the history of Cold War science, but their implications for the agenda of American public scientists, especially the formulation of technological skepticism and the state–science relationship, deserve further exploration.

The Scientists’ Movement In the postwar era, although most veterans of the Manhattan Project continued to believe, as did the Oppenheimer panel, that ending the war quickly justified the use of the bomb, a sense of anguish, if not guilt, haunted many of them. As historian Alice Kimball Smith pointed out, this feeling of responsibility for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped drive the Scientists’ Movement.1 A young scientist wept when he read John Hersey’s New Yorker account of the Hiroshima bombing.2 “All of us had,” declared Samuel Allison, the physicist who had presided over the countdowns at Trinity, “a momentary elation when our experiment met with success, but that feeling rapidly changed to a feeling of horror and a fervent hope that no more bombs would be dropped.”3 Such a sense of doubts about the wisdom of the use of the bomb, and about their failure to question the decision at an earlier stage, would in turn lead many scientists to be skeptical of technological solutions in the future. To American public scientists, the bomb was a mixed blessing: it helped to increase federal support for science, but it also introduced a darker image of science and scientists. A small but vocal segment of the public indeed blamed scientists for Hiroshima. Lewis Mumford, who had hoped in the 1930s that science would counterbalance technological excesses, for example, now felt betrayed by the scientists. In an angry 1946 magazine article titled “Gentlemen, You Are Mad!” Mumford asked “Why were there no martyrs?” “Why wasn’t there a movement 23

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of those who said no and would remove their services from bomb making?” Science, Mumford insisted, should not only pursue truth for its own sake, but be made to answer the question: “Is it beneficial?”4 Such public questioning of their responsibility contributed to scientists’ resolve “to make science serve the cause of peace” and to redeem their beloved calling.5 Likewise denouncing the Hiroshima bombing, Albert Einstein urged activism among fellow scientists: “To the village square we must carry the facts of atomic energy. From there must come America’s voice.”6 Such appeals encouraged scientists to leave the ivory tower or weapons labs, if temporarily, to enter the public sphere and attempt to shape nuclear policy. The Scientists’ Movement achieved some of its goals, but not others. It led to the formation of the Federation of Atomic Scientists (FAS)—later changed to the Federation of American Scientists—and the passing of the McMahon Bill that established the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) as a civilian, not a military, agency. It failed, however, to make much progress on the international control of atomic energy as outlined in the Acheson–Lilienthal report, drafted by Oppenheimer. Scientists in the movement also pushed for the appointments of science advisers in the White House and at the State Department.7 Although the move failed, it put presidential science advising on the agenda of American public science. Furthermore, despite all its setbacks, the movement represented an important early example of American scientists exercising their social responsibilities. The Scientists’ Movement also subjected scientists to renewed questioning about their fitness to speak on nontechnical issues. The New York Times raised this issue when it editorialized that “not even the fact that a scientist has had a share in making the atomic bomb qualifies him to map national policy or read the future.” In response, a group of scientists, echoing the Franck report, contended that they not only had the average citizen’s rights and qualifications to speak on the social and political issues, but perhaps more due to their familiarity with the technical aspects of the problem.8 Such an argument drew general support among scientists, but more experienced voices urged caution. Hans Bethe, for example, dissuaded fellow FAS members from advocating world government as a solution to the problem of international control of atomic energy, lest they be accused of speaking far outside their expertise and thus lose their present political prestige: “I believe that the time may come again . . . when we shall need this prestige, and when we shall again have a message . . . which we can carry with enthusiasm.” “It is most important to preserve our ability to act at such a time,” he added.9 Where did scientists derive their remarkable political prestige in 1945–1946 in the first place? Echoing Karl Compton, many observers believed that scientists’ “disinterestedness” upheld their public image and made them effective lobbyists. The scientists, once again working on the science and technology boundary, made themselves, perhaps in contrast to engineers and industrialists, into professionals “without private ambitions” or “profit motive.” Indeed scientists carefully cultivated this image of disinterestedness by avoiding issues of policy for science. They did not want to be seen “as just another pressure group.”10 Although the

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Scientists’ Movement flexed science’s newfound political muscle, the resistance to scientists as an interest group that had infl icted Compton’s SAB did not vanish in the postwar period.

The NSF Debate Despite the atomic scientists’ claim and popular image, the concurrent debate over the founding of the NSF indicated that scientists were far from being disinterested in matters of government science policy. If the scientists’ drive to redeem science was only implicit in the fights for civilian and international control of atomic energy, their professional interest became explicit and central in the debate over the NSF, which was designed by Vannevar Bush to provide federal funding for science. What connected the debates over the control of atomic energy and over the NSF was not only that the bomb provided the most compelling rationale for federal support of science, but also that public scientists in both cases advocated the cause of science by making a politically advantageous distinction between science and technology. As the war drew to an end in 1945, Bush began to plan for the simultaneous phasing out of the OSRD and the creation of a new mechanism to continue the government–science partnership. Scientists’ wartime achievements put Bush in a much better position than Karl Compton and his SAB in the 1930s to justify federal support of science. The key to Bush’s argument was the linear, assembly-line model of science leading to technology and then to practical applications. As he explained in his famous report on Science, the Endless Frontier: “Today, it is truer than ever that basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress. . . . [W]e are entering a period when science needs and deserves increased support from public funds.”11 The government should give special support to universities, Bush argued, because they were the main institutions for basic research and for training of scientists.12 In the postwar political economy, science became too expensive to depend on private funding and too important not to attract attention from the state. Evoking the pure science ideal allowed Bush to articulate what historian of science Nathan Reingold called the ideology of basic research, which placed it ahead of applied research and development in priority.13 To be sure, by the end of World War II, the pure science ideal was even less tenable than in Henry Rowland’s days. The Great Depression had forced universities to emphasize practical applications of scientific research and to seek industrial patronage for its research efforts.14 Consequently, Bush, in his report, tried to modify the assembly-line model by replacing the exclusionary concept of pure science with that of basic research, and by broadening it to include basic engineering research. Indeed, Bush called his proposed funding agency the National Research Foundation. Nevertheless, Bush wanted to keep social and political interference—“rigid controls”—out of curiosity-driven science. “Freedom of inquiry must be preserved under any plan for Government support of science.”15 Along the same line, those sympathetic to Bush’s proposal, as historian David Hollinger has argued, soon promoted the concept of the scientific community to replace men of science, implying that

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scientists could police themselves without governmental oversight, even though Bush himself held on to an individualistic conception of scientists.16 By insisting on scientists making decisions on the distribution of federal funds, Bush parted company with those who supported Senator Harley Kilgore’s rival proposal to integrate the NSF into the political process, including the geographical distribution of some federal research funds.17 This disagreement, and President Truman’s veto of a 1947 Bush-backed bill on the grounds that it denied political control over the running of the NSF, resulted in a delay of the NSF from 1945 to 1950. By then, the military and the AEC had already dominated the support of academic science, ensuring a pluralist federal structure of funding for science even after the NSF’s birth. Although Bush could claim some measure of success with the founding of the NSF, his concurrent push for a new science policy was met with frustration.18 His proposal for another SAB of outside, “disinterested” scientists to advise both the White House and Congress on science policy went nowhere.19 This long-standing dream of American public scientists had to wait.

The H-Bomb Debate and the Making of Technological Skepticism Even though Bush failed to establish a permanent presidential science advisory system, the NSF did give scientists a voice in the area of policy for science and the various science advisory committees that sprung up in other federal agencies did enable them to speak on matters of science in policy. In contrast to the Scientists’ Movement, which waged a grassroots political campaign to reshape American nuclear policy, those scientists who sat on these advisory bodies chose the insiders’ approach by working within the channels. Among the most infl uential of such groups was the General Advisory Committee (GAC) to the AEC, which succeeded, in many ways, the Oppenheimer panel in advising the government on its nuclear programs. In late 1949, shortly after the Soviet atomic bomb test, the GAC, which was chaired by Oppenheimer and included Conant, Hartley Rowe, Cyril Smith, Lee DuBridge, Rabi, Enrico Fermi, Glenn Seaborg, and Oliver Buckley, found itself at the center of a major national policy controversy: the AEC asked it to advise on whether to launch an “all-out” program to make the hydrogen bomb, or the “super.” The ensuing debate on the H-bomb proved to be a turning point in the evolution of scientists’ technological skepticism by fostering a critical attitude toward faith in technology as a solution to social and political problems. Surprisingly, in view of its earlier questioning of the propriety of the Franck Committee’s activism, one of the earliest expressions about the limits of nuclear weapons in the postwar period came from the Oppenheimer panel to the Interim Committee. “We believe that the safety of this nation—as opposed to its ability to infl ict damage on an enemy power—cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess,” the panel to wrote the Interim Committee only days after Hiroshima. It urged the committee to undertake “all steps,” including international negotiations, to work on the prevention of war as the only way to protect Americans.20 In making this appeal, the Oppenheimer panel clearly ventured beyond its technical mandate and moved into policy matters, as Jewett had

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wished before the war and as the Franck Committee sought to do during the war. Like the Franck group, the panel now justified its move as an “appropriate” step to establish a meaningful context for its technical advice.21 It was a precedent that many postwar science advisory committees would follow. The Truman administration did make efforts, half-heartedly to its critics, at negotiations over the international control of nuclear weapons, but by late 1946, most scientist-activists recognized that their hope for arms control had faded and nuclear arms buildup would take center stage in national security policy. The H-bomb debate, however, reignited the hope for a moderation of the nuclear technological onslaught. It provided a chance for liberal scientists, represented by Oppenheimer and his colleagues on the GAC, to make the argument that such technological fixes as the super would not solve political problems in international relations. As Oppenheimer put it in his famous “ox cart” letter on the H-bomb to Conant on October 21, 1949: What concerns me is really not the technical problem. I am not sure the miserable thing will work, nor that it can be gotten to a target except by ox cart. It seems likely to me even further to worsen the unbalance of our present war plans. What does worry me is that this thing appears to have caught the imagination, both of the congressional and of military people, as the answer to the problem posed by the Russian advance. It would be folly to oppose the exploration of this weapon. . . . But that we become committed to it as the way to save the country and the peace appears to me full of danger.22

Oppenheimer’s skepticism toward the H-bomb resonated with and was reinforced by Conant, who shared with the physicist a deep doubt about the widespread faith in nuclear weapons and nuclear power. At the GAC, they both had opposed the nuclear-powered bombers as wildly unrealistic.23 Even though he had advocated the use of the bomb during World War II to shock the world into international control, Conant turned, in the postwar period, firmly against the promotion of nuclear power—they were “bedtime stories”—and the reliance on nuclear weapons in national security policy as perilous. In 1951 he would offer this critical observation of the military’s transformation from pre–World War II “technological conservatism” to postwar “technological enthusiasm”: It seems to me something like the old religious phenomenon of conversion. As I see it now, the military, if anything, have become vastly too much impressed with the abilities of research and development. They are no longer the conservatives. I don’t know what I should say—at times they seem to be fanatics in their belief of what scientists and technologists can do.24

Likewise Bush was alarmed by the technological enthusiasm of the military. As early as October 1945 Bush, as chairman of the Joint New Weapons Committee, had complained to Conant that “[t]he Services are running wild . . . [pursuing] a very extensive and utterly uncoordinated” technological agenda.25 His discouragement of missile research was part of his drive to disabuse the American public and military from Buck Rogers push-button high-tech wars.26

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Partly in reaction to the military’s gung-ho attitude toward nuclear weapons, a sense of technological skepticism prevailed at the GAC meeting in October 1949, where Conant emerged as the most forceful opponent of the hydrogen bomb and might have moved Oppenheimer from skepticism to opposition.27 Initially it was not clear which way the meeting was going to go. Both Rabi and Fermi believed that the decision would be to go ahead.28 Even Oppenheimer, as his letter to Conant indicated, thought that an outright opposition to it would be “folly.” At the end of the meeting, however, the GAC, infl uenced by Conant’s emotional appeal, recommended against a crash H-bomb program even as it urged an acceleration of the AEC’s fission bomb production. The resultant GAC report marked several important departures in the history of science advising. Even more than the Franck Committee, the GAC based its recommendation against the H-bomb on explicitly social, political, and moral considerations: the H-bomb was not a military instrument but a weapon of genocide.29 The majority appendix to the report, drafted by Conant, and cosigned by DuBridge, Rowe, Smith, Buckley, and Oppenheimer, argued that it was both necessary and possible to stop the development of this technology. “Mankind would be far better off not to have a demonstration of the feasibility of such a weapon, until the present climate of world opinion changes.”30 The minority appendix to the GAC, signed by Rabi and Fermi, condemned the H-bomb even more forcefully, calling it “necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.”31 Thus, in advising the government, the GAC sought to explain not what a technology could do, but rather what it could not do. “[I]t is not a weapon,” the committee agreed, “which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi-military purposes.” In other words, it would not help the United States win the Cold War militarily even if it could be made. Furthermore, like the Franck Committee, the GAC argued against the inevitability of a new military technology. “In determining not to proceed to develop the super bomb, we see a unique opportunity of providing by example some limitations on the totality of war and thus of limiting the fear and arousing the hopes of mankind,” the majority appendix argued.32 Whereas in November 1945 Oppenheimer had declared at Los Alamos that “It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity,” he now expressed the GAC’s hope that “by one means or another, the development of these weapons could be avoided.”33 Characteristic of the postwar science advisory scene and foreshadowing of the future PSAC, however, the GAC deliberation was not without its own internal dissent. Despite their moral reservations about the H-bomb, Rabi and Fermi declined to join the majority’s advocacy of a “disarmament by example” approach. Instead, they proposed essentially an H-bomb test ban: “It would be appropriate to invite nations of the world to join us in a solemn pledge not to proceed in the development or construction of weapons of this category.”34 Unfortunately, the moderate Rabi–Fermi proposal did not receive broader support inside or outside of the GAC. Glenn Seaborg, a nuclear chemist at Berkeley and the only GAC member who was

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absent from the meeting, had written a letter to Oppenheimer expressing his reluctant endorsement for the super. He later said that he believed he would have signed the Rabi–Fermi recommendation had he been present at the meeting.35 Reflecting his own ambivalence, even Oppenheimer considered signing the Rabi–Fermi statement before joining the majority opinion.36 Then, in a December 3, 1949 letter to Oppenheimer, the cautious Buckley subtly moved, too, to a position closer to that of Rabi and Fermi: “I would stop short of a demonstration of a super.”37 Both the majority and the minority views of the GAC enraged its critics. Edward Teller, who firmly believed in the necessity of deterring Soviet aggression with superior American military technology, denounced the GAC for abandoning Oppenheimer’s earlier position on a scientist’s duty. “The scientist is not responsible for the laws of nature,” Teller argued: It is his job to find out how these laws operate. It is the scientist’s job to find the ways in which these laws can serve human will. However, it is not the scientist’s job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used, or how it should be used. This responsibility rests with the American people and with their chosen representatives.38

In other words, just as the wartime Oppenheimer panel had tried to patrol the boundary between the technical and the political in 1945 in its debate with the Franck Committee, it was now Teller’s turn to use the same rhetoric to attack the GAC’s opposition to the H-bomb. His argument did not prevent him from actively lobbying the AEC and Congress for the construction of the H-bomb, however.39 Privately Teller suspected that Oppenheimer opposed the H-bomb partly due to “misplaced pride about the device [fission bomb] he was responsible for producing.”40 In the end, the GAC’s argument did not matter in the H-bomb decision nearly as much as its supporters had hoped or as its critics had feared. Although AEC chairman David Lilienthal (and a majority of the AEC commissioners) supported the GAC recommendation to discourage military reliance on nuclear weapons, President Truman did not share the GAC’s moral concern over the development of the H-bomb. Three years ago he had privately dismissed Oppenheimer as a “cry-baby scientist” when the physicist told him that he had blood on his hands in the aftermath of Hiroshima.41 Truman now decided that it was in American national interest to proceed with the H-bomb, even before a special subcommittee of the National Security Council voted two to one, secretaries of state and defense against Lilienthal, to recommend a go-ahead. As Lilienthal wrote in his diary, “the President was so clearly set on what he was going to do before we set foot inside the door.”42 Sidney Souers, a Truman aide, likewise believed that Truman had made the decision “at the very beginning.”43 Members of the GAC, in session when informed of the decision and the additional presidential “gag” order not to discuss the matter in public, were “stunned and disheartened” by the verdict.44 Oppenheimer thought of resigning the GAC chairmanship, but was dissuaded by Secretary of State Dean Acheson and the new AEC chairman, Gordon Dean.45

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American public scientists lost their first major battle to limit the technological momentum in the nuclear age. Truman’s decision on the H-bomb had a far-reaching effect not only on the nuclear arms race but also on the future of the GAC and science advising in general.46 The committee never regained its infl uence.47 When Oppenheimer and Conant retired from the GAC, it marked, as Conant biographer James Hershberg noted, “the triumph of ‘enthusiastic’ scientific advisers intent on the unlimited development of nuclear weapons.”48 Less tangible but equally important, the Hbomb controversy left the impression in the minds of Congressmen and government officials that most scientists were “soft” in national security policymaking. It reinforced the idea that scientists, as experts, should be strictly “on tap” and not “on top.” Redrawn was the boundary between what was technical, and therefore proper for scientists to address, and what was political, to be reserved for politicians and other policymakers.49 When the H-bomb was eventually made despite initial technical difficulties, the achievement would further strengthen faith in technological progress in the minds of those who had backed its development in the first place. The Manhattan approach worked again; Cold War technologies could, it appeared, be commanded. In contrast, scientists associated with the GAC opposition to the H-bomb would view such enthusiasm for technological solutions as a dangerous impulse to accelerate the nuclear arms race. The gulf would widen in subsequent debates over nuclear weapons.

Conclusion This examination of the Scientists’ Movement, the NSF debate, and the H-bomb controversy indicates that during the early Cold War, scientists increasingly became part of the national security state both because of their sense of the danger of Stalinism and because of their mission as public scientists. Even their articulation of technological skepticism formed a key part of their promotion of science: Motivated by a sense of moral and social responsibility for the uses of their scientific research, they sought not only to redeem science’s peaceful image, which they felt had been damaged by the Hiroshima bombing, but also to limit the technological momentum that would accelerate a nuclear arms race in the postwar period. As they moved closer to policy and politics, however, they found that their ideas and ideals about science, technology, and the proper role of experts in a democracy severely challenged. Oppenheimer and his GAC colleagues’ opposition to the H-bomb did not mean that they questioned the objectives of American Cold War policy. Those who opposed and those who advocated a crash H-bomb project differed mainly on the means to achieving the same objectives. Many in the former camp, for example, urged a conventional military buildup and increased fission bomb production as a preferred alternative to reliance on thermonuclear weapons and as a better response to the Soviet bomb, the Chinese Communist revolution, and, soon thereafter, the outbreak of the Korean War. Accordingly, Oppenheimer, who later regarded his following Conant in opposing the H-bomb “a mistake,”

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not only played an active role in the making of the hawkish policy document NSC-68, but also helped organize the Committee on the Present Danger, which advocated, among other measures, a universal draft for military service in the United States.50 What the H-bomb episode did demonstrate to liberal scientists associated with the GAC was the danger of not only blind faith in nuclear military technology, but also the inadequacy and opacity of the science advising process. Small groups of top government officials could make life-and-death decisions behind closed doors without public or even congressional debate.51 Scientists like themselves did participate in the process and proponents of the H-bomb such as Lawrence and Teller indeed had great infl uence on some key government officials. Yet it was doubtful whether the GAC’s unorthodox and perhaps naive arguments had a fair hearing before Truman.52 This lack of a balanced system of science advising and a more open debate was deeply troubling to the GAC scientists. Thus, when the next crisis, the Korean War, hit the nation shortly after the H-bomb debate, Oppenheimer and his supporters on and off the GAC saw it as another opportunity both to strengthen presidential science advising and to redeem science through technological skepticism by bringing scientists closer to American Cold War policymaking.

3

Mobilizing Science for the Korean War under Truman, 1950–1952

The Korean War dramatically changed the landscape of American science and government. On the heels of the H-bomb decision, the confl ict brought the urgency of general military research and development (R&D) and scientific mobilization beyond nuclear weapons to the attention of government officials.1 It also highlighted the need for a revitalization of defense research policy and organization at the top of the government. The White House became the locus of a campaign by scientists who pushed for the establishment of a science advisory setup there to coordinate both science in policy and policy for science for the Cold War.

The Golden Plan Even before the outbreak of the Korean War in summer 1950, there had been a growing concern over the disarray in military R&D. Demobilization and scientists’ desires to go back to basic research had led to the termination of the OSRD, as its military successor, the Research and Development Board (RDB) in the Department of Defense (DOD), struggled to fulfill its mission of coordinating the vast military R&D enterprise. A major problem derived from the fact that military representatives on the board each worked for the interests of their own services, making it impossible for the divided RDB to exert much infl uence in defense science policy. More important, the Joint Chiefs of Staff refused to open their decision-making process to the civilian scientists on the RDB. By 1950 many scientists feared that the RDB, one of the main formal channels for scientists to infl uence military strategy, was on the verge of collapse.2 Science advising at the White House had also almost vanished. Truman never warmed up to the technocratic style of Vannevar Bush, who technically remained science adviser to Truman even after the dissolution of the OSRD. In 1945, for example, Truman put James R. Newman, chief of the science section in the Office of War Mobilization and Conversion, instead of Bush, in charge of dealing with atomic energy legislation. “I cannot remain silent,” Bush protested. “Either my comments and advice must play an important part in the councils of your administration or I must be free to speak plainly in public on all those matters of science in which I feel that my war experience gives me a duty to speak.”3 Soon he left the White House, disillusioned by what he perceived to be Truman’s unwillingness to heed outside scientific advice.4 In 1947, a President’s Scientific Research Board under Truman’s nonscientist assistant John Steelman produced a New Deal-inspired report on Science and Public Policy that emphasized a strong government science policy. Among its recommendations were the establishment of an Interdepartmental Committee 32

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on Scientific Research and Development (ICSRD), and the designation of a White House staff member by the president “for the purpose of scientific liaison.” The former step was followed but the latter was ignored.5 Shortly after the beginning of the Korean War, calls reached the White House for a resurrection of the OSRD to remedy the dismal organization of military R&D. An RDB subcommittee under Irwin Stewart, former OSRD executive secretary, advocated both a revival of the OSRD and the appointment of a presidential scientific adviser. John McCormack (D-MA), House majority leader, urged Truman to return military R&D to the hands of civilian scientists and ensure that R&D funds not be diverted to other purposes.6 To examine the status of military R&D in general and the wisdom of a new OSRD in particular, Truman and the Bureau of the Budget (BOB) decided to conduct an informal review of the matter. With the president’s approval, the BOB appointed for this task William T. Golden, a New York investment banker and friend of BOB Assistant Director Charles Stauffacher. Golden had just returned to Wall Street from a post as Commissioner Lewis Strauss’s assistant at the AEC. Now serving President Truman as a special consultant to the BOB director, Golden found during the initial phase of his investigation the immense value of presidential sponsorship. He began to formulate his plan for a science adviser to the president as the focus for national scientific mobilization.7 On October 31, he tried out his idea on David Stowe, a presidential assistant. Stowe thought that the president “would be favorably disposed to this recommendation,” but he also warned Golden that “the President would be opposed however to the idea of a [advisory] board,” reflecting perhaps his lingering disaffection toward the GAC over the H-bomb.8 Nevertheless encouraged, Golden went on to visit and talk to more than one hundred scientists and administrators in and out of the government to further test his proposal and gain feedback. Many of his interviewees welcomed the proposal,9 and their enthusiasm reflected the key importance of the Korean War in motivating scientists to remobilize for military research. As Hans Bethe, who had refused to work on the H-bomb in 1949 on moral grounds, later recalled, the Korean War represented “the first time that I saw direct confrontation with the Communists”: It was too disturbing. The cold war looked as if it were about to get hot. I knew then I had to reverse my earlier position. If I didn’t work on the bomb, somebody else would—and I had the thought if I were around Los Alamos I might still be a force for disarmament. So I agreed to join in developing the H-bomb.10

Thus, for Oppenheimer, Bethe, and other leading liberal scientists, Golden’s proposal promised to raise scientists’ independent voice in U.S. defense and science policy. Otherwise, as AEC chairman Gordon Dean told Golden, “many scientists would not work for the military.”11 Scientists disagreed, however, over the exact setup. Initially, Oppenheimer and Conant opposed the proposal for a single science adviser, fearing that one scientist, however qualified, would not represent the broad spectrum of views and

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scientific disciplines. They rather preferred a committee of scientific advisers.12 In the end, all agreed that some form of presidential science advising should be established as soon as possible.13 Scientists’ sense of urgency intensified especially after the United States suffered setbacks in Korea in late 1950 following the Chinese entry into the war. I. I. Rabi, for example, returned from a trip to Europe gravely concerned about the pessimism there. He called Golden immediately to urge him to advance his plan for a science adviser as a way to mobilize science for the Cold War not only in the United States but in the West in general.14 The aggressive recruiting and “stockpiling” of scientists by military services also generated a rising concern that without a “focal point” the mobilization of science would be dangerously fragmented.15 In December 1950, Golden formally recommended to Truman that he appoint a presidential scientific adviser but postpone the resurrection of the OSRD, as yet unnecessary in view of the vast R&D enterprise in the Department of Defense. The science adviser would monitor the government’s defense R&D programs, stand ready to revive the OSRD when necessary, and, of course, provide independent science advice in the president’s daily policymaking. To alleviate Oppenheimer’s and Conant’s concern over the domination of a narrow point of view, Golden suggested that the science adviser “select a small advisory committee of scientific specialists . . . or he may call on the National Academy of Sciences.”16 The first step was taken toward the establishment of a formal presidential science advisory system.

The Science Advisory Committee President Truman reportedly studied the Golden proposal and reacted to it favorably in mid-January 1951, but he did not consider it a vital part of his strategy.17 Such indifference made the proposal vulnerable to objections from other presidential institutions, especially the new Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM) in the Executive Office of the President. The ODM was created by Truman in a declaration of national emergency on December 15, 1950, following the Chinese entry into the Korean War. Headed by Charles Edward Wilson (“Electric Charlie”), former president of General Electric, the ODM was to set priorities and keep control of defense-related activities of the entire government. Significantly, the ODM director was made one of the only five statutory members of the National Security Council (NSC; the others were the president, vice president, and secretaries of state and defense). When Golden discussed his plan with General Lucius Clay, assistant director of the ODM, the latter accepted the necessity for scientific mobilization but questioned the establishment of a presidential science adviser to accomplish it. Rather, Clay, famous for his direction of the 1948 Berlin airlift, claimed that the function fell squarely into the purview of the ODM and therefore the science adviser should be appointed assistant to the ODM director rather than to the president.18 Further discussions among Clay, the BOB, and Golden resulted in the downgrade from a presidential science adviser with a committee to an Advisory Committee on Defense Scientific Research with a full-time chairman reporting to

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both the ODM director and the president.19 Given Stowe’s earlier warning about Truman’s hostility toward a science advisory board and the scientists’ preference for direct access to the president, Golden could not have been very happy with the arrangement, but there seemed little that he could do to change Clay’s mind. Thus, Clay, in one stroke, considerably dimmed the scientists’ hope to regain an independent voice in defense and science policymaking. Another challenge to the Golden plan came from the NSF, which was finally activated in May 1950. Meeting for the first time on December 12, 1950, the NSF’s governing National Science Board (NSB) expressed anxiety that the appointment of a presidential science adviser would undermine its own prerogatives. The NSF Act of 1950 had directed the foundation not only “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare,” but also “to secure the national defense.” The NSB felt the new science advisory setup impinged on its mandate in military R&D.20 Fortunately for the Golden plan, Conant and DuBridge, who sat on the NSB, turned the board around by arguing for a much more limited mission for the NSF. The fledgling NSF should not attempt to take R&D away from the military, they argued, but rather concentrate on basic research and science education. Fear of military domination if the NSF took on military research proved greater than bureaucratic ambition. By early 1951, the NSB dropped its objection to the Golden plan.21 We would probably never know whether the NSF could have persisted in covering both military and civilian areas had the preceding events not intervened, but we do know that this turn of events had profound implications for the future of the NSF and American science policy. Although freed from possible military encroachment and left to support basic research, the NSF was forced to accommodate itself to a federal science funding mechanism dominated by the DOD and the AEC. Its budget languished both in the BOB and in Congress, due partly to its detachment from direct defense concerns. This situation would change with Sputnik, but for much of its formative period, the NSF remained an underfunded promise for the future. As the mechanism of presidential science advising evolved from Golden’s original high-profile science adviser in the White House to one of much less significance in the ODM, the search for a committee chairman became an exercise in frustration. Both Mervin Kelly, president-designate at Bell Laboratories, and DuBridge, who were Golden’s and most scientists’ favorite candidates, declined to be considered. The White House did offer the position to chemist Charles Thomas of Monsanto, but he also declined. Eventually, it fell to Oliver Buckley, retiring president of Bell, who also served on the GAC.22 The White House’s interest in Kelly and Thomas and its final choice of Buckley derived from a belief that a scientist from the industrial sector would be more practical and decisive than one from the universities.23 Scientists were, however, lukewarm toward the Buckley appointment. Oppenheimer, Conant, and DuBridge, three of Buckley’s colleagues on the GAC, all felt that “his attitude is correct and self-effacing and that he will not do foolish things,” hardly a ringing endorsement.24 However, with the looming

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threat that the whole thing would be called off if Buckley declined, the scientists persuaded him to accept the post.25 Contrary to the White House’s expectation, Buckley, in frail health, turned out to be a very passive leader of the committee and was later blamed by Golden and many others for the ineffectiveness of science advising in the White House in this period. Yet, at least for the future of presidential science advising, Buckley made a significant alteration in the Golden plan when he changed the name of the group from the proposed Advisory Committee on Defense Scientific Research to a broader-sounding Science Advisory Committee of the ODM (ODM-SAC). The renaming helped the committee and its successor, PSAC, to branch out of military matters and into science, space, and environmental policies.26 The charter of the ODM-SAC was sufficiently vague and broad that the effectiveness of the committee depended on its own initiatives and its administrative environment. In President Truman’s appointment letter to Buckley on April 19, 1951, which served as the only legal foundation for the ODM-SAC, he directed the group to advise both the ODM director and himself on mobilizing science for defense. In particular, he asked the committee to advise on the “objectives and interrelations” of the several federal agencies engaged in military R&D, to report on any scientific discoveries that might have military importance, to channel the scientists’ views on defense R&D to the White House, and to stand ready to resurrect the OSRD when needed. The advising role on nonmilitary science was left to the NSF.27 The initial eleven members of the ODM-SAC, selected by Buckley in consultation with Golden, the White House, and several scientific leaders, formed an “old boy network” of science administrators in and out of the government, much like the original founders of the NAS. Besides Chairman Buckley, four others served as ex officio members of the Science Advisory Committee: Detlev Bronk, as president of the NAS (he was also president of Johns Hopkins University), William Webster, as chairman of the RDB, Alan Waterman, as newly appointed NSF director, and Hugh Dryden, as chairman of the ICSRD (he was also director of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics). Except for Robert F. Loeb, medical professor at Columbia, the rest of the ODM-SAC members were all scientists or engineers who headed academic institutions or industrial firms: Conant of Harvard, Killian of MIT, DuBridge of Cal Tech, Oppenheimer as director of the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study, and Charles A. Thomas, vice president for research of Monsanto Chemical Company. Even these “outside” scientists occupied important government advisory positions. Conant was chairman and DuBridge was a member of the National Science Board, Killian headed the Army Scientific Advisory Panel, and Oppenheimer chaired the GAC, of which Buckley, Conant, and DuBridge were members. Thus they knew each other well from association during World War II in the OSRD, or the Rad Lab, or the Manhattan Project, and, in the postwar period, they were further interlocked in their activities as science advisers in the AEC, the DOD, the Department of State, and individual military services.

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Notably, moderate-liberal scientists associated with the GAC dominated the ODM-SAC membership. Given the rise of the Cold War atmosphere at home and abroad and the nature of the committee, it was not surprising that those scientists identified with the progressive left were not represented on the committee. What might have puzzled observers was the absence of those politically conservative scientists who had, for example, prevailed over the GAC in their push for the Hbomb. During his investigation, Golden did talk with one of the latter, Lawrence, and his supporter on the AEC, Strauss. However, their recommendation of each other as candidates for the position of the science adviser to the president—while virtually no one else mentioned their names—must have made Golden realize that they represented only a minority, however powerful, within the scientific community. Because the Golden plan had envisioned that the presidential science adviser would “[b]e recognized as the representative of the scientific community at the top of the Government,” it was perhaps understandable that none of the vocal pro-H-bomb scientists ever was seriously considered as a candidate for science adviser or ODM-SAC chairman or made it onto the ODM-SAC.28 The resultant ideological coherence might have helped create a collegial atmosphere in the ODM-SAC, but it also opened the committee to charges of not being fully representative of the spectrum of political views in the scientific community. Furthermore, the very concept that the ODM-SAC would act as a representative of the scientific community tended to reignite the debate over the dual allegiance of science advisers. In any case, despite its distinguished roll call, the ODM-SAC attempted and accomplished very little under Truman. Oppenheimer later aptly called it “our good-for-nothing committee.”29 Under Buckley’s conservative guidance, the committee became a forum of information exchange for the several federal science agencies and advisory groups represented on the committee.30 In September 1951, the ODM-SAC published its first public statement, “Scientists and Mobilization: Some Views of the Science Advisory Committee on the Role of Academic Scientists.” In it, the committee tied American science with the Cold War, defending, as did the Bush report, the importance of basic academic research for national defense as a source of new knowledge, new revolutionary ideas, and technical manpower. As to actions, it recommended that scientists at universities stay where they were, concentrating on “fundamental research” and teaching, but stand ready to participate in interdisciplinary projects on military problems.31 The statement was so general, however, that many scientists found it useless and felt that it failed to reflect their sense of urgency.32 In view of both the history of science advising and the particular circumstances during the Truman administration, however, the ineffectiveness of the ODM-SAC was not surprising. To date, there had never been a powerful presidential science adviser in peacetime.33 As we have seen, during the 1930s, Compton’s SAB rarely exerted much infl uence during its term of two and a half years. The extraordinary effectiveness of Bush during World War II derived from both a good relationship with Roosevelt and the clear need for scientific contributions. Both conditions were

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absent in the case of the ODM-SAC under Truman. The Missourian, although a professed enthusiast for science, never felt close to scientists. Meeting Buckley in April 1951, he assured him of access but made no request for advice, asking only vaguely that Buckley and the committee help develop more “scientific statesmen.”34 What Truman meant was that he preferred scientists who would be more understanding of his Cold War strategy, not those associated with the GAC, who produced, in his view, the naive recommendation against the H-bomb. “We need men with great intellects, need their ideas,” he commented to Lilienthal on the anti-H-bomb scientists, “but we need to balance them with other kinds of people, too.”35 It was the common perception at the time that, as the philosopher Sydney Hook articulated in 1950, scientists’ pursuit of precision and logic actually handicapped them in the emotional realms of politics.36 Neither the president nor the ODM director, Wilson, nor his successor John Steelman, turned to the ODM-SAC for advice on any significant matter during the remainder of the Truman presidency.37 The action in science advising on nuclear weapons took place largely outside of ODM-SAC as the H-bomb program headed toward its first test in 1952, code-named “Mike.” Although a Panel of Consultants on Disarmament in the State Department, chaired by Oppenheimer but led largely by Bush, argued for a postponement of the test to give the test ban another chance, Edward Teller counterattacked, effectively, not only for proceeding with the test but also for establishing a second nuclear weapons laboratory at Livermore.38 Throughout this period, it was possible that Truman’s antipathy toward Oppenheimer and the GAC carried over into his indifference toward Buckley and the ODM-SAC.39 The following anecdote, told by Jerome Wiesner of MIT, well illustrated ODM-SAC’s peripheral status: One day, during a visit with Buckley, our talk turned to the President and his need for science advice. He told me that President Truman did not feel the need for much scientific advice and, as a consequence, Buckley did not offer very much of it. “On the other hand,” he said, “I see the President every day.” “You do?” I asked, somewhat surprised, and he said, “Yes, he walks out there in the garden every day.”40

Indeed, between his appointment in May 1950 and resignation a year later, Buckley made only one request to see Truman and he was politely turned down by the White House staff, who told him to present his report to Wilson instead.41 Buckley was certainly no Bush; but then, the Korean War never became a total war like World War II. Few scientists went to Korea. The young nuclear physicist Richard Garwin did spend about a month in Korea in 1950, but he was there not to work on nuclear weapons but to consult on technical problems associated with the establishment of a tactical air command.42 Nuclear weapons did figure in President Truman’s strategy in the Korean War—at the time that he approved the establishment of the ODM-SAC he ordered nine atomic bombs transferred from the AEC to the Air Force with a view toward their possible use in northeast China—but no nuclear scientist was involved in the policymaking process.43 All these factors make

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it doubtful that a more active scientist in the White House would have made much difference.

An Agenda for Reform By the end of the Truman administration, it was apparent that due to both personality and politics the ODM-SAC failed to impress either the president or the scientific community. Although Buckley was content with the status quo, Golden and several committee members became restless.44 A chance for reform arrived in spring 1952 when the chairmanship passed from the ailing Buckley to DuBridge, but the lack of presidential interest continued to frustrate the committee. DuBridge, for example, remained largely a stranger to the president.45 The fact that he agreed to serve only as a part-time chairman of ODM-SAC further reduced its presence in policymaking.46 Concerned with the course of the arms race, members of the ODM-SAC, however, were as eager as ever to play a role in American national security policy. Dissatisfied with the ODM’s modus operandi as “not well suited to science and scientists,” several members returned to Oppenheimer’s original proposal to move it to the NSC, where they thought it could affect national policy.47 Pinning its hope on the new Republican administration, the committee held a three-day retreat at Oppenheimer’s Princeton Institute in November 1952, shortly after the first thermonuclear test Mike and Dwight Eisenhower’s electoral victory.48 During the meeting, the committee produced a report that agitated for change: it proposed its own termination because it “has had few—if any occasion to render advice” and was “not needed for the national interest,” on the one hand, and, somewhat paradoxically, changes in government to strengthen scientists’ presence in policymaking, on the other.49 Remarkably, the key to ODM-SAC’s justification of scientists’ role in the government was not what science and technology could contribute directly to the military strength, but their role in shaping planning and policy. “Perhaps the greatest single improvement in the effective use of science in the national defense will lie,” the committee argued, “in its use in helping to bring about the increasing clarification of our over-all strategic objectives and priorities, and a greater understanding of where our problems lie and of their relative importance.” Continuing earlier attempts in the same direction, the ODM-SAC’s quest for science in policy implied a concurrent demand for scientists in policy. Such science advisers would not only alert the government about opportunities offered by scientific and technological developments, but also, more important, carry out critical evaluations at the interface between technology and policy so that both the potentials and limits of new technologies could be recognized and incorporated in the making of policy. Such integration of science and scientists in policy would, the committee believed, “serve to reduce waste, confusion and futility in technical development.” Finally, the scientists also linked its advice on science in policy with policy for science when the committee contended that such critical technical and policy evaluations would in turn have to rest on “the best available estimates of scientific

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fact and technical promise,” offering, implicitly, rationale for federal support of scientific research. Looking to the future, the committee made two specific recommendations. First, it suggested that the chairman of the RDB, as chief science adviser to the secretary of defense, be given broader authority and allowed to take active part in the Pentagon’s strategy-making processes. Second, it advocated that the NSC be reformed to concentrate more on long-term national security planning, and that a scientist be appointed to the council to channel science and technology to it. A new science advisory committee could then be established to help this NSC science adviser. In essence, therefore, the committee advocated a direct role for scientists in national policymaking at the highest level. “It is not enough for policy-makers to be ‘briefed’ on scientific matters before making their decisions,” the committee explained, perhaps with the H-bomb decision in mind. Instead, “men conversant with the scientific background must participate in the process of making these decisions.” Ironically, unbeknownst to them, the scientists’ concern actually found echo, in a way, within the White House. In fall 1952, for example, Raymond B. Allen, departing director of the Psychological Strategy Board, an interagency coordinating body designed to implement NSC decisions, urged the appointment of a staff officer, with the backing of a science advisory body, empowered to develop special technical studies. “The President and, among the Cabinet members the Secretary of Defense particularly, could profitably use intelligent, high level, advisory counsel of experts on scientific, technical problems which concern national security and the general problem of fighting tomorrow’s wars with tomorrow’s weapons rather than with the weapons of the last war,” Allen told Souers. Souers professed sympathy on the need for science advising but apparently did little to see it implemented. As a sad commentary on the status of the ODM-SAC, it never even came up in the conversation.50

Conclusion Thus, only two years after its birth during the Korean War, the fledgling ODMSAC fell victim to White House turf wars and came close to self-dissolution. When they lent enthusiastic support to the ODM-SAC, the scientists certainly had hoped to revive the spirit, if not the form, of the OSRD, in terms of giving scientists autonomy from the defense establishment. That dream almost vanished by the end of the Truman administration. Partly what doomed it was a profound divergence in the scientists’ and the White House’s expectations of what the science advisers could accomplish. Whereas the scientists pushed the Golden scheme as a way to represent the voice of science and to counter the domination of the military in national security policymaking, Truman and Wilson looked to the scientists primarily as a way to pacify critical scientists and their political supporters and to legitimate administration policy. In this connection, it was more than ironic that it was General Clay who vetoed the idea of a presidential science adviser in the first place. Lacking presidential interest, strong leadership, and, perhaps most

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important, a clear mandate, the ODM-SAC became a lesson in how not to create and run a science advisory institution. There was a broader context in which we can understand the failure of the ODMSAC under Truman: the intensified Cold War abroad and rising anti-Communism at home severely circumscribed the space for the kind of technological skepticism that was first identified with the GAC and then associated with the ODM-SAC. At a time when the Truman administration was preoccupied with “fighting tomorrow’s wars with tomorrow’s weapons,” these liberal-moderate scientists’ advocacy of critical evaluations of military technology, with its accompanying demand for scientists to play a role in strategic policymaking, generated much less enthusiasm in the government than Edward Teller’s fervent promotion of direct scientific and technological contributions to national defense. The Red Scare at home had already put the Truman administration on the defensive; it had instituted a federal loyalty program in 1947, with profound impact on many scientists working for the government. By the time of the Golden investigation, Senator Joseph McCarthy had already begun to attract a powerful following with his reckless accusations of communist agents within the government and Oppenheimer was under increasing attack for his past left-wing associations and for his opposition to the H-bomb. Indeed, at the Princeton meeting in November 1952, the well-connected James Killian felt compelled to warn Oppenheimer of forthcoming troubles.51 As the national security state gained momentum, the establishment of the ODM-SAC as a move toward removing control of military R&D from the military might well have been viewed as a radical, if not subversive, act. The domination of the ODM over the scientists spoke volumes about the unequal partnership between science and the national security state in this early Cold War period. Yet, as the nuclear arms race raged on and the scientific enterprise increasingly depended on government support, the mutual need of American science and state deepened. With the coming of a new administration, there would be, once again, new opportunities and challenges for the scientists who believed that a strong science–state partnership was vital for the United States during the Cold War.

4

Science and the National Security State under Eisenhower, 1952–1957

For American society and science, the years between the 1952 election and the 1957 Sputnik crisis were full of paradoxes. The end of the Korean War and economic prosperity created complacency, but beneath the surface lurked great danger for the United States as the nuclear arms race entered the thermonuclear and missile age.1 To meet the new threats, many American scientists remobilized themselves into national security work, only to find themselves targets of surging McCarthyist attacks that began in the late 1940s and victims of what they regarded as capricious government science policy. Against this most trying background, the ODM-SAC, as the highest ranking group of scientists in the federal government, undertook the daunting task of revitalizing itself and sustaining the partnership between science and the national security state by, among other measures, exploiting the potentials of military technology.

Science Advice for National Security From the beginning, the Eisenhower administration exhibited a profound ambivalence toward science. Coming into the White House, Eisenhower brought with him an impressive record in building a partnership between science and the state. Often priding himself as a graduate of the nation’s first engineering school, West Point, he employed science advisers during World War II when he was the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. In the late 1940s, while Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, he greatly enhanced the place of science in that service.2 Thus the new administration appreciated scientists’ critical role in military technology, but it was reluctant to allow them to enter into policymaking. At a meeting of the NSC in 1953, the president found it “strange,” for example, that the State Department Panel on Disarmament led by Oppenheimer and Vannevar Bush “moved out of the scientific realm into the realms of policy and psychology.”3 Thus, the ODM-SAC received confl icting signals about its Princeton proposal for better science advising at the Pentagon and at the NSC. DuBridge, as ODMSAC chairman, and Oppenheimer, a committee member, took the Princeton proposal to Eisenhower’s transition advisers Arthur Flemming and Nelson Rockefeller. The latter endorsed it and passed it on to Eisenhower.4 Although Eisenhower reportedly favored both steps, only the Pentagon reform went through as two new assistant secretaries, one for research and development, and another for systems engineering, replaced the weak Research and Development Board.5 The effort to put science in the NSC stalled at the feet of Robert Cutler, Eisenhower’s special assistant for national security, or national security adviser, who was clearly 42

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aware of the president’s ambivalent views toward scientists’ role in policy. A Boston banker in background, Cutler believed in the “on tap but not on top” philosophy of science advising. Preferring ad hoc task forces, Cutler reacted coolly to both the ODM-SAC’s recommendation for science advising in the NSC and his friend Vannevar Bush’s idea of appointing a scientist on the NSC staff. A meeting in May 1953 with DuBridge, Bush, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roger Keyes, and Flemming, newly appointed director of the ODM, failed to change Cutler’s mind. The NSC, he argued, dealt mainly with broad issues and could, when necessary, draw on the NAS and the NSF for science advice. To Bush, what Cutler ignored was that a council of “generalists” might not know when it needed scientific and technical advice. “And I have seen fool things done in the White House for that very reason,” he warned.6 Cutler’s stonewalling did not deter the scientists, however. The ODM-SAC found a much more sympathetic hearing from Flemming, who dissuaded the committee from self-dissolution. The appointment in spring 1953 of David Z. Beckler as both the committee’s executive officer and Flemming’s special assistant for technical liaison with the NSC also brought the group closer to policymaking. Beckler, a chemical engineer and patent attorney by training, had worked as a staff member for foreign technical liaison at the OSRD during World War II and then as executive director of the RDB’s Committee on Atomic Energy after the war. On the latter sat two ODM-SAC members, Oppenheimer and Bacher, who enthusiastically recommended him for the new positions.7 The ODM-SAC also had its own charter broadened to enable it to take initiatives. Instead of following Buckley’s philosophy of “speaking only when spoken to,” it could now, on its own, bring defense science and technology issues “to the attention of the President, the Director, Office of Defense Mobilization, the National Security Council, and other agencies.” The membership was expanded and shifted from busy government science administrators to academic scientists who could devote more time on urgent problems. By 1954, for example, Bacher and Charles Lauritsen of Cal Tech, James Fisk of Bell Labs, Bruce S. Old of Arthur D. Little, Inc., Rabi, Walter G. Whitman and Jerrold R. Zacharias of MIT, mostly former consultants, had joined the committee, while William Webster, James Conant, and Robert Loeb had retired.8 Strengthened by these reforms, the Science Advisory Committee was ready to rise from its insipid beginnings to take center stage in the effort to provide much needed scientific and technological input in national security policy. Before it could do so, however, a great controversy erupted in late 1953 and early 1954 that threatened to wreck the committee’s ambitious plans.

The Oppenheimer Case On December 3, 1953, Beckler was attending a conference in a hotel in Washington, DC, when he was urgently summoned back to the Executive Office by Flemming. The president had just suspended Oppenheimer’s security clearance at a secret White House meeting, Flemming told him. From now on, Beckler should stop sending Oppenheimer, at the time still a member of the ODM-SAC,

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any classified information.9 A “blank wall” that Eisenhower had famously ordered was thus erected between Oppenheimer and the government.10 Although the trigger of the Oppenheimer case came from William Borden, a former congressional aide who suspected that Oppenheimer was a Soviet agent, the surging attacks on scientists had deeper roots. For several years Senator Joseph McCarthy had exploited the Red Scare hysteria of domestic anticommunism and, by the time of Eisenhower’s election, he began to target scientists. The ODM-SAC watched in horror as McCarthy’s reckless investigations devastated an Army research laboratory at Fort Monmouth and threatened to do the same for MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in December 1953.11 Eisenhower, although opposing McCarthy’s method, nevertheless shared his objective “to cleanse the government of security risks.”12 On learning of the Borden charge, Eisenhower’s first reaction was that Oppenheimer could not have been a disloyal citizen, but, he added, “this does not mean that he might not be a security risk.”13 As Cutler noted a few days later, the new administration had lowered the bar to deny security clearance: it was no longer disloyalty, but security risk.14 Informed by Secretary of Defense Wilson and Lewis Strauss, now AEC chairman, that “McCarthy knows about it and might pull it on us,” Eisenhower felt that he had no choice but to order a suspension of Oppenheimer’s clearance.15 More than his past left-wing associations, Oppenheimer’s stand on the nuclear arms race provided ammunition for his antagonists. In 1949, his opposition to the H-bomb infuriated the Air Force, which counted on the weapon to become part of its strategic nuclear bomber force. It also disliked Oppenheimer’s advocacy of tactical nuclear weapons in the summer study, Project Vista, at Cal Tech in 1951, and of continental defense in another summer study, Project Lincoln, at MIT in 1952, as weakening its centrality in American defense strategy.16 Oppenheimer’s public ridicule of Strauss, then a commissioner of the AEC, in a congressional hearing on the export of radioisotopes for basic research in 1949—Strauss had opposed such export—turned the latter into a vengeful rival.17 In the poisoned political atmosphere, even the advocacy of basic research by Oppenheimer and his supporters came under suspicion. General R. C. Wilson of the Air Force, for example, reported to the AEC that he had been highly alarmed that “Dr. Oppenheimer always appeared to be in favor of basic research and various testing activities but always appeared to be opposed to production and development,” including, especially, the nuclear powered bomber.18 American public scientists turned into public enemies and dual allegiance verged on disloyalty. Finally, in early 1953, Oppenheimer’s apparently successful campaign for candor in government policy to enable the American people to understand the dangers of the nuclear arms race united his enemies in their effort to remove him from national security policymaking by revoking his security clearance.19 Ironically and tragically, Oppenheimer had foreseen the gathering storm as early as the summer of 1946 when he discussed with Lilienthal the consequences of a Soviet opposition to international control of atomic energy. Speaking in “a really heart-breaking tone,” Oppenheimer predicted, in Lilienthal’s paraphrase:

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This will be construed by us as a demonstration of Russia’s warlike intentions. And this will fit perfectly into the plans of that growing number who want to put the country on a war footing, first psychologically, then actually. The Army directing the country’s research; Red-baiting; treating all labor organizations, CIO first, as Communist and therefore traitorous, etc.20

By the time Eisenhower issued his “blank wall” order, Oppenheimer had already retired from the GAC; he remained a rarely used consultant to the AEC and participated regularly in governmental activities primarily through his membership on the ODM-SAC. Therefore, in the December 1953 White House meeting, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director J. Edgar Hoover had proposed to disband the ODM-SAC so that Oppenheimer’s clearance would lapse automatically and quietly because he would have no further need to use it. As a sad commentary on the importance of the committee, no one came to its rescue. The proposal was abandoned only because others, especially Strauss, thought it would not go far enough to cut Oppenheimer off from the scientific community.21 Oppenheimer’s suspension shocked and dismayed many of his colleagues on the ODM-SAC. The committee appealed to the administration for reason and, especially, for consideration of the value of scientists to national security. Writing on behalf of the committee to Vice President Richard Nixon, who, as the administration’s point man on security, had earlier publicly praised Oppenheimer, DuBridge called on the administration “to take more fully into account the value of the individual to the Government and balance this against the often trivial nature of the allegations before action is taken which would reduce or destroy his value.” Unjustified attacks on scientists “are reducing the morale of important research laboratories and reducing the availability of key scientists for important posts in the Government,” DuBridge warned. Notably and characteristically, the letter was framed in utilitarian, not moral, terms, but, to its credit, the committee sought redress in regard to both Oppenheimer and less well-known scientists, such as those at the Fort Monmouth Laboratory, who were victims of McCarthyism.22 The scientists’ lobbying for Oppenheimer was met with silence. Nixon not only avoided meeting with DuBridge, who hand-delivered the letter to his office, but actually secretly reported DuBridge’s visit and letter to the FBI.23 DuBridge did see Strauss, but his “encouraging” talk with the AEC chairman hardly helped Oppenheimer.24 Privately, several committee members—DuBridge, Rabi, Bacher, and Zacharias—attempted to raise funds for Oppenheimer’s legal defense when Oppenheimer decided to challenge the AEC’s suspension.25 When news of Oppenheimer’s trouble broke in April 1954, even some of those who had sided with Edward Teller against Oppenheimer in the H-bomb debate became concerned that the case might be used to “discredit a substantial group of scientists,” as Frederick Seitz, then a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote Teller.26 The hearing on Oppenheimer’s security clearance before the AEC Personnel Security Board, chaired by Gordon Gray, presented such a rich and fascinating

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window on modern American science and politics that it has attracted the attention of various scholars from historians to dramatists. Among the many issues it highlighted was one that has been central in the history of American science advising: the boundary between the technical and the political that defined the proper role of scientists as government advisors. Oppenheimer was attacked not only for giving “wrong” advice on matters such as the hydrogen bomb, but for giving such advice at all. “Why you felt it was your function as a scientist to express views on military strategy and tactics,” Roger Robb, the government’s chief “prosecuting” counsel, demanded of Oppenheimer repeatedly in the hearing. Initially, Oppenheimer addressed this issue by retreating to the position of his wartime panel report that scientists were not especially qualified to answer nontechnical question. However, cornered later in the hearing, Oppenheimer boldly declared that: “having played an active part in promoting a revolution in warfare, I needed to be as responsible as I could with regard to what came of this revolution.” The rationale was no longer that scientists had special knowledge, as the Franck group emphasized, but that they had a special responsibility. It reflected a growing sense of political activism of scientists collectively as well as individually in the postwar period, although it did not convince either Robb or apparently the Gray Board.27 A number of Oppenheimer’s close friends on and off the ODM-SAC spoke before the board not only for reinstating his clearance but also for a science adviser’s right to venture beyond the technical and render unpopular policy advice.28 Bush challenged directly the AEC’s H-bomb charge against Oppenheimer: “I think this board or no board should ever sit on a question in this country of whether a man should serve his country or not because he expressed strong opinions.” He feared that the scientists–state partnership he “labored to create during the war” was now “in jeopardy.”29 Rabi warned implicitly that the case could have repercussions on scientists working for the government. Speaking of Oppenheimer’s contribution to the atomic bomb project, he told the Gray Board that “If the end of that road is this kind of hearing, which can’t help but be humiliating, I thought that it was pretty bad show.”30 Not surprisingly, Strauss’s scientists—Edward Teller, Luis Alvarez, and Kenneth Pitzer of the University of California—testified against Oppenheimer.31 Teller’s testimony was widely regarded as the most damaging to Oppenheimer, whose actions appeared “confused and complicated” to him: “To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more.”32 In May 1954 the Gray Board, by a vote of two to one, confirmed Eisenhower’s initial judgment by finding Oppenheimer a loyal citizen but a security risk, and thus recommended against reinstating his clearance. The judgment was based largely, and, to many scientists, dangerously, on his failure to “show the enthusiastic support” for the H-bomb program and for moving beyond the technical and into moral and political realms. Echoing Robb, the board cautioned against “advice of specialists relating to moral, military and political issues” and “judgments which go beyond areas of special and particular competence.” The board

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then promptly did the latter by endorsing the view that “this country cannot in the interest of security have less than the strongest possible offensive capabilities in a time of national danger.” Such an incredibly narrow definition of national security—and scientists’ role in policy—drew not only rebuttal from Oppenheimer—“Does this mean that a loyal scientist called to advise his Government does so at his peril if he happens to believe in the wisdom of maintaining a proper balance between offensive and defensive weapons?”—but also from other scientists such as Bush, who argued that “Scientists need to be used not as lackeys or underlings but as partners in a great endeavor to preserve our freedoms.” This debate made it clear that the Oppenheimer case was as much about scientists’ role in policy, and thus a sequel to the 1953 Bush–DuBridge clash with Cutler about science advising, as it was about the security system. The views of the Gray Board, if anything, reflected widespread public and official skepticism toward scientists’ participation in public affairs.33 Outraged by the verdict, the ODM-SAC made a desperate last attempt to help Oppenheimer. On June 4, DuBridge wrote Strauss to request the restoration of Oppenheimer’s clearance so that he could participate in the ODM-SAC’s president-commissioned study on surprise attack: “His value is . . . so enormous as to completely over-balance and override the relatively trivial risks” cited by the Gray Board. On the eve of the AEC’s own decision on the matter, Rabi wrote Strauss a personal note: “may the wisdom of Solomon and the judgment of Hillel [Jewish leader who liberally interpreted Hebrew Scripture] guide your decision.”34 All these efforts were in vain. Kenneth D. Nichols, general manager of the AEC, who also recommended against Oppenheimer, countered DuBridge’s assertion by claiming that the ODM-SAC did not know the secret evidence against Oppenheimer and that Oppenheimer was “far from being indispensable” to national security programs. In late June, the AEC, led by Strauss, found Oppenheimer a security risk and formally denied Oppenheimer’s clearance in a four-to-one decision, with the dissenting vote cast by the sole scientist-commissioner, Henry Smyth. Recognizing that it could not “convict” Oppenheimer for his opinion, the AEC cited instead Oppenheimer’s character and association as grounds for denial of clearance.35 In retrospect, the Science Advisory Committee’s utter failure in the Oppenheimer case seemed inevitable. Given its own shaky foundation and the general ineptness of institutional response to McCarthyism in the era, the committee had little space to maneuver.36 No one in the committee suggested mass resignation, nor would it have been helpful to Oppenheimer. Yet, despite all the restraints on the ODM-SAC, one wonders why it failed to protest the Oppenheimer case and other similar cases directly to President Eisenhower, as it was authorized to do by its revised charter. The committee did meet with Eisenhower in March 1954, but this subject apparently never came up. Conant also personally protested the Oppenheimer case to Eisenhower as an unfair punishment for his advice on the H-bomb, but it hardly changed the president’s mind. Ironically, Eisenhower called on none other than Strauss for help in drafting a letter to Conant answering his charge.37

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The Oppenheimer case evoked a vehement protest from the scientific community, which generally blamed the injustice on a paranoid security system.38 It marked a profound deterioration in the relationship between American science and the national security state. The far-reaching repercussions did not escape top government officials. Eisenhower had approved Oppenheimer’s removal because he questioned Oppenheimer’s conduct and believed the Gray Board’s allegation that Oppenheimer had attempted to obstruct the hydrogen bomb program even after Truman made the decision to go ahead. Nevertheless, Eisenhower worried about the case’s effect on scientists in various defense projects. A telegram from the AEC’s Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory, protesting the Oppenheimer case and carrying the signatures of 500 scientists and engineers, surely did not ease Eisenhower’s mind.39 As Gordon Dean, the second AEC chairman who had retired in 1953, told Lilienthal, “[t]he Oppenheimer case—the way it was initiated, the way it was handled, the incredible report of the Gray Board—all put together make them [scientists] sad, angry, and disenchanted.”40 Aware of the case’s potentially explosive impact on scientists and dangerous exploitation by McCarthy, Eisenhower told his aides that “we’ve got to handle this so that all our scientists are not made to be Reds.”41 Remarkably, Eisenhower even suggested a means of damage control to Strauss: “Why do we not get Dr. Oppenheimer interested in desalting sea water? I can think of no scientific success of all time that would equal this in its boon to mankind.”42 Because he was “so acutely conscious of the great contributions the scientists of our country have made to our security and welfare,” Eisenhower claimed privately that he shared the hope that Oppenheimer could be cleared.43 It was to the president’s and the AEC’s relief, that the “mass exodus” from weapons laboratories that had been predicted by the ODM-SAC and the AEC’s GAC failed to materialize in the wake of the Oppenheimer case.44 For many, the Oppenheimer case has remained a classic example of the confl ict between the values of science and the state. Just as Oppenheimer’s “candor” campaign and support of the export of radioisotopes for scientific research embodied the open and international nature of science, Strauss’s opposition to both and his instigation of illegal FBI wiretaps on Oppenheimer showed the closed, secretive, and to Oppenheimer’s many supporters, repressive nature of the state. The failure of the ODM-SAC to exert any infl uence in protecting Oppenheimer added an especially sad and revealing note about the Cold War science–state relationship. In the wake of the case, a deep division would develop within the American scientific community between the majority who supported Oppenheimer and the minority who sided with Teller, and would cast a long shadow on the representation of science in policy for decades to come.45 Another legacy of the case was a deepening suspicion of scientists in public affairs. Questioning scientists’ role in policymaking, as we have seen, did not start with the Oppenheimer case, but the controversy did powerfully reinforce that message. Although not every scientist would accept, as historians Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin believed, that now “they could serve the state only as experts on narrow scientific issues,” the

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case undoubtedly made many think twice before venturing outside of their field and into policy issues.46 Yet, to see the science–state relationship after the Oppenheimer case as one of conflict ignores the other, cooperative side of the coin. After all, the American scientific enterprise remained dependent on military patronage, and, for all their misgivings, leading American scientists were committed to working for national security. Both Stalinism and McCarthyism weighed on their minds—they were fighting “two Joes.” Individually, an excommunication from the national security state meant exile from not only policymaking but possibly one’s science as well, when so much of it required access to classified information.47 Even Oppenheimer, with perhaps the exception of the H-bomb debate on which his stand was strongly influenced by Conant, remained supportive of American Cold War policy in general.48 Thus, both justified on the collective good and based on private necessity, most American public scientists continued to prefer the “insider” approach for exerting influence on national security policy. As the nuclear arms race reached a turning point in 1953 and 1954, neither could the national security state, as indicated by Eisenhower’s “Reds” comment, afford to alienate the technical manpower it needed. The interdependence between the scientists and the state ensured that their partnership would survive the Oppenheimer case.

The TCP Study of Surprise Attack One major effort to exert scientific infl uence on national security policy was a massive investigation on surprise attacks conducted by the so-called Technological Capabilities Panel (TCP) of the ODM-SAC. This study coincidentally—or perhaps not so coincidentally—began at the same time as the Oppenheimer case. The direct impetus for the TCP came from two sources: Trevor Gardner, then an assistant to the secretary of the Air Force, who pushed the ODM-SAC to support his proposal for a crash program to develop a thermonuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), and, in quite the opposite direction, Rabi, who saw this turning point in nuclear weapons as another opportunity to promote arms control.49 At ODM-SAC meetings, Rabi, who also chaired the GAC at the time, argued that a new thermonuclear arms race would favor the closed Soviet system, diminish American security, and threaten to ruin American democratic institutions. Thus, with different goals in mind, both Rabi and Gardner called for a high-level NSC study on science and national security.50 After heated discussions—some members thought Rabi’s proposal was too much a challenge of the “New Look” defense policy of relying on nuclear weapons—the ODM-SAC decided to recommend such a study to the White House.51 On March 27, 1954, Flemming arranged the committee’s first meeting with President Eisenhower (see Figure 4.1). Coming when the administration was preparing its case against Oppenheimer and when Eisenhower was worried about the case’s impact on American scientists, the meeting provided him a welcome opportunity to express his enthusiasm for the scientists’ work. Specifically, he directed the

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Figure 4.1 President Eisenhower meeting with the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization, 1954. Left to right, seated: Arthur Flemming, Eisenhower, Lee DuBridge, I. I. Rabi; standing: Emanuel Piore, Oliver Buckley, Alan Waterman, James Fisk, Detlev Bronk, Bruce S. Old, James Killian, David Beckler, Robert Bacher, Jerrold Zacharias, and Charles Lauritsen. Courtesy of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library.

group to conduct a study on the problem of surprise attack, which had long concerned him and which, he feared, echoing Rabi, worked better for the closed Soviet Union than the open United States.52 The ODM-SAC accepted the assignment but, in drawing up the terms of reference, actually broadened it and brought it closer to its original proposal for a “comprehensive examination” of U.S. technological and military capabilities. From past experiences, ODM-SAC scientists had learned that restricting themselves to narrow technical issues often led to unsatisfactory results. Beyond the question of feasibility—Can you do it?—were issues of practicality and desirability—Do you want to do it?—as Jerrold Zacharias, who recruited members for the TCP, put it in reference to an earlier study on the nuclear-powered airplane.53 Like Jewett, the Franck Committee, and GAC members before them, ODM-SAC scientists believed that it was essential to move beyond technical details to explore policy implications and to move beyond the question of the means to that of the end. Not radicals, the ODM-SAC scientists did not question the overall American Cold War objective of countering Soviet threat, but neither did they want to be treated as mere technicians solving a narrow technical problem. Thus the committee’s proposal ventured into policy as well as technical areas, identifying continental defense, offensive power, and intelligence as three areas vital to the prevention of surprise attacks.54

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The ODM-SAC was well positioned to sponsor the study. Several of its members had participated in or organized relevant summer studies in the past related to these three areas. Furthermore, the full ODM-SAC, as a hub of the vast science advisory network to the national security state, had held numerous discussions and briefings on these topics. Besides strengthening American defense, the committee hoped, perhaps with the Oppenheimer case in mind, that the study would “provide a better relationship between government and the scientific community.”55 Despite his earlier qualms about scientists getting into policy, Eisenhower approved the revised plan. The committee soon established the special TCP panel, with Killian as director and Fisk as deputy director.56 As the TCP started to recruit panel members, it immediately felt the fallout from the Oppenheimer case. Dale Corson, a prominent nuclear physicist at Cornell who had participated in Project Vista, cited the hostility toward scientists venturing beyond purely technical issues in explaining his decision not to join the TCP. He had first experienced such hostility personally in Project Vista, he told Zacharias, and then, indirectly but more strikingly, in the Oppenheimer case: I have read almost all the 992 pages of the Oppenheimer hearing and all through that there runs an official suggestion that people are advising the government on problems outside their fields of competence. I feel that this criticism could well be leveled at me. . . . [Thus] I would not participate in any other projects except on direct appeal by some high official of the defense department.57

Another physicist, A. E. Whitford of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, also declined to join the Killian panel in favor of “astronomy-as-usual,” mainly because “I want to be freer to think my own thoughts and to campaign on the political front than one committed to highly classified work is now apparently permitted to be.”58 Luckily for the TCP, Corson and Whitford proved a minority among those contacted; most responded with enthusiasm for the project. Despite their misgivings about the Oppenheimer case, moderate American scientists saw the Killian panel as an opportunity for them to contribute to national security, to preserve their infl uence, and possibly to slow the arms race. In total, about forty scientists, engineers, and military and civilian administrators from universities, industries, the Rand Corporation, and the armed services participated in the study, from which would emerge several future PSAC members. Whereas most advisory committees met only periodically, the Killian panel actually worked full time from September 1954 to February 1955.59 The presidential commission facilitated cooperation from the defense establishment and the study proceeded with remarkable speed. By November 1954, the TCP began to brief Eisenhower on some of its key findings. The climax of the project came on February 14, 1955, when the panel presented its report on “Meeting the Threat of Surprise Attack” to the NSC. At the heart of the report was a sobering time table of the likely course of the nuclear arms race. For several years in the mid-1950s, the panel predicted, the United States would keep its offensive advantage over the Soviet Union, but both sides would be vulnerable to surprise

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attacks. Approaching the end of the decade, both would improve defense but the United States would enjoy its greatest offensive advantage. Repeating Rabi’s earlier suggestion, the panel urged “political moves and diplomatic negotiations” in this period to reach arms control agreements, thereby freezing the American military edge. If this window of opportunity was lost, the consequences could be catastrophic. Both sides would develop massive thermonuclear ICBMs in the early 1960s, and after the mid-1960s, “an attack by either side would result in mutual destruction.” At that time, improved defense, early warning, or even surprise attack would not matter much. Based on this grim preview of the nuclear age, the panel made both strategic and tactical recommendations. To prevent a surprise attack and to prepare for a future without a nuclear thaw, the panel urged that the United States develop the ICBM as the highest priority, followed by measures to protect bomber bases, build up continental defense, expand early warning systems, and improve the overseas communications networks. The panel also recommended a crash program to develop intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBM), both land and submarine based, and, strangely, even two programs that had met with skepticism from ODM-SAC in the past and would again come in for criticism by PSAC in the future: the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion project and an intensified campaign for civil defense. Dissatisfaction with the massive retaliation strategy led the panel to advocate development of tactical fission bombs for use in limited wars—confl icts that did not directly involve the superpowers.60 The most secret section of the TCP report, fully declassified only in 1997, dealt with intelligence, the “first defense against surprise attack.” It was drafted by the so-called Project 3 group, which included three future PSAC members: Edwin “Din” Land of Polaroid as director, Edward Purcell, professor of physics at Harvard, and John W. Tukey, a statistician at Princeton. Acknowledging that the “brutally effective” Soviet security system had frustrated human intelligence gathering, the Project 3 group urged a shift to innovative technical approaches. “Indeed, the really cute tricks are those so close to the frontier of scientific knowledge that they remain unsuspected for months or even for years,” it noted. In an “Eyes Only” appendix to its report, the TCP proposed such a “trick”—a program of aerial photography with a plane that eventually became known as the U-2. Flying at a height of about 70,000 feet, the Lockheed-made glider would not only be beyond Soviet interception, but also “have a good chance of avoiding detection” for a few years, Land assured Allen Dulles, director of central intelligence. “No proposal or program that we have seen in intelligence planning can so quickly bring so much vital information at so little risk and at so little cost,” Land enthused.61 In early November 1954, Killian and Land presented the U-2 proposal to the president who, after asking “many hard questions,” approved it with the condition that it be operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), not the Air Force, to reduce provocation to the Soviet Union.62 Besides the U-2, the report recommended other ways to “increase the number of hard facts” and “to reduce the danger of gross overestimation or gross

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underestimation of the threat.” For example, the Land group pushed for the initiation “at once” of a program of intelligence operation in the North Pole region. It also urged the “immediate” start of a program to launch a small satellite before the development of a full-featured reconnaissance vehicle. Although not a carrier of reconnaissance operation itself, the small satellite was expected to serve four important purposes: it would gather information on the upper atmosphere and the shape of the earth; work as a possible communication reflector; win international prestige for the United States; and, most interestingly, “explore or establish the principle that space, outside our atmosphere, is open to all.” The last justification confirmed long-held suspicions by historians that the U.S. scientific satellite program was designed from the beginning to serve primarily not scientific interests, but the political purpose of legitimizing reconnaissance satellites. On July 28, 1955, a few months after the presentation of the Killian report, the White House announced the president’s approval for a program to launch “small, earth-circling satellites” as the U.S. contribution to the International Geophysical Year.63 The Killian TCP report has been widely hailed as one of the most infl uential documents of the nuclear age and the Cold War. It greatly accelerated ballistic missile development in America and led to vastly improved intelligence-gathering capabilities. The TCP-inspired Polaris missiles, U-2, and reconnaissance satellites played crucial roles in stabilizing the arms race.64 In addition, the TCP study did much to restore the scientists’ and the government’s confidence in each other. To Eisenhower, the TCP provided evidence that “many dedicated scientists have gladly devoted their talents to government service” following the divisive Oppenheimer case.65 The TCP study also reflected much credit on ODM-SAC, despite the panel’s largely autonomous status as an NSC task force. When the Sputnik crisis came in 1957, perhaps more than anything else it was the memory of the TCP that prompted Eisenhower to appoint Killian his science adviser and to upgrade the ODM-SAC into the White House.66 The very success of the TCP investigation, however, also raised disturbing questions about the relationship between science and the national security state. If the Oppenheimer case bode ill for scientists who gave advice unwelcome to the national security establishment, did not the warm reception of the TCP seem a reward for those who in effect argued for a great, although perhaps justified, arms buildup? Did not both convey the message that science and scientific advice advanced only within the framework of the national security state? In the end, as historian Daniel Kevles points out, the study reflected more Gardner’s push for a military-technological buildup than Rabi’s concern for the need to arrest the nuclear arms race.67 The TCP report did emphasize arms control, but the message appeared lost in the sea of proposed new weapon systems. Even Eisenhower became troubled by the report’s effects on the arms race. During a 1956 NSC discussion on the implementation of the TCP report, he commented, “with a smile,” that “every new survey of our problems by a scientific team seemed to result in recommendations that we undertake additional things.” He rather

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wished that “we could find a team which would recommend programs which we could dispense with.”68 Undoubtedly, TCP members regarded their recommendations as necessary measures to counter Soviet aggression in the Cold War, especially after the outbreak of the Korean War, but such rationalization was complicated by the almost total dependence of American scientists on military funds for their research in this period. What effect this support had on scientists’ incentive to work on national security problems, and even to perpetuate the arms race, is hard to ascertain and might well have varied from one scientist to another. Killian and Fisk were respected for their integrity and the question of confl ict of interest never arose because the TCP study they directed did not make specific contracts or grants. Nevertheless, their respective institutions, MIT and Bell Labs, were the U.S. government’s two largest contractors on military R&D and would obviously profit from a TCP-inspired arms buildup. After all, MIT had earlier agreed to undertake summer studies for the military partly on the promise that these studies would “make MIT a world center in the field of electronics” and “help [its] Lincoln Laboratory’s growth.”69 Institutional self-interest played a significant role in science advising. Indeed, throughout the McCarthy era, as discussed later, American scientists were as much concerned with ensuring a stable and generous science policy (i.e., support of science) on the part of the government, especially the military, as they were with incorporating science into national security policy.

Science Policy Debate Ambivalence characterized Eisenhower’s pre-Sputnik attitude toward scientists’ participation not only in “science in policy” but also in “policy for science.” In his first term as president, Eisenhower earned admiration from scientists for his dramatic Atoms for Peace proposal in 1953 and for his warm public endorsement in 1954 of the International Geophysical Year as a model of peaceful international cooperation in science—although we now know that he also intended it as a cover for American space reconnaissance.70 However, as the first Republican president in twenty years, Eisenhower, along with the Republican-dominated Congress, also vowed to undo the “paternalistic state” of the New Deal and to cut federal spending.71 In defense policy, the administration sought to achieve “economy” by reducing military R&D by 25 percent in 1953, with significant impact on funding for scientific research. To add insult to injury, Secretary of Defense Charles Erwin Wilson, a former chairman of General Motors, publicly denigrated basic research, calling it an activity that “could not be of any possible use to the people who put up the money for it.”72 Related to this economy drive, the powerful BOB, as the president’s housekeeper, attempted to centralize federal science policy. Specifically, the BOB sought in 1953 to get the reluctant NSF to exercise its statutory role in making federal science policy through the issuance of two new presidential executive orders. One would make NSF, then spending only 3.5 percent of all federal funds for basic research, a “primary agency” in the field by gradually transferring to it basic

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research funds from other agencies. Another order would authorize it explicitly to evaluate other agencies’ R&D programs.73 Still cautious, the NSF was nevertheless tempted by the chance for growth and by the prospect of the demilitarization of American science.74 Scientists represented in the ODM-SAC, however, thought otherwise, as did affected science administrators in government outside of the NSF. Their opposition to the BOB’s move opened the first major debate over science policy in the Eisenhower years. If the Pentagon and the AEC abandoned basic research, the scientists doubted, rightly, that Congress would ever allow the NSF to pick up the balance. Scientists also preferred non-NSF funding agencies for their more generous overhead allowances. For their parts, science administrators, especially at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the AEC, resisted any cuts in their budgets.75 As William Golden learned in 1950, the agencies saw basic research as not only being relevant to their missions, but also as a bargaining chip with the universities, which would do classified research in exchange for support for basic research.76 The ODM-SAC, as the highest ranking scientific advisory group in the federal government, led the scientists’ campaign to keep the Pentagon funding science. Dominated by academic scientific administrators, the committee had much at stake in the debate. As DuBridge wrote Flemming on August 12, 1953, his own Cal Tech “would go broke promptly” if all its basic research funds were transferred from the DOD and AEC to the NSF, presumably due to a lower overhead allowance.77 The urgency of the matter was further underscored by a 40 percent cut in ONR funding for Rabi’s own laboratory at Columbia.78 In his appeal to DuBridge for help, Seitz, who chaired the military’s Joint Service Advisory Panel on Solid State Physics, called the pressure for the military to withdraw from science “almost subversive.”79 Quickly DuBridge brought the ODM-SAC into the fray, and in so doing, formally expanded the scope of science advising beyond science in policy and into policy for science. DuBridge justified the committee’s new role by the need to maintain a “virile” scientific community as part of the national security resources.80 His specific argument for keeping the military funding science represented an adaptation of the 1945 Bush report to the postwar reality of a pluralistic but military-dominated system of federal science funding. Like Bush, DuBridge sought to base American science policy on setting a clear boundary between science, or basic research, on the one hand, and technology, or applied research and development, on the other. Even more than Bush, DuBridge broadened the definition of basic research. It included not only the “search for knowledge” carried out for its own sake or for unforeseen applications, but also that undertaken “because it clearly would be useful in some particular area of activity.” Like Bush, DuBridge called for preferential treatment of basic research and those scientists engaged in it: It is basic research which leads to the new discoveries in science and it is basic research which makes the heaviest demands upon the ingenuity and creativeness of the scientists. For this reason scientists engaged in basic research must be given utmost freedom in carrying on their studies.81

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In contrast to basic research, DuBridge defined applied research as research aimed at a specific goal such as a new weapon system, a new drug, or a new product, and interpreted development as industrial design and building of prototype hardware. Agreeing with the Eisenhower administration that the latter were expensive and could be usefully centralized to avoid duplication and waste, DuBridge emphasized that basic research was self-regulating and ill-suited to centralization.82 As another departure from the Bush report, the DuBridge committee tried to position the academic scientific community both as a strategically important part of the national security state and as a deserving interest group in the welfare state. Responding to those who criticized federal support of basic research as a subsidy to the universities, DuBridge declared that “in a sense such support is a subsidy,” an acknowledgment that would have delighted those left-liberal scientists who had advocated distribution of federal science funds on a geographical basis. DuBridge went on to argue that universities deserved special support because of their critical role in basic research and the training of technical manpower, both being “vital to public welfare and national security.”83 Thus the universities contributed to the American Cold War efforts not only a reservoir of knowledge for future weapons development, but also a scientific community in reserve, ready to man the applied research laboratories in an emergency: The Science Advisory Committee suggests that the Office of Defense Mobilization should regard it as a part of its mobilization planning to make sure that the general scientific strength of the country is maintained and improved. From this general scientific strength must come the knowledge and the men to be used in case of national emergency. As we require stockpiles of aluminum and of uranium and of certain production facilities, so even more, must we “stockpile” scientific resources—for they cannot be created suddenly.84

With this concept of the university as a technical reserve for national security, DuBridge sought to align the science advisers’ institutional self-interest with the broad national interest. Reflecting the new, pluralistic reality in science policy, the DuBridge argument diverged most strikingly from the Bush report in that it tried to justify support of science not just by the NSF, but also by the DOD and AEC. Even as the DuBridge committee recommended that the federal government increase its support of science, from $75 million to $100 million for academic science, it explicitly rejected any effort to centralize science funding or policy in the NSF. “The nation’s scientific program requires that the Foundation undertake activities in addition to others now in progress,” DuBridge wrote. “[T]he diversity of support provided when several agencies are active is a valuable asset.”85 Such a pluralistic structure of science support was good not only for the scientists but also for the agencies themselves, which needed both knowledge and, especially for the military services, “direct and friendly contacts with scientists.”86 Here, DuBridge’s emphasis on the utility of basic research fit into the articulation of what emerged as “mission-oriented basic research.”87 His “keeping in touch with scientists” argument was relatively new and

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would become increasingly important in scientists’ justification of military funding of science. The embracing of pluralism, however, represented a significant break in the search for a central scientific organization that historian A. Hunter Dupree identified in his survey of the history of science in the federal government before World War II. A further revision from the Bush report took place when DuBridge and his colleagues suggested that basic research could serve not only as the fountainhead of technological progress, as Bush had argued, but also as a possible remedy to the ills created by unwise technological enthusiasm. At a meeting with Bush, Robert Cutler, and others in May 1953, DuBridge had already contended that whereas research cost little money and was well managed, development cost much more and showed “mismanagement.” It was not always industry’s fault, he explained later in a follow-up letter to Cutler: The trouble comes in military planning: what weapons or equipment should industry be asked to design? Too often, most any idea for a new gadget—if an enthusiast is behind it—results in an expensive contract. Sometimes the technical feasibility is not properly examined first; more often the military need or use for the device is not examined at all.88

DuBridge did not name any specific project, but he could have pointed to the nuclearpowered airplane that Zacharias had criticized. What should be done? DuBridge made a case for basic research in solving ill-defined development projects: The conclusion is this: Let us not slice “R&D” funds blindly; let us do better military planning so that R and D effort will not be wasted on useless projects. The new organization plan for the Department of Defense should improve this situation. I hope the research funds for such agencies as the Science Foundation, the Public Health Service, the Office of the Naval Research, etc. will be increased not decreased.89

Like keeping in touch with scientists, this justification of basic research as a way to prevent technological blind alleys or as an antidote to technological excess marked another important revision to the Bush’s assembly-line model. Like the ODM-SAC’s Princeton report, the DuBridge appeal formed an important part of scientists’ technological skepticism, and represented a move in public science by linking policy for science with science in policy. What motivated DuBridge to justify basic research as a possible cure for developmental problems was not just that he knew the latter to be of paramount concern to the Eisenhower administration. It also derived from the fact that Bush’s assembly-line model of science producing practical technologies was not as forceful in 1953 as it had been in 1945. There had simply been too few examples of striking new weapons to come out of postwar research. The semiconductor and the laser would not appear and bear fruit until a few years later. Remarkably, and unbeknownst to the scientists, they had an ally in the White House who not only accepted their basic–applied boundary, but was sympathetic

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to their promotion of basic research. On May 23, 1953, President Eisenhower wrote Wilson, his science-bashing, headline-making secretary of defense: I think I have forgotten to tell you about my great interest in what we call basic research. I think we probably overdo what is generally called development research, but in the basic research largely conducted in industrial establishments and our universities I think we have been doing a good job. Since a relatively small amount of money is involved, I should hate to see this contracted or much damaged. If we have planned to cut this particular part of our research program seriously, will you let me know?90

Although expressed privately, the note was one of the earliest and clearest presidential statements favoring federal support of basic research as compared to applied research and development. Subsequent administrations, even those of his Republican successors who objected to government’s involvement in civilian technology, would endorse federal funding of basic research in principle. Eisenhower’s experience of working with scientists during World War II and during his presidency at Columbia must have contributed to his understanding of such fine points of science policy. Unfortunately for American public scientists, neither the president’s caution nor DuBridge’s protestation seemed to deter Wilson from ordering an across-the-board reduction in military R&D. Nevertheless, the strong opposition to the BOB’s plan and Eisenhower’s own sympathy toward basic research did make it necessary for all to compromise on the issue of centralizing science funding. Interestingly, the DOD, if not the individual armed services, decided to give up general-purpose, or “pure,” basic research that was not related to its mission, which totaled about $3 million, a mere fraction of its basic research funds, if only to stop the BOB from “heckling” it on the subject. To the relief of the ODM-SAC, the DOD promised DuBridge that it would not abandon “mission-related” basic research.91 On March 17, 1954, President Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10521, which designated the NSF to be “increasingly responsible” for federal support of general-purpose basic research, instead of the “primary agency” as preferred by the NSF. Most important, and a victory for the ODM-SAC, the order deemed “important and desirable” that other agencies conduct and support “mission-oriented” basic research, thus legitimizing the postwar structure of pluralistic science funding. To the scientists’ further delight, a presidential statement accompanying the order called for increased support of basic research, which marked the end of the first debate on science policy in the Eisenhower administration.92 Thanks to the prestige of the scientists, Eisenhower’s sympathy for basic research, and, perhaps most important, the lull in military technology spending before the onslaught of the missile program that the TCP would set in place, DuBridge and his colleagues in the ODM-SAC successfully defended and even updated the Bush doctrine of basic research for the Cold War. The episode also demonstrates that, contrary to some earlier studies of the ODM-SAC, the committee did not just focus on science in policy but participated actively in the debate over the funding of science.93

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The Second Science Policy Debate As much as the executive order pleased the scientists, it clearly fell short of the BOB’s aim of establishing a science policy mechanism to control expenditure. The bureau continued to nag the NSF about its responsibility to regulate other agencies’ programs.94 By 1956, the top echelon in the BOB returned to the “runaway horse” of federal R&D. After a few flat budgets at $3.6 billion between 1953 and 1955, the federal R&D expenditure jumped to $4.1 billion in 1956, $5 billion in 1957, and then to an expected $6.6 billion by 1958.95 Although most of the growth derived from the missile and nuclear projects, basic research funds also rose rapidly. In late 1955, for example, the NSF, aided by the ODM-SAC, won a budget increase from $16 million for FY 1956 to $40 million for FY 1957, much of which went for capital grants to improve scientific instruments.96 At a high-level meeting in the BOB on October 2, 1956, William Carey, a key staff member on science policy, became restless: “Must the government accept the fact that the scientists call the tune?”97 In 1956, the BOB’s mounting concern over federal R&D spending began to receive sympathetic hearings from the president himself. His earlier support for basic research was now replaced with worries about a budget deficit, the expansion of the federal government, and the militarization of American science and society.98 By mid-1956, Eisenhower decided to curtail the technology-driven growth of big government on several fronts. He directed the Pentagon to cut the military R&D budget, and ordered reviews of several big defense projects, especially the nuclear-powered aircraft, with a view toward its cancellation. On July 31, 1956, he directed a willing Wilson to “go ahead and squeeze” the DOD’s R&D in its FY 1958 budget.99 Notwithstanding his early enthusiasm for the International Geophysical Year satellite program, Eisenhower in 1956 and 1957 frowned at its mushrooming cost and, on the instigation of Wilson, refused to give it highest national priority. At an NSC meeting, he also rejected the ODM-SAC’s recommendation to increase the number of launching vehicles from six to twelve to ensure a successful satellite within the International Geophysical Year ( July 1957–December 1958). The committee’s prescient warning that an American failure and Soviet success in this field “would result in loss of U.S. scientific prestige” went unheeded.100 Eisenhower also ordered a general review of federal support for R&D. At a cabinet meeting on March 11, 1957, Eisenhower criticized “the tendency of Government in recent years to supply whatever funds might be requested for research” and expressed his “long-time feeling” that “basic research was a university rather than a governmental responsibility.” He urged federal departments, especially the Pentagon, to “get better control over the matter.”101 Thus started the second major science policy debate of the Eisenhower administration on the eve of Sputnik. The renewed threat of DOD withdrawal from basic research alarmed the ODMSAC, now under Rabi’s chairmanship.102 Believing that this was yet another ploy by Wilson to eliminate basic research funding, the committee met with Eisenhower on March 29, 1957, to appeal for his intervention. At the meeting, Rabi deplored the military’s narrow focus on weapons at the expense of basic research as shortsighted and self-defeating. Moving even further than the DuBridge doctrine in 1953–

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1954, Rabi’s argument emphasized both the “keeping in touch with scientists” and “basic research as an antidote to problematic technologies” justifications of military funding of science. If the military did not fund basic research, it would lose contact with scientists and new scientific progress and would pour money into expensive and obsolete weapon systems. Thus the government should support basic research not merely or even primarily to derive ideas for new military technologies, but to ensure the functioning of a robust system of technological evaluation.103 Reflecting their respective positions as a laboratory director and a university president, Rabi’s argument differed from DuBridge’s arguments in a subtle but important way. Instead of arguing how important federal support was to the universities and how universities were important to national security, as DuBridge did, Rabi pointed to the military’s direct self-interest in basic research and in keeping in touch with the scientific community. Even though DuBridge had mentioned implicitly the function of basic research as a solution to technological blind alleys in the first debate over science policy, Rabi now made it the central argument for federal support of science. Rabi’s argument also differed from those scientists who, like John Wheeler of Princeton, regarded the military as a more powerful patron. “The National Science Foundation,” Wheeler lamented, “doesn’t seem to have the political power it takes to live a safe life in Washington.”104 In contrast, Rabi argued that the military needed to fund science not for science’s sake, but for the military’s own sake. Although sympathetic, Eisenhower was not entirely convinced by Rabi’s argument. He reiterated that he accepted the importance of basic research but he objected to its monopoly by the military. After all, science, he said, “has a wider purpose than weapons alone,” foreshadowing his farewell address warning against militarization four years later.105 He knew firsthand the effects of the invasion of military secrecy on campus when he was president of Columbia: he would have been prevented from knowing the detail of some research projects had he not had full clearance due to his prior military background.106 To avoid federal control of science, he now requested from the ODM-SAC “a simple set of yardsticks” to decide “the dividing line between the efforts that should fall to the government and those that should fall to universities and industry.” He also wanted the committee to advise him on the right balance between research and development. Eisenhower’s deceptively simple requests pointed to the central questions of American science policy: What was the proper role of the federal government in the support of American science and technology? How much should it spend on science and how much on technology? On these questions, the scientists’ answers did not completely satisfy him. Rabi and his colleagues claimed that government support had not infringed on scientific freedom, but Eisenhower did not seem convinced. As to the “yardsticks,” Rabi concluded that the best gauge for determining the national scientific effort was “the manpower available for basic research” and that the lion’s share of funding had to come from the federal government. In other words, Rabi was asking for a blank check: the federal government should provide as much funds as needed to support all the available scientists and engineers

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capable of conducting research. It might have been a workable, if generous, policy but for the fact that the same federal funds were often used to increase the pool of scientific manpower as well. At times, the president and the scientists seemed to talk past each other. Part of the difficulty in this dialog derived from Rabi’s failure to clarify for Eisenhower that even when a research project was carried out in the university or an industrial lab it was most likely funded by the government. For his part Eisenhower never made it clear to the scientists that it was he, not Wilson, who had instigated this new round of DOD retrenchment in research. In a letter to Gordon Gray, who was then ODM director, following the White House meeting, Rabi denounced the budget cut as “a dangerous fallacy.” He asked Eisenhower to order the DOD to reverse its policy. As in the 1953 debate, the committee recommended an increase in basic research.107 Meanwhile, in response to Eisenhower’s repeated comments, the BOB and the NSF conducted a joint study on federal research programs and presented it to the Cabinet meeting on August 2, 1957. After Percival Brundage, BOB director, gave a survey of the upward trend in R&D spending, Waterman made his case for increasing, rather than decreasing, federal support of basic research. Basic research, he said, constituted only 3 percent of the total R&D expenditure and could pay for itself if done on a broad scale.108 Gordon Gray then cited the ODM-SAC paper to support Waterman’s request for an increase in basic research. Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks likewise sided with Waterman after securing the latter’s endorsement for an expansion of the “science of measurement” in the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in his department. When Wilson attacked basic research as reaching “a point of extremely diminishing return,” Weeks, who himself had clashed with scientists earlier in a controversy over the NBS, rebutted that in research “the end is never reached.” The scientists’ arguments somewhat muted President Eisenhower’s objection to government’s role in basic research. As if just suddenly remembering his 1953 memo for Wilson, he noted during Waterman’s presentation that the procurement took much more money than basic research. He subsequently approved a Cabinet policy paper that directed the federal government to curtail R&D in general but continue to support basic research, even at a slightly higher level.109 So in theory, the scientists succeeded, once again, in holding the line on the issue of military support of academic basic research by demarcating between basic and applied research. In practice, however, the result of the second science policy debate turned out very differently from the first one, largely because the DOD chose to implement the new policy in a way that ignored the boundary set by the scientists. When Wilson ordered, on August 7, 1957, a 10 percent reduction in military R&D, the military services chose to sacrifice basic research first and foremost. The same kind of thinking that had caused General Wilson to equate Oppenheimer’s advocacy of basic research with subversion now led the Air Force to slash basic research funds. Predictably, uproar ensued among universities as the Pentagon canceled numerous academic contracts and halted research projects on short notice.110 A number of universities reportedly “swore never again to have any

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dealings with the Air Force in peace time.”111 Speaking before a group of industrial chemists, Killian held the capricious policies of the DOD responsible for a crisis in basic research in the face of a rising Soviet challenge.112 Science administrators in the DOD warned that not only vital defense research would be lost, but “irreparable damage will be done to the excellent Defense–research scientist relationship built up during the past decade.” The Defense Science Board, consisting of mostly academic science advisers to the Pentagon, passed a resolution calling for an immediate correction of the situation.113 Ironically, it was the NSF that now came to academic scientists’ rescue. In September, Waterman finally took a step in exercising the foundation’s science policy role by intervening with the DOD on “the importance of stability and continuity in basic research.” As a result, basic research programs were reportedly “partially exempted” from the Wilson cuts.114 However, the damage was already done and few of the scientist-critics were pacified.

The Rabi Study Indeed, on the eve of Sputnik in late 1957, many scientists were greatly demoralized over both the state of American science and the course of the Cold War. Moderate scientists as represented by the ODM-SAC met with disappointments in both policy for science, as federal funds for science were cut, and in science in policy, as arms control languished in the shadow of the accelerating nuclear arms race. In both areas, the committee appeared to have diminished in infl uence since its peak TCP days. When Harold Stassen became Eisenhower’s special assistant for disarmament in March 1955, for example, he proceeded to create his own scientific advisory groups, and only occasionally sought advice from the ODM-SAC.115 During the 1956 presidential election campaign, nuclear fallout became a political issue and many scientists endorsed the call by Eisenhower’s Democratic rival, Adlai Stevenson, for a nuclear test ban. The ODM-SAC, although silent in public, privately prodded Stassen to take up the test ban proposal as a point of departure in disarmament. Rabi and Bethe, a new ODM-SAC member in 1956, in particular argued the case for a test ban to freeze the U.S. nuclear advantage. However, the test ban faltered at the resistance of the DOD and the AEC and at the Soviet refusal to allow inspection. Strauss and his antiban science advisers—primarily Teller and Lawrence—prevailed over the ODM-SAC with their campaign for tests to make a “clean” hydrogen bomb, free of radioactive fallout. Ever since their victory over the GAC in the H-bomb debate of 1949, they had nearly monopolized science advice on U.S. nuclear weapons policy.116 The marginal position of the ODM-SAC scientists in this period was also demonstrated by President Eisenhower at a press conference in the White House in mid-1957. Asked whether he had thought of appointing a scientist on his staff on the model of the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Eisenhower responded: Well, no. We have got the National Science Foundation, you know, and Dr. Waterman and Dr. Bronk are always available to me for instant consultation.

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Then, of course, we have our scientists in the AEC and Defense Department and other places. It hadn’t occurred to me to have one right in my office, but now that you have mentioned it I will think about it.117

Notably, Eisenhower did not mention the ODM-SAC scientists, nor is there evidence that he ever followed up seriously on his promise “to think about it” during the days before Sputnik. Remarkably, the post-TCP marginalization of ODM-SAC scientists led them to take their complaints about the neglect of scientists in government to the public. In early 1955, the usually mild-mannered DuBridge told the press “that the top government officials treat scientists like barbers”: “They call them in for a specific job and then forget about them.” “They say that scientists should be on tap not on top,” he continued, referring probably to Cutler’s attitude. “I would not want to argue with that, but it is time that those who are on top began to tap them.” Echoing Rabi, DuBridge argued against the perceived role of scientists as merely delivering weapons to the military’s specifications. There was a great danger, he warned, that without the direct participation of scientists at the highest level, national policy would be made based on “mistaken and misunderstood technical grounds” filtered up from below.118 Such complaints, however, did not improve ODM-SAC’s status in government.119 In fact, restrictions on ODM-SAC’s policy role continued to frustrate the committee under Rabi. In late 1956 and early 1957, Rabi, alarmed by the unchecked momentum of the American military buildup and its growing global security commitments, revived his earlier idea of a sober review of American national security. He proposed a TCP-type study on the effects of the arms race on national resources and manpower. It sought “to test priorities, to check on coherence, and to determine whether the program represents the most effective employment of our technological and economic resources as related to national security objectives.” Among its specific proposals was an examination of major weapons systems “in order to suggest the elimination and deemphasis of unprofitable approaches.”120 The plan was, however, vetoed by Cutler, who viewed it as too broad a review of national security policy to be appropriate for the scientists to undertake. Officials in the Pentagon, AEC, and other agencies already resented intrusion in policymaking by “outsiders,” Cutler informed the ODM-SAC in a tense meeting.121 Privately, Cutler feared that Rabi might exert undue infl uence on Eisenhower in effecting a radical change in American policy. “If we let Rabi loose on the President, he’ll go along” was Rabi’s recollection of Cutler’s reaction to his proposal.122 What Rabi did not know was that even Eisenhower himself was wary, in early 1957, of another TCP-style investigation by the scientists. When Cutler briefed him on the Rabi proposal on March 12, 1957, Eisenhower readily concurred with his national security adviser’s negative conclusion. Mounting concern over the costs of military R&D led him to have second thoughts about the Killian TCP study, which in turn colored his view of the study proposed by Rabi. As Cutler recorded the conversation,

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It was perfectly obvious from what the President said that he wanted to go very slow on letting any more scientists “into the act.” He said with a wry smile that he was still living with the prior scientific appraisal (meaning the Killian Report of 1954). He indicated that every time the scientists looked into a matter their exact minds required them to come to a very finite conclusion which inevitably added up to a great expenditure of money.123

One could argue with Eisenhower’s conclusion whether it was their exact minds, or their objective assessment of the situation, or their institutional selfinterest that led scientists to recommend new programs. However, the note was revealing of Eisenhower’s misgivings, evidently shared by Cutler and many others in the government, about scientists’ role in policy on the eve of Sputnik. Here the basis for the president’s objection was not the scientists’ lack of objectivity, but rather their obsession with it in a narrow sense. In a way, his lament about narrow expertise echoed Truman’s call for scientific statesmanship several years before. To Eisenhower, hard-headed evaluations of the technical aspects of American national security by “exact minds” were needed, which was why he had sponsored the Killian study in the first place. However, he was also keenly aware that any such examination, if not put into the broadest political context, would likely be transformed by the logic and momentum of the arms race into justification for a new military buildup. There was, however, a fundamental difference between Eisenhower’s and Cutler’s views on the potentials of scientists’ participation in public policy. Whereas Cutler saw a dichotomy of experts being either “on tap” by staying with the facts or “on top” by playing a policy role, Eisenhower viewed three connecting zones of the expertise–policy continuum: the technical realm of technological evaluations, the policy realm where the policy implications of these technical evaluations were extrapolated, and, finally, the political realm where national policy was made on the basis of both these technically based policy considerations and other, broader political considerations, such as the economic and psychological aspects of the Cold War. Whereas Cutler felt that scientists had overreached themselves if they ventured into the policy realm, Eisenhower rather thought that they had not gone far enough to liberate themselves from their “exact” mind-set, to see beyond the logic of technological determinism, and to take the broader political factors into considerations in the policy realm. This did not mean that he would want political considerations to distort technical evaluations, but it did mean that the technical arguments should be balanced with those derived from other justified sources. Thus, even though from his experiences with the Killian study and with the Teller– Lawrence lobby for the clean bomb Eisenhower was aware of scientists’ tendency to push for technological buildup, he did not preclude their participation in policy just because they were scientists. Ironically, however, Rabi’s proposed study resembled the TCP study only in form and diverged very much in direction. Aimed at reducing the American commitments in the world, Rabi’s proposal was in essence a push for arms control

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that can be traced to his opposition to the H-bomb and his original intention for the Killian study. If approved, the new Rabi study would have been exactly the kind of study Eisenhower was looking for, to eliminate unnecessary programs and curb the arms race. To be sure, here, as in TCP, the science in policy was not far removed from the policy for science. Reflecting his concern over the “Wilson cut” in military R&D, Killian made a “redraft” of Rabi’s letter that highlighted the rationale for beefing up federal support for “risk-taking, creative” basic research that would underline future military strength. However, both Rabi and Killian believed that such investment in basic research, especially by the military, would help the government gain fresh, independent insights, which would in turn enable it to pursue a forward-looking, intelligent military technological system and to weed out dubious, obsolete, and costly weapons. Most important, they believed that enhanced basic research would produce the kind of science and scientists that would help Eisenhower control the runaway spending on weapons systems by evaluating military technology “free of vested interests.”124 Why did not Rabi talk to Eisenhower directly about the matter? After all, he had enjoyed a close working relationship with Eisenhower ever since they met at Columbia. Even after Ike left Columbia to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Rabi continued to provide him with scientific advice.125 In 1956, Rabi had publicly lent his name to Eisenhower’s reelection campaign.126 In 1957, however, he thought that he was “outgunned” and that “it would have been futile to appeal to the President”; “General Cutler was there all the time, I only from time to time.”127 Had Rabi had a chance to explain to Eisenhower fully the objective of his study, he would have found a kindred spirit. During his March 1957 meeting with the ODM-SAC, the president had mentioned “the importance of re-evaluating war as an instrument of policy,” and added that he “studies and reflects at great length on how to deter war—which has now become so destructive.” This statement might have sounded vague to the scientists, but it represented a real, profound rethinking on Eisenhower’s part on nuclear weapons, deterrence, war, and peace that emerged in a series of NSC debates in 1956 and 1957. Eisenhower was gradually turning to arms control as a way not only to prevent budget deficit, but also to prevent war. His conviction that it was not only desirable, but also possible to avoid a nuclear war with the Soviet Union helped him to persuade other administration officials to pursue a sufficient, not unlimited, deterrence, which, in turn, would contribute to the control of spending. Unfortunately for Rabi and his colleagues, who were not privy to these NSC meetings and who were preoccupied with the problem of science funding, they did not pick up this clue to the president’s new thinking and connect it with their own proposal for an arms control study.128 Soon Rabi would come to regret his decision to back down, not only for the sake of the arms control study that was not pursued, but even more because of the study that did get underway.129 Just as Cutler and Eisenhower vetoed the Rabi initiative, they approved a rival project also sponsored by the ODM-SAC. The Security Resources Panel, or Gaither panel, chaired by H. Rowan Gaither of the Ford Foundation and dominated by industrial leaders and former government officials, was

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launched to examine, for the NSC, a $40 billion bomb shelter program proposed by the Federal Civil Defense Administration. Following the example of the TCP and with the consent of the White House, which apparently thought that sensible businessmen would be more responsible at evaluating national security than those exacting scientists, the panel broadened its investigation to a comprehensive review of U.S. defense strength.130 One of the largest “summer studies” ever conducted, the Gaither panel involved about one hundred prominent scientists, engineers, and government officials. Several ODM-SAC members, including Rabi himself, were nominally involved in the study as advisers.131 Completed in October, the report depicted, in blunt terms, the danger facing the United States by the growing Soviet military power. It recommended a massive military buildup that included bomber dispersal and alert, acceleration of missile programs, and to a lesser degree, fallout shelters. It was a grimmer update of the TCP report.132 Once again, as in the discussion that had led to the formation of the TCP in 1954, Rabi’s concern for arms control was sidetracked by a push for arms buildup as the Cold War moved toward another turning point.

Conclusion In a sense, the mixed experience of the Science Advisory Committee in this period reflected American society’s ambivalent feeling toward nuclear arms—products of modern science and technology—as sources of both protection and danger. Ever since the discovery of radioactivity at the turn of the twentieth century, the public had feared that scientists might destroy the universe with their mysterious inventions.133 Reflecting widespread social attitude, American high school students, for example, typically would pay lip service to science but few would want to pursue it as a career, as revealed in a 1957 study sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and conducted under the direction of well-known anthropologist Margaret Mead.134 As the Oppenheimer case demonstrated, unease likewise colored the science–state relationship as liberal scientists’ technological skepticism was equated not only with dissent but sometimes with disloyalty. A subtle but unmistakable shift in science advising followed the H-bomb debate and the Oppenheimer case: few science advisers would question national security policy on moral grounds. The process was not unlike what happened in the State Department in this period: As the old China hands were purged from the State Department for, among other things, stepping out of their diplomatic bounds and into policy arena, “[t]he best had been destroyed and the new experts were different, lesser men who had learned their lessons, and who were first and foremost good anti-Communists.”135 Although few would think of I. I. Rabi and Hans Bethe as inferior successors to Oppenheimer and Conant in any way, they often had to advocate nuclear arms control in the name of national security instead of morality. American scientists and state were brought together by mutual desires—scientists wanted to contribute to the defense of freedom and needed the military funds for research, and the state depended on the scientists’ expertise to win the

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Cold War—but their distrust of each other persisted in the pre-Sputnik period. Although the ODM-SAC’s TCP investigation on surprise attack and its successful fight to keep the DOD funding basic research helped strengthen the partnership, it could not overcome the fear and paranoia engendered by the advent of the nuclear arms race or prevent the clash between scientists and the state. The failure of the scientists to move closer to the NSC, the Oppenheimer case, the military’s disregard for basic research, and the government’s shelving of arms control were only a few prominent examples of that confl ict in the committee’s experience. Yet, the fact that the ODM-SAC survived and matured in this most turbulent period indicated the increasing importance of science in government and in the Cold War. The Sputnik crisis would put a decisive end to much of the ambivalence of the government and public toward science and science advisers, and would place scientists, as represented by the ODM-SAC, in a much better position to reshape American science policy.

5

Eisenhower, Sputnik, and the Creation of PSAC, 1957

On the evening of October 4, 1957, American physicist and ODM-SAC member Lloyd Berkner was attending a reception for International Geophysical Year scientists at the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC, when a New York Times reporter told him that the Soviets had just launched a satellite. Berkner immediately announced the news and congratulated the Soviet scientists present on their achievement.1 In short order, the Sputnik news spread like a wildfire and promised to change, among other things, the science–state partnership and put the hitherto obscure scientists on the ODM-SAC into the public spotlight. Sputnik, or “fellow traveler [of the earth],” evoked intense but mixed feelings in the American people. Ever since American scientists and engineers produced the atomic bomb and other technological wonders to win World War II, their countrymen had generally assumed that the U.S. domination in science and technology was unquestionable. Few were aware or cared about the fact that Europe had led the world in science until the 1930s. Even scientists who knew better about Soviet strength disbelieved that a totalitarian system that had brutally suppressed scientific freedom, as in the Lysenko scandal only a few years before, could achieve such technological excellence. Vannevar Bush, for example, had declared in 1949 that “We can take comfort in the conviction that dictatorship will seldom pioneer, and that when they do the dictator will probably buy gold bricks. . . .”2 Now Sputnik inspired in the American public not only a sense of shock, but also admiration for this unique human endeavor. Amateur astronomers from coast to coast gazed into their telescopes searching for the artificial moon. Others tuned to their radios to listen to the sharp beeps emitted by the satellite as broadcast by CBS and other networks.3 As Sputnik brought the world into the shrinking global village, many Americans also recognized the end of U.S. safety through isolation. It was a rude awakening to the nation’s vulnerability. The fact that the rocket that had launched Sputnik could also serve as an ICBM to deliver an H-bomb to its target led many Americans to wonder whether the country had lost not only the competition for national prestige, but also the nuclear arms race. Just a few weeks prior to Sputnik, Khrushchev’s boast of a successful launching of an ICBM had been met with skepticism in Washington. Some even thought that Sputnik itself was merely a propaganda trick. However, when the Soviets launched Sputnik II on November 3, 1957, with an incredibly large half-ton payload and a live dog, all doubts vanished.4 With Sputniks beeping overhead, all other Soviet propaganda appeared perilously true: their gross national product grew at a faster rate than that of the United 71

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States and would soon surpass it; they were producing twice as many engineers as the Unites States; other countries would adopt the Soviet political system and the United States would be isolated in the world. Dire warnings from politicians and scientists soon radiated from Washington. Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson characterized Sputnik as “a devastating blow to the prestige of the United States as the leader in the scientific and technological world.”5 Lyndon Johnson, Democratic majority leader in the Senate, held headline-making hearings on the nation’s satellite and missile programs. As the lead witness, Edward Teller, whose portrait appeared on the cover of Time, gave alarmist testimony. His warning that the Soviets were winning the race in military technology and in scientific research was confirmed by two venerable figures in American science and defense, Vannevar Bush and James Doolittle. To drive the point home, both Teller and Johnson pronounced the Sputniks a worse defeat for the United States than Pearl Harbor.6 Underneath the Cold War rhetoric was a strong sense of wounded nationalism. Partisan polemics reached a height in Washington that had not been seen since the acrimonious debate over “who lost China” several years earlier. Democrats accused the Eisenhower administration of lacking leadership and vision and putting budget before national security. Senator John F. Kennedy (D-MA), for example, criticized it for “complacent miscalculations, penny-pinching, budget cutbacks, incredibly confused mismanagement and wasteful rivalries and jealousies.”7 Capitalizing on the so-called missile gap, Kennedy, Johnson, and other Democratic presidential hopefuls began preparation for the 1958 congressional and the 1960 presidential elections.8 In response, the Republicans blamed the Truman administration for delay in starting the missile program and the Democratic-dominated Congress for reducing Eisenhower’s request for defense funds. Such partisan bickering largely drowned out the voices of many intellectuals and concerned citizens who called for a thoughtful national self-examination.9 In this tense atmosphere, scientists, because of their prominent role in both the missile and satellite programs, came under attack. Senator Styles Bridges (R-NH) blamed them for the missile lag because they “were beguiled by the peace and light emanating from the Kremlin.” “The time has come,” he claimed, “not to ask our scientists what to do, but to tell them what must be done.”10 Unaware that the rocket, not the satellite, was the bottleneck of the American program, some members of the public charged scientists’ “gold-plating” of the satellites as the cause of the nation’s humiliation. One Texan constituent complained to Johnson that the “brains” did not understand the feeling of the people. If they did, “they would have shot a waste basket, a filing cabinet or anything up there.”11 Whereas scientists appeared soft-headed, incompetent, and out of touch to their critics, they stood out to others as unsung heroes laboring in an environment of neglect and hostility. Whether accurate or not, former President Truman’s diagnosis that McCarthy-style “character assassination of Oppenheimer” and other scientists had led to the loss by the United States of the satellite race resonated within the scientific community.12 Several of Oppenheimer’s supporters within

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ODM-SAC, including Rabi, then ODM-SAC chairman, now called publicly for a redress of his case, “as elementary justice.” Rabi also agitated for Oppenheimer’s reemployment by the government—only then “will it indicate that a change of heart has occurred.”13 The administration, however, resisted reopening the Oppenheimer case. One NSC official privately characterized the scientists’ request as scapegoating the security system when they were “unable to equal some of the scientific feats of the Soviets.”14 Sputnik was not the first technological spectacle to bring the power of science to national conscience—the atomic bomb and other technology-based weapons during World War II had already done so. However, Sputnik coupled science and technology with the pursuit of national prestige in a way that touched a raw nerve in a society already rattled by the Cold War. Thus, when the news came from Stockholm on October 30 that the Nobel Prize for physics had been awarded to two Chinese American physicists—Tsung Dao Lee of Columbia and Chen Ning Yang of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study—it provided both a welcome relief and a cause for concern. When the duo traveled to Sweden to receive the awards in December, American officials kept “an anxious eye” on them for fear that China might woo or snatch them way; the FBI relaxed only when the pair promptly returned to the United States.15 Eventually, traditional American enthusiasm toward technology would return with a vengeance as a reaction to the Sputnik challenge, but in late 1957, the American public lived in the shadow of a technological defeat. Eisenhower, even years later, could not believe the near panic that had greeted Sputnik—“its light was blinding.”16 In part, the Eisenhower administration had itself to blame for the way Americans reacted to Sputnik. Prior American rhetoric, such as that advanced by Strauss, had always identified the superiority of the American system with its technological and military prowess.17 Eisenhower himself had never given the U.S. satellite program the highest priority that the Soviets did. Even though the Killian TCP report of 1954–1955 had urged the United States to launch the International Geophysical Year satellite program as a way to legitimize its reconnaissance satellites, and many people, including the ODM-SAC and Eisenhower himself, recognized the satellite’s significance for national prestige, apparently none believed the Soviet Union could really beat the United States.18 Thus there was a sense that the American International Geophysical Year satellite would serve its strategic purpose better if it was pursued as an internationally open scientific project, rather than a crash military endeavor. In the same spirit, Eisenhower had approved in 1955, on recommendation from Assistant Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles, that the U.S. satellite project, called Vanguard, be established as an NSF project using a relatively new rocket built by the Navy, instead of utilizing the advanced Redstone military rockets developed by the Army.19 Such an arrangement, as Quarles reminded the cabinet two weeks after Sputnik, had been meant to “obviate or weaken Soviet protest on over-fl ight.”20 Now Sputnik actually “has done us a good turn,” as Quarles told Eisenhower in a separate meeting, by nicely establishing the “freedom of space” for everyone, paving the way for American reconnaissance satellites.21

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In a way, the fact that the Soviets used a military rocket for launching the satellite was actually reassuring to the Pentagon and Eisenhower. It indicated that the Russians gave higher priority to space than to ICBMs, which would in turn imply that they did not think that the United States was going to start a war against them and that they wanted to wage the Cold War more in psychological than military terms.22 This understanding, coupled with his knowledge of the real Soviet strength from the U-2 reconnaissance overfl ights, led Eisenhower to react calmly to the Sputnik launch. For security reasons, however, he could not disclose the U-2 information to the public, which limited the effectiveness of his response to the Sputnik challenge.

The Origins of Presidential Science Advising Despite his conviction that Sputnik, per se, represented no major strategic threat (and indeed some benefits) to the United States, Eisenhower still had to calm the hysteria and mitigate the public alarm. He took several measures behind the scenes to speed up the American satellite program, but his appointment of James Killian as science adviser and the reconstitution of the ODM-SAC into the President’s Science Advisory Committee formed the most publicly prominent part of his response to the Sputnik challenge. Conventional accounts of this process render it as mainly a matter of science in policy: Sputnik made the president recognize his need for science advising in space and defense policy and he then proceeded to establish it.23 However, this narrative of natural evolution does not explain why Eisenhower chose Killian and the ODM-SAC scientists, instead of their opponents led by Edward Teller or Ernest Lawrence, as his science advisers. After all, in the pre-Sputnik days Teller and Lawrence were equally if not more prominent scientific figures than ODM-SAC scientists. They certainly wielded more infl uence than the latter in U.S. nuclear weapons policy. What the conventional account masks is the role played by a crucial debate among these opposing scientific camps and policymakers over the meaning of Sputnik for American science and technology policy, especially nuclear weapons policy. In the end, the establishment of the science advisory system had to do with both science in policy and policy for science. Even though Sputnik provided the direct trigger for the establishment of the PSAC system of science advising and with it the incorporation of moderate scientists in policymaking, at least three prior or concurrent developments shaped Eisenhower’s choices of scientists. The first and most important factor was Eisenhower’s profound rethinking about the course of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, as he indicated in his meeting with the ODM-SAC in March 1957. “There will be no such thing as a victorious side in any global war of the future,” he told the nation during a subsequent press conference.24 Related to this turn toward serious arms control was Eisenhower’s increasing disenchantment with the technological push of the Teller–Lawrence–Strauss group. In the summer of 1957, for example, in response to the clean bomb campaign by Teller, Lawrence, and Strauss to derail a nuclear test ban, Eisenhower acknowledged the potential benefits of the research in reducing civilian casualties in a nuclear exchange and

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in peaceful applications, but resented their implication that a test ban was thus immoral. They made it “look like a crime to ban tests,” he complained after the meeting.25 The incident also led him to observe bitterly that “the scientists today in this field seemed to be running the Government rather than acting as servants for the Government.”26 Concurrent with these developments was Eisenhower’s increasing attraction to the ODM-SAC group for both its advocacy of a moderation of the arms race and for its linking of federal support of basic research with curbing the technological push. Thus, on October 8, in his post-Sputnik consultation with Detlev W. Bronk, president of the NAS, he warmed to the latter’s recommendation that he revive William Golden’s original proposal for a presidential science adviser and advisory committee by consulting with Rabi and upgrading the ODM-SAC.27 Coincidentally, Eisenhower had, prior to Sputnik, requested to meet with the ODM-SAC on October 15 to discuss its report on basic research. He now appreciated it even more as an opportunity to discuss the Sputnik crisis with a group of prominent American scientists, especially Rabi and Killian, who had commanded his admiration and confidence.28 For their part, Rabi, Killian, and their ODM-SAC colleagues also looked forward to the meeting. They had been just as surprised by Sputnik, especially by its political impact, as everybody else, despite their own earlier warning of just such an event.29 “I was really astonished,” recalled Rabi years later.30 As Hans Bethe recalled, most American scientists had thought “that the Russians were somewhat behind us.”31 Still smarting from the Wilson cut in basic research funding, ODM-SAC scientists saw the meeting with Eisenhower as a golden opportunity to strengthen the scientists–government relations and to promote federal support of science. Rabi, for example, “knew something would happen.”32 On October 12, Rabi met with Andrew Goodpaster in the White House to plan for the committee’s conference with the president three days later. “Advice to the president on science” was already on the meeting agenda, including the possibility of the appointment of a special assistant for science and upgrading the ODMSAC to a level comparable to the Council of Economic Advisers.33 The day before the meeting with the president, Rabi convened the Science Advisory Committee, which decided to recommend the preceding steps as well as other changes in science and defense policies to Eisenhower.34 At the October 15 meeting, Eisenhower opened the discussion by posing a question about government support of science, the original theme of the meeting. Still remembering the pre-Sputnik debate on basic research he touched off in the Cabinet, Eisenhower told the scientists that he had been reflecting “very earnestly” on the best way to support science. According to Goodpaster’s notes: He said it was all well and good to accept the importance of basic research, but government officials have some responsibility to assure that money provided is actually used for research, and not diverted to other ends. However, to do so might result in intrusion into university activity.35

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Obviously the debate in the spring and the impact of Sputnik had softened the edges of Eisenhower’s criticism of federal support of science. He was no longer questioning such support, although his concern over maintaining a public–private boundary—public accountability and private autonomy—remained and would later find general expression in his farewell speech. Welcoming this shift in Eisenhower’s thinking, Rabi sought to transform the debate even further into a matter of administration. He told Eisenhower that the question of government management of research was of central concern to his committee and proposed that it conduct a study on the issue for the president. Eisenhower readily approved. Then the discussion quickly turned to the burning question of whether American science already lagged dangerously behind that of the Soviet Union. Rabi’s answer was both reassuring and alarming. The United States still enjoyed some advantages, he told Eisenhower, but the Soviets had picked up momentum. “Unless we take vigorous action,” he predicted, the Soviets could surpass the Americans just as the Americans had overtaken the Europeans in science in the last generation. Following Rabi, Edwin Land spoke “with great eloquence” about the urgent need for presidential action. Land lamented the American obsession with mass production and consumerism and its loss of the pioneering spirit to the Soviets, who pursued science “both as an essential tool and a way of life.” Describing the current feeling of scientists as “isolated and alone,” Land pleaded with the president to break American complacency and inspire American youth toward scientific adventure. Although Eisenhower disagreed with Land on the advantages of the elitist Soviet education system (they were “picking out the best minds and ruthlessly spurning the rest”), he promised to do his part to create a better attitude toward science in the United States. Thanks to Sputnik, he added, “people are alarmed and thinking about science.” By giving speeches and public recognition to scientists (including establishing the national science medals), Eisenhower hoped to turn this alarm to constructive ends. Rabi then came to the main recommendation of the ODM-SAC: the appointment of a presidential science adviser. According to Goodpaster’s notes, Dr. Rabi said that many of the policy matters that come up to the President have a strong scientific component. He pointed out that the President lacks a scientific adviser, or someone who can provide him with a scientific point of view. The President said it might be well to have such an adviser, or even a small section, to support him. He said the group would have to recognize, however, that every such individual added simply adds to the burdens of the Presidency—but perhaps the individual could be a great help in getting the right point of view across. He said he would like to hear something more specific as to their ideas.

Rabi answered that he believed “the first essential is to get someone the President could live easily with (in the sense of working with him agreeably),” and “completely sound scientifically.” Killian suggested “a committee to back up” the science adviser, with which Eisenhower agreed, mentioning the Council of Economic Advisers as a model.

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The more Eisenhower reflected on the idea of a science adviser, the more enthusiastic he grew. “Such an individual could be most helpful,” he told the scientists. A science adviser could assist him in keeping track of the government’s decisions related to “scientific matters,” he said, such as the one he made in 1955 to give the highest priority to ballistic missiles. That decision, Eisenhower complained, did not get fully implemented due to secondary considerations at the Pentagon. As another example, Killian mentioned the disarray in military R&D in the DOD and the demoralization of the scientific community. The need, Killian said, was “more for leadership than for money.” A sympathetic Eisenhower immediately asked Goodpaster to arrange for the committee to meet his new secretary of defense, Neil McElroy, on the subject. It is worth noting here that both the scientists and Eisenhower adopted fairly fl uid definitions of the boundaries between science and technology and between science in policy and policy for science: missiles were hardly “scientific matters” and scientific demoralization derived more from the cut in funding for science than from any weakening in the government’s use of science. Yet, the nature of the Sputnik crisis allowed ODM-SAC scientists to connect policy for science with science in policy. In the same vein, the scientists urged Eisenhower to strengthen scientific cooperation with the allies. A joint scientific committee with the NATO allies was mentioned (and later established). Rabi suggested a science adviser to the secretary of state. Albert Hill and others called for removal of security restrictions in information exchanges with allies, especially the British. Again, Eisenhower was most receptive. He immediately asked Cutler and Goodpaster to explore ways to implement these ideas.36 Although, as we have seen, Rabi had cleared most of these proposals with the White House staff, if not President Eisenhower himself, prior to the meeting, its significance as a creation moment for the modern presidential science advisory system was recognized and would be long remembered by American public scientists. Years later, Bethe recalled it as “one of the most memorable hours of my life. . . . I have never before been present at a session where so much was decided in such a short time. Eisenhower was most impressive.”37 The receptiveness of the president to their proposals clearly excited and energized the scientists. For his part, Eisenhower appreciated the scientists’ reassurance of present U.S. strength and made good use of it in his effort to calm the public and fend off political attacks. At the same time, he took the scientists’ warning about science education and basic research seriously, and soon made these subjects major items on his post-Sputnik agenda. It is doubtful that the American response to Sputnik would have emphasized science and education so much if not for the strong infl uence of science advisers such as the ODM-SAC. In retrospect, what was at stake in the meeting was no less than the negotiation over the meaning of the Sputnik challenge itself. With his Pearl Harbor analogy, Edward Teller was especially effective in leading the charge, in both Congress and in the media, that Sputnik represented a military and technological defeat for the United States and that it had to respond accordingly by accelerating its nuclear

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weapons and other defense programs. Even though he agreed with the ODMSAC scientists about the Soviet challenge in science and education, the thrust of his concern over Sputnik was military and technological. Just two days before Eisenhower’s meeting with the ODM-SAC, Teller had issued a clarion call in the Los Angeles Times under the headline “We Must Win the H-War before It Starts!” Contrary to Eisenhower’s conviction about the absurdity of nuclear wars, Teller demanded that “we must overcome the popular notion that nuclear weapons are more immoral than conventional weapons” and that “we must revamp our military planning to fl ight and win a limited nuclear war.”38 Much of what Eisenhower would later call the military-industrial complex resonated with Teller’s analysis. It pushed on its own for a countertechnological attack that would eventually spill over into other areas of American life, resulting in a new wave of technological enthusiasm in Sputnik’s shadow. Of course, such a reaction placed the institutions of American military technology—including Teller’s Livermore Laboratory—in the forefront of American Cold War strategy. In contrast, at the White House meeting, Rabi, Killian, and their colleagues, with their own interpretation of the boundary between science and technology, attempted, with considerable success, to turn Sputnik into a challenge in science, education, and presidential science advising. Like Teller, they did so partly out of conviction and partly out of their own institutional self-interest, for their interpretation of Sputnik would lead to increased funding for science and science education, with benefit for the universities, home institutions of most ODM-SAC members. Thus, despite their differences, both groups would contribute to what historian Walter McDougall called “another American lurch toward technocracy” in the wake of Sputnik.39 For his part, Eisenhower was not unaware of ODM-SAC scientists’ self-interest, but on balance he accepted their version of the challenge because it helped him devise a response strategy that would promote his own agenda of arms control and fiscal conservatism. He even began to appreciate their argument that federal support of basic research might help curb the technological momentum behind the arms race itself. Ultimately, it was this agreement between the president and his science advisers that paved the way for the establishment of a peacetime science advisory system in the White House for the first time in American history. Thus, even though all parties involved in the debate over Sputnik—Eisenhower, the Democrats, ODM-SAC scientists, and Teller—shared what historians have called an “ideology of liberal consensus” on the need to fight communism abroad (and to solve domestic problems through incremental reforms, not radical revolutions), they differed sharply over the limits of nuclear weapons in this struggle.40 The cordial atmosphere at the October 15 meeting left little doubt that Eisenhower would look to the ODM-SAC for his first science adviser. Although no name was mentioned at the meeting, Killian, for his performances in directing the TCP in 1954–1955, in chairing the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, and for his prominent position as MIT president, quickly emerged as Eisenhower’s and his staff ’s favorite choice. A political moderate, he had been attacked by the right wing for protecting left-wing faculty members at MIT and for

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his association with Oppenheimer, but his TCP investigation had also established his credibility with the military establishment.41 Although not a working scientist himself, Killian had the reputation of a brilliant science administrator. He knew both the scientific community and the government well enough to be an effective liaison between them. Conceivably, his nonscientist background might actually have made other White House staff feel more comfortable in working with him. His friendship with Congressman John McCormack, the Democratic majority leader in the House, did not hurt him either. Another logical choice would have been Rabi: He not only knew Eisenhower well, but also, unlike Killian, was “completely sound scientifically.” Was he ever considered? Goodpaster remembered Rabi declining the position—“Rabi felt that it simply was not possible for him to undertake the job”—implying that it was offered to him, but Rabi recalled neither receiving a formal offer nor having great enthusiasm for it. In retrospect, Rabi cited his religious ( Jewish) background and possible attack from the right wing as his, and possibly the White House’s, concerns.42 His advocacy for arms control both during the H-bomb debate and after would have led to opposition from the national security establishment as well. Cutler, who was attuned to the concerns at the Pentagon and the AEC and who had just clashed with Rabi over his proposed study of American commitment in the world, clearly favored Killian over Rabi, too. Once the White House reached consensus on Killian, things moved rapidly. A few days after the White House meeting, Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, called Killian and asked him to come back to Washington for discussion on the matter of a science adviser. After a conference with Rabi, Land, Berkner, James Fisk, Mervin Kelly, and Bronk in New York, Killian drew up a memorandum on the appointment of a presidential science adviser and the transfer of the ODMSAC, with enlargement, into the White House. At breakfast in the White House, Killian met with Adams and Cutler, who had drafted a similar memorandum on the subject. Killian was subsequently asked to combine his with Cutler’s memo and come up with terms of reference for the new science adviser and advisory committee.43 On October 24, Killian had breakfast with Eisenhower, who formally asked Killian to be his special assistant for science and technology (commonly known as the science adviser). Killian accepted the offer after securing a leave of absence from MIT.44 Although the exact setup for a science advisory committee was not yet decided, a major step in the history of American public science was accomplished.

The Rabi Committee vs. the Teller–Lawrence Group As the White House deliberated over whether to upgrade the ODM-SAC or try a new setup like the Council of Economic Advisers, another sequence of events took place that might well have both reaffirmed Eisenhower’s decision to shift his trust from the Teller–Lawrence group to the Rabi–Killian group and led him to approve the establishment of PSAC out of the ODM-SAC. On October 29, 1957, Rabi, as chairman of the ODM-SAC, met with Eisenhower in the White House to report a finding by his committee that nuclear explosions could prematurely detonate

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unprotected warheads within several miles. Although the United States had already started shielding its warheads against this effect, the Soviets apparently had not yet caught on. Thus, the committee recommended that, first, the United States develop an antimissile system based on this effect, and, second, the United States quickly reach a test ban with the Soviets to prevent them from finding out the secret.45 Eisenhower reacted favorably to the Rabi proposal. He even agreed with a poignant comment by Rabi that it was a “tragedy” that the United States had not reached a test ban early enough, as ODM-SAC had suggested, to prevent the Soviets from testing their thermonuclear warheads in their latest test series. Eisenhower recalled that he himself had often expressed a desire for a test ban to “freeze our advantage.”46 Eisenhower’s warm reception of Rabi’s test ban advice alarmed Strauss, who also attended the meeting. He told Eisenhower that he and his scientists questioned some of the assumptions and conclusions of the ODM-SAC study. The AEC believed, for example, that the Soviets could always “steal our secrets” or conduct tests secretly. As a compromise, Eisenhower agreed that scientists holding different views should get together and try to reach a technical agreement on the proposal.47 After Rabi left, Strauss tried to plant more doubts about the Rabi proposal in Eisenhower’s mind. He told the president that Rabi was a brilliant scientist and “a friend of long standing,” but the ODM-SAC proposal was not thought through. It lacked mature and experienced judgment about the broad concerns of national security and international relations. Interrupting him, however, Eisenhower reiterated his agreement with Rabi on the need to freeze the U.S. lead.48 The Rabi meeting made a deep impression on Eisenhower. Months later, when reviewing U.S. policy on the test ban, Eisenhower singled out the Rabi meeting as the pivotal event that prompted the administration to enter into serious test ban negotiations with the Soviets.49 It also made Eisenhower keenly aware of the deep division within the scientific community over American nuclear policy. At one point in the meeting, Rabi stated bluntly that he thought it a mistake for Eisenhower to have accepted the views of Lawrence and Teller on the clean bomb and the test ban. Strauss later confirmed that the Rabi and Teller–Lawrence groups had opposed each other “very sharply” ever since the H-bomb decision. What Strauss did not tell Eisenhower was the impact of the Oppenheimer case and the minority status of the Lawrence and Teller position within the scientific community. In his diary, Eisenhower noted, with surprise, that “Dr. Rabi and some of his group are so antagonistic to Drs. Lawrence and Teller that communication between them is practically nil.” Given his own turn toward arms control and his growing antipathy to Teller’s advocacy for continued nuclear buildup, it was clear which scientific group was going to gain his trust.50 Thus, even though the Rabi initiative proved technically problematic, it did add to the voice for a test ban and, more important, let Eisenhower know that he could rely on the Rabi and Killian group for assistance on arms control.51

Science in National Security As the White House sought to respond to the Sputnik crisis with reforms in science advising, the urgency of the situation was underlined by the delivery, on November

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4, of the Gaither report, with its gloomy assessment of the Soviet military threat to the United States. Among its recommendations was a proposal for a massive program to defend the population and the nuclear force against a Soviet attack. In contrast to his largely positive reception of the TCP report three years before, Eisenhower reacted to the Gaither report with serious misgivings. Although agreeing on the need to protect the bombers, he thought the panel underestimated the U.S. offensive strength, especially the value of its many overseas bases. He concurred with the panel on giving priority to offensive power but doubted the feasibility of the shelter program. Above all, Eisenhower’s reservations about the Gaither report derived from his own profound rethinking of the direction of the arms race. Listening to the briefing by the Gaither panel, he was flabbergasted by its finding that in a nuclear war, the Soviet Union could infl ict 50 percent casualties on the United States, and vice versa.52 It reinforced his conviction about the absurdity of talking about winning a nuclear war. “You can’t have that war,” he said. “There aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off of the streets.”53 When Eisenhower conveyed his conviction forcefully to the Gaither panel, he helped convert several young scientists, such as Jerome Wiesner of MIT and Herbert York of the AEC’s Livermore Laboratory, who already began to question the direction of the arms race during the study, to the cause of arms control.54 In the meeting with the Gaither panel, Eisenhower also lamented the tendency “in our democracies” to await a crisis such as Sputnik to awaken the people about the importance of science and technology. Instead of this “government by crisis,” he wanted to “keep up interest and support without hysteria.” However, hysteria was just what Eisenhower faced when the Gaither report was, to Eisenhower’s dismay, leaked to the press in late November 1957. Part of the uproar came from Congress, which demanded public release of the report, but Eisenhower refused, claiming executive privilege. Although the administration eventually took the Gaither report into consideration in making the FY 1959 DOD budget, the apprehension it generated lingered on.55 Finally, having undertaken all these steps, Eisenhower was ready to launch a series of “confidence speeches” to calm the country in the shadow of both Sputnik and the Gaither report. The first one was a radio and television address on November 7, 1957 on “science in national security” from the White House. Its drafting was in part shaped by a report from the ODM-SAC on the need to improve public appreciation of science, strengthen the partnership between science and the federal government, increase support for basic research, especially in the DOD, and reform science education.56 In his speech Eisenhower emphasized how scientific advice and research had in the past shaped the superior American defense strength, complete with an enumeration of the many nuclear weapon and missile systems. Conceding Soviet advantages in satellites and in some other areas, Eisenhower nevertheless declared to the nation that the West still enjoyed overall military strength over the Soviet bloc. “Our scientists assure me that we are well ahead of the Soviets in the nuclear field, both in quantity and in quality.”

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In this address, Eisenhower spotlighted science not only as the driving force in the defense of America, but also as a key to the nation’s future security and prosperity. Following Land’s proposal, Eisenhower took the forum to promote public interest in science. “According to my scientific friends,” he warned the millions of households watching him on TV and listening to him on radio, “we could fall behind” the Soviet Union if complacency persisted. He urged Americans to give higher priority to science education and basic research.57 Moderate scientists’ interpretation of the Sputnik challenge now reached the public through Eisenhower’s pulpit. It was in this speech that Eisenhower announced the appointment of Killian as his special assistant for science and technology. His job would be to formalize the science advising process, link government with the scientific community, and monitor the defense R&D programs. In particular, Eisenhower emphasized that Killian would help the secretary of defense to curb interservice rivalry in missile development. To facilitate scientific cooperation with the Western alliance, Eisenhower also proposed a NATO Science Committee, a science adviser to the secretary of state, and science attachés in important U.S. embassies abroad. In closing, Eisenhower mentioned the peaceful contributions of science—“there is much more to science than its function in strengthening our defense”—and called on the Soviet Union to join the U.S. in disarmament efforts.58 A week later, in another speech on national security, Eisenhower expanded on the importance of science education and basic research: “My scientific advisers place this problem [science education] above all other immediate tasks of producing missiles, of developing new techniques in the Armed Services.”59 It was another powerful indication of the effectiveness of American public scientists’ campaign to turn Sputnik into a challenge more in science and education than in military technology. At the same time, by highlighting the importance of science and education to national security, the speech also subtly accelerated their integration into the Cold War. The upgrading of the ODM-SAC into the PSAC in the White House proceeded soon after the Killian appointment. In his November 7, 1957 speech, Eisenhower had said that Killian, as his science adviser, would be aided by a scientific staff and “a strong advisory group of outstanding experts reporting to him and to me.” Notably, Eisenhower did not mention the ODM-SAC by name, probably because the White House had not yet decided whether to upgrade the ODM-SAC or establish a smaller advisory council modeled after the Council of Economic Advisers, which consisted of three economists working full time in the Executive Office of the president, with the chairman acting as the president’s principal economic adviser. On November 15, Killian wrote Eisenhower that “after careful consideration,” he recommended the upgrading of ODM-SAC. He also suggested the addition of several new members to strengthen the committee. Eisenhower approved the plan and announced the reconstitution and upgrading of the ODM-SAC into the PSAC on November 22, 1957.60 As an indication of their newly acquired status, the science adviser and PSAC were given the best suite in

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the Executive Building next to the White House as well as the privilege of using the White House mess for lunch, overcoming a long-standing inconvenience facing the old ODM-SAC.61 In a formal December 2, 1957 letter to Killian that served as the legal foundation for his office, President Eisenhower gave the science adviser what Killian later called “remarkable carte blanche.”62 He was asked to keep himself informed of science in government, giving primary attention to “the use of science and technology in relation to national security,” to provide the president with scientific and technological “facts, evaluations and recommendations,” to try to “anticipate future trends or developments” in science and technology, especially related to national security, and to facilitate international scientific exchanges with allies. Perhaps most important, the science adviser was authorized to attend the NSC and cabinet meetings and “to have access to all plans, programs, and activities involving science and technology in the Government, including the Department of Defense, AEC, and CIA,” reflecting a striking confidence from Eisenhower in his new science adviser.63 Notably, the letter emphasized science in policy much more than policy for science; the latter was implied only when Killian was asked to work closely with the NSF and its director. It was more specifically spelled out in a separate set of terms of reference: “to be concerned with maintaining good and close relations with the U.S. scientific and engineering community and to further in every appropriate way the strength and morale of the scientific community.” The terms for PSAC likewise emphasized science in policy: it should be “broadly representative of those fields of science and technology most important to Government and at this juncture, most relevant to national security.” Both the letter and terms of references were, however, so generally worded that they contained the flexibility for the science advisory system to expand into areas beyond national security in science in policy and into policy for science even under Eisenhower.64 The emphasis on science in policy was also reflected in the background of the five new PSAC members. Their fields of expertise indicated the primary importance of space and missiles as well as the possibility of a move by Eisenhower in the direction of a nuclear test ban. Chemist George B. Kistiakowsky of Harvard had worked on implosion at wartime Los Alamos and had sat on the infl uential John von Neumann committee on missiles. Physicist Herbert F. York, director of the AEC’s Livermore Laboratory and another alumnus of the von Neumann committee, was obviously knowledgeable about nuclear weapons. Both he and another new PSAC member, Robert F. Bacher, professor of physics at Cal Tech and a former AEC commissioner and ODM-SAC member, would play a key role in PSAC deliberations on a nuclear test ban. James Doolittle, then vice president of Shell Oil Company and chairman of both the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board and the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, would naturally advise on both the space and missile programs. Finally, Edward M. Purcell of Harvard, a Nobel laureate in physics and expert on space communication, would chair PSAC’s space science panel.65

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In many ways, the reconstituted and enlarged PSAC thus embodied the American scientific establishment. Not surprisingly, most members were veterans of wartime research under OSRD. However, contrary to common perceptions, the number of former atomic bomb makers (Bacher, Bethe, Kistiakowsky, and York) was dwarfed by that of the radar people (Killian, William O. Baker of Bell Labs, Berkner, Bronk, Fisk, Caryl P. Haskins of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Purcell, Rabi, H. P. Robertson of Cal Tech, Wiesner, and Zacharias), although it should be noted that several members had worked on both. Continuing the ODMSAC tradition, the membership fell into roughly three major categories: scientific generalists, industry, and medicine and biological sciences. All major forms of scientific institutions found representations: about half of the members came from academia (Killian, Bacher, Bethe, Bronk, Kistiakowsky, Purcell, Rabi, Robertson, Wiesner, and Zacharias), several were based in industry (Baker, Doolittle, Fisk, and Land), one (York) directed a government weapons laboratory managed by a university, one (Berkner) headed a university consortium on contract with the government, and three (Haskins, Bronk, and Paul Weiss of Rockefeller Institute, who was added in March 1958) operated from private research institutions. Interestingly, the last three also stood out from their physical scientist colleagues for being biologists or physiologists. With this mainly academic cast, it was not surprising that committee meetings often resembled more the freewheeling laboratory or departmental gatherings in the universities than formal bureaucratic affairs. In addition to these full members, PSAC also invited several major science administrators, such as the NSF director, director of the National Institutes of Health, and, later, the director of defense research and engineering (DDRE) in the DOD (York became the first DDRE in 1958), to sit in on its meetings as consultants. Almost in a class by himself was Emanuel Piore, who, first as chief scientist of the Office of Naval Research and then as director of research at IBM (a position that Killian helped secure for him), had long been active in ODM-SAC affairs as a consultant.66 In the wake of Sputnik he became the main troubleshooter for Killian despite the fact that he would not be made a full member of PSAC until 1959. He was, as he saw it, simply an insider: When Killian took the job, he made it a condition that either Jim Fisk or I would back him up. One of us had to be in residence in Washington. Eventually, I became an official member of the committee, but it was almost irrelevant whether I was a member or not. I was part of the inner circle of the committee from the beginning, welcomed to every meeting.67

In the future, when their terms expired, almost all the chairmen and a few key members, such as Bronk, Fisk, Land, Piore, Harvey Brooks of Harvard, and Colin MacLeod of New York University, would become consultants-at-large and participate in nearly all of the committee’s activities. In the 1960s, these PSAC alumni consultants would play as important a role in the politics of science as current members.68 Inevitably, who sat on the PSAC affected what came out of it. Members were more likely to be science administrators than working scientists—department chairs,

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college deans, laboratory directors, and university presidents. As historian Rebecca Lowen has illustrated with the case of Stanford University, the interest of science administrators did not always coincide with that of the working scientists.69 Among PSAC’s science administrators, layers of networks overlapped: scientific (physicists, e.g., had already formed bonds in their field), institutional (several worked for the same universities or industrial labs), and political (PSAC members would often support the same candidates). “A Cambridge mafia” dominated PSAC, as a large number of MIT and Harvard faculty and alumni served as committee and panel members, a fact that often subtly colored their science policy advice to favor elite universities. As MIT president, Killian enjoyed especially the respect and loyalty of industrial scientists, such as Land, Fisk, Baker, and Piore, who had played a key role in his TCP investigation and would be most active in the early PSAC. These close connections among PSAC members might have helped make the committee into what Kistiakowsky called a “coherent, thinking organism,” but it also gave them the appearance of an “old boys’ club,” in both a symbolic and a literal sense.70 The committee remained an all-male cast throughout its existence. Some members of its secretarial staff were women, but their critical role in educating the scientists about the inner workings of the White House and Washington has often been neglected.71 Neither was there much racial or ethnic diversity in the committee, except for the presence of a number of Jewish American and immigrant scientists.72 Remarkably, the establishment of the new science advisory system involved only the president, his close aides, and a few prominent scientists, without meaningful participation of the scientific community at large or the public. Neither did the BOB, which had been largely responsible for the creation of the ODM-SAC in 1950–1951, and Congress, which last spoke on science policy with the NSF Act, play any significant part. Like the NAS, PSAC was a semipublic institution whose establishment derived as much from American public scientists’ desire to promote basic research and expand the role of scientists in the federal government as from the latter’s need for assistance.73 Interestingly, it operated on largely a nonpartisan basis; many of its members were Democrats but Eisenhower refused to intervene even when pressured by other members of his party.74 The new PSAC convened on the same day as the White House announcement, at which time Rabi resigned the chairmanship (but remained a member) and Killian was elected to succeed him.75 Although PSAC retained the option of electing a chairman other than the science adviser, the Rabi–Killian transition set a precedent that would be followed in the future to help maintain unity. At the committee’s meeting in early January 1958, members elected Fisk and Bacher as co-vice chairmen.76 With a sense of urgency, most PSAC members devoted substantial time to the committee’s work; York and Kistiakowsky even worked full time on the all-important satellite and missile reports for several months. Killian quickly appointed panels in PSAC to provide advice for Eisenhower regarding space, missiles, a nuclear test ban, and, significantly, science policy. Usually chaired by PSAC members, these (and other) PSAC panels drew their members mostly from outside the committee, thus enabling PSAC to utilize a network of several

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hundred scientists and engineers who were experts in their fields. In contrast to the massive and semiautonomous Killian TCP and Gaither panels of the ODM-SAC, the PSAC panels were often low-key operations focusing on specific issues. Early on, PSAC recognized the problem that its panels, as groups of specialists, could become parochial advocates for a certain policy, or, in the case of policy for science, could become advocates for their own respective fields. One way to counter such tendencies was to balance panel membership with people holding different points of view. Another way was to put specialist panel reports and recommendations through a thorough scrutiny by the full PSAC, which, as a gathering of generalists of stature and independence, could bring a broader perspective to the discussion. Thus PSAC created a two-tier system to achieve a kind of functional, collective objectivity not through cognitive purity or a priori elimination of bias, but as the result of a reasoned, balanced clash of ideas and interests.77 The new science advisory system received enthusiastic support from the scientific community as well as from the public.78 Many regarded it as one of the most significant steps Eisenhower undertook in response to the Sputnik crisis. It marked a new level of centralization of science in the federal government, never before achieved except during wartime, and had far-reaching implications for American defense and science policy. Although the NSF worried, again, that the new science advisers in the White House would further erode its statutory role in science policymaking, it nevertheless supported the move as giving scientists more control over military R&D.79 A few scientists, most notably Wallace Brode, a veteran government scientist and president-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, privately lamented the fact that Killian was not a trained scientist, but most scientists found Killian a wise choice for the post of science adviser.80

Conclusion Thus, only weeks after the onset of the Sputnik crisis, a new, vigorous presidential science advising system was in place. For Eisenhower, having his own scientists meant a better understanding and control of government programs that increasingly involved technical considerations. In public relations, they provided a shield to deflect political criticism, to slow down the space race, and to move toward nuclear arms control. They also helped the White House to resist what it regarded as undesirable reform proposals, such as an expansion of the NSC or the establishment of a Department of Science.81 Although the leak of the Gaither report showed the hazards of an outside group—never again would Eisenhower approve such an autonomous task force—the science adviser–PSAC arrangement proved an effective and valuable asset to the White House.82 As Gordon Gray, Eisenhower’s last national security adviser, later pointed out, “the reconstitution and elevation of the Science Advisory Committee in 1957 . . . had substantially eliminated the use of consultant groups which had been put together in the past such as the Technological Capabilities Panel, the Gaither Committee, etc.”83 Clearly, public pressure, political expediency, and policy considerations prompted Eisenhower to create the presidential science advisory system. But

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could he have chosen a different science adviser and brought in a different group of scientists than PSAC? Could he, for example, have appointed Edward Teller or Ernest Lawrence, who had just three months before Sputnik met with Eisenhower to lobby for the “clean bomb” and to argue against a test ban? Teller, in fact, was so ubiquitous in the media in the aftermath of Sputnik’s launch, including appearances on the cover of Time and on Edward Murrow’s See It Now television program, that David Lilienthal noted in his diary that “Teller’s is now the featured face (instead of Oppenheimer’s) in the role of scientific statesman.”84 Or could Eisenhower picked Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist whom the Army had brought from Germany at the end of World War II and who was widely celebrated as a space enthusiast and expert?85 The fact that Eisenhower chose Killian and the ODM-SAC indicated his agreement with the latter in the intense debate and negotiation over the meaning of Sputnik: it represented less a military and technological threat than one in science and education. Furthermore, his awareness of the Rabi–Teller division over a nuclear test ban also confirmed his desire to bring in scientists who could advance his own efforts to control, not accelerate, the nuclear arms race. In other words, he was as much attracted by PSAC’s technological skepticism as he was repulsed by Teller and Lawrence’s technological enthusiasm. Thus, a hope of using PSAC to raise the voice of moderation helped overcome Eisenhower’s considerable worry about the expanding role of scientists in public policy. In contrast to his complaint in July 1957 about “scientists . . . running the government,” he openly welcomed Killian and PSAC to “provide him with a scientific point of view” in policy matters.86 His wariness about scientists’ policy role in general did not completely disappear; it would resurface in his warning against the scientific-technological elite in his farewell speech. However, Eisenhower appreciated PSAC scientists’ technological skepticism enough that he encouraged them to play an active role in public policy, including space, military technology, arms control, and science policy. In contrast, he grew disenchanted with the Teller–Lawrence group. Three days after he reconstituted PSAC, Eisenhower complained to Strauss bitterly about Teller’s Pearl Harbor analogy, commenting wryly that “Scientists have suddenly become military and political experts” and vice versa.87 For American public scientists, the establishment of a presidential science adviser and PSAC marked the achievement of a long-sought goal. From the Steelman and Stewart reports of the 1940s, to the Golden plan of 1950, and through the ODM-SAC’s Princeton memorandum of 1952 and various other attempts of the committee during the Eisenhower administration, scientists had agitated for an institutional base at the top of the U.S. government. With the PSAC system, they finally regained a voice for science in national policymaking. Because of the nature of the Sputnik crisis, it was clear from the beginning that the new science advisers would play a key role in both science in policy and policy for science. How they approached and balanced their dual, and sometimes confl icting, mandates would help determine not only the fate of science advice at the top of the government, but also the science–state partnership for the remainder of the Eisenhower administration and beyond.

6

PSAC and the Launching of NASA, 1957–1960

With PSAC’s ascendance into the White House in 1957, American public scientists moved institutionally closer to executive policymaking than ever before in peacetime. The first order of business for PSAC was to help President Eisenhower restore confidence in the American space program, which appeared technically incompetent and organizationally confused. At a press conference on February 5, 1958, the president announced that he had asked Killian and PSAC to “give for the United States a program of outer space achievement.”1 The decision was an unusual one in that it allowed a group of technically private citizens to shape one of the most important public policies of the day. That Eisenhower took such a step and had it accepted by the American public and polity was testimony to the effectiveness, in this period of American history, of what political scientist Yaron Ezrahi has called the “depoliticization of executive action” through the “utilization of science and technology.” Symbols of openness and rationality, science and technology functioned as political and ideological resources, allowing the president to present his actions as “impersonal, nonarbitrary, and publicly accountable measures to enhance the public good.” 2 It was also a powerful demonstration of what historian Robert Griffith called Eisenhower’s “quest for a corporate commonwealth in which the contradictions of modern capitalism would be resolved through cooperation, self-restraint, discipline, and disinterested public service.”3 The theoretical attraction of the strategy, however, did not mean that its actual application would be smooth sailing. Sharp clashes and tension soon ensued, as interested parties, including the scientists themselves, sought to protect and advance their often divergent political, ideological, and institutional agendas. At stake were both the organization and direction of the American space program. Should the United States consider space a national security priority and carry out a Manhattan District-style crash project under the military, or regard it primarily as a peaceful pursuit and put it under a civilian organization? Should the United States concentrate on popular and spectacular feats, thus increasing American national prestige and gaining Cold War propaganda effects, or follow a scientific agenda? Whatever space policy PSAC was to recommend would have to satisfy public and congressional pressure for action, solve—or at least get around—the problem of interservice rivalry in the military, and promote, as much as possible, their own interest in the advancement of science. In other words, space policy encompassed both science in policy—how would science and technology contribute to the achievement of national objectives in space—and policy for science, or how the space program would further progress in relevant scientific fields. 88

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The International Geophysical Year Satellite Investigation PSAC actually had begun to advise Eisenhower on space even before his public announcement in February. On December 6, 1957, the first American attempt to launch a satellite failed miserably when the Navy’s Vanguard rocket exploded after barely leaving the launching pad. The intense public and media reaction made the aborted attempt a national catastrophe, but the outcome was not entirely surprising, given its low priority and a launching schedule contrived under White House pressure.4 The pressure actually backfired: the Vanguard fiasco forced Eisenhower to allow the Army, whose ambition to get into the space program he had earlier denied, to launch a satellite using its better tested Jupiter C rocket. Yet, concern over interservice rivalry made him withhold the final go-ahead until the last minute. He hoped that Vanguard would prove itself.5 To help the president and the Pentagon decide whether the Navy or the Army had the best chance of launching satellites during the International Geophysical Year, Killian appointed a panel under Herbert York, with George Kistiakowsky and Emmanuel Piore as members.6 Working feverishly, the York panel came up with a preliminary report to PSAC within a week; it reached Eisenhower before Christmas. Essentially, the panel found the Vanguard team competent but pressured to meet deadlines. So many key parts of the Vanguard had not been fl ight-tested that York told PSAC on December 11 that he would “bet even money against” its next firing. In contrast, the Army team had tested most of its rocket parts and was likely to succeed even on its first try. Thus, the York panel recommended to Killian that instead of expanding the Vanguard program, the administration should shift resources to the Army’s Jupiter C to launch the several satellites for the International Geophysical Year. Eisenhower heeded this advice.7 The technical predictions of the York panel proved accurate. Vanguard indeed failed again on its second try on January 26, 1958, and five days later Jupiter C carried the first American satellite, Explorer I, into orbit. The subsequent performance of the two systems also fell within the scope of the panel’s assessment, with the Vanguard finally redeeming itself on March 17, 1958. Through this narrow and yet extremely important example, Eisenhower found in PSAC an indispensable technical arm that could help him make a decision based on sound knowledge. Thus, instead of creating a special presidential commission on space to examine the issue for him, as proposed by the NSF, he entrusted the task to PSAC. Unfortunately, however, not all policies were so clearly a matter of technical judgment, not the least of which were the questions of the direction and organization of the space program.8

Space for Science As Explorer I brought welcome relief to the United States, national attention turned to the administration’s long-range space policy, which in turn intensified an internal space race in Washington as agencies competed to become the organization running the U.S. space program. There was also public pressure for what

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Eisenhower viewed as glamorous, expensive, but useless stunts to beat the Soviets in space. Concerned with these developments, Eisenhower asked PSAC to examine for him both the question of direction—what projects should be undertaken by the American space program—and the question of organization—what organizational form the program should take. Often the two questions were intertwined, requiring both technical and policy determinations. In response, Killian and PSAC established a panel on space science and technology under Purcell, with York, Edwin Land, and James Doolittle as members, to study and report on these issues to the full committee from December 1957 to March 1958.9 Key to PSAC scientists’ deliberation on the direction of the space program was its effect on the funding for nonspace scientific research. Several members felt that the dramatic effects of Sputnik had stimulated “undisciplined enthusiasm” for an inflated importance of space. Kistiakowsky called the situation a “great tragedy”: the uninformed public could easily give space half a billion dollars while leaving other sciences starving. He urged the committee to educate the public about the proper relation between space exploration and science. The former could be useful to the nation only if the latter was vigorously supported as well.10 Rabi thought the clamor for grandeur in space was “outside [the] realm of science.”11 It distorted national priorities, as space fl ight or beating the Russians to the moon became more important than finding a cure for cancer. Space’s share of federal funding, Rabi believed, was out of proportion, especially when compared to that of basic research. In FY 1958, basic research, encompassing all the sciences, received $280 million, whereas space alone garnered $130 million and was expected to receive much more in the future. “Should we as [a] committee go along with this prog[ram] without further exam[ination?]” Rabi asked, adding that “We are likely to have to do explaining.” Killian and Cal Tech physicist H. P. Robertson agreed with Rabi that the imbalance between basic science and space funding was troubling.12 Here, PSAC members clearly linked a national public policy with their institutional self-interest—the funding of science. Not everyone was, however, pessimistic about space’s impact on science. Hans Bethe believed that it “would be a great mistake for us to oppose popular enthusiasm even tho[ugh] misguided.” He discounted the fear that space would take money away from science, recalling that many European physicists had originally worried that CERN (the European Council for Nuclear Research) would divert funds from their own fields, but in fact the “opposite has happened.” Bethe proposed that PSAC endorse the space program but at the same time advocate increased support for other sciences. Doolittle seconded Bethe’s position, urging the committee to use space as a means to “enhance public interest in science per se.”13 Other members, although not without misgivings, emphasized the many real benefits that would come from space explorations. Edwin Land, for example, agreed with Rabi and Kistiakowsky that PSAC should dismiss “stunts” or “athletic contests” with the Soviet Union and give Eisenhower “bona fide” scientific objectives for the American space program.14 It should let Congress know the costs involved in going to Mars and let it decide “whether we should buy [a] ticket.”15

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But he also believed that the space program could save more than it cost by its contributions to the military strength of the country in the area of reconnaissance. Likewise, Lloyd Berkner foresaw “saving [the] entire expense simply by meteorological gains.”16 Spiritually, Land thought that space exploration represented “one of [the] best human crusades,” a feeling shared by Jerome Wiesner. Detlev Bronk added that “the prestige factor can’t be ignored.” Bethe and Rabi also thought space provided a great opportunity to engage the Soviet Union in international scientific cooperation, although others doubted the feasibility of such an endeavor because civilian and military space programs were so closely tied together.17 Notably, these discussions focused on space as technology; space as science was conspicuously missing, reflecting perhaps the fact that no astronomer or geophysicist served on PSAC. For his part, President Eisenhower shared PSAC’s skepticism against “stunts” in the parallel political debate on space. Whereas PSAC worried about space’s adverse impact on science funding, Eisenhower feared that a costly space program would weaken national security and the economy. He took a dim view of lunar probes, for example, because “we didn’t have any enemy on the moon!” This narrow definition of national security, however, was challenged at a meeting by Republican Senator William Knowland of California, who reminded the president of the great psychological effects of Sputnik at home and abroad. Eisenhower grudgingly relented, but only approved the lunar probe project on the condition that “it could be accomplished with some missile already developed or nearly ready.” Overall, Eisenhower vigorously demanded the application of “a rule of reason” in space and a stop of the rush into “all possible glamour performances.”18 To provide this “rule of reason,” he asked his science advisers to examine the specific plan for lunar probes before issuing the final go-ahead.19 Such a study was carried out by the Purcell panel. It soon submitted a list of several satellites and lunar probes as the next phase of the U.S. space program. Although one lunar shot, by the Air Force, was recommended to counteract and mitigate the psychological impact of a possible early Soviet feat in that direction, most of these projects were devoted to scientific research.20 A month later the DOD formally proposed to launch these projects, under the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a new agency established to lessen interservice rivalry by centralizing anti-ICBM and space projects in the Pentagon. On advice from Killian and PSAC, Eisenhower approved the projects with the stipulation that those of a civilian nature should be transferred to the new space agency once it was established. He also asked that no money for the lunar probes should come from the armed services. “I desire that the identity of these projects as ARPA projects be maintained throughout.”21 Meanwhile, PSAC’s extensive internal discussions and external consultations with other interested parties served as an effective consensus-building process. Eventually, PSAC reached the agreement that it should endorse a reasonably strong civilian space program, but should make sure that nonspace sciences were also adequately supported. Indeed, PSAC hoped that the space program itself could focus on scientific research and exploration, with due consideration to prestige and

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exploration factors. Above all, PSAC emphasized that the space program’s expected huge expenditure should not be laid at the feet of science and thereby work against science in the federal budgetary process.22 To summarize this consensus, the Purcell panel worked out an outline of scientific research that could be carried out in space.23 It also compiled a timetable for space exploration, basing it on technologies then foreseen. In terms like “early” (two years), “later” (two to five years), “still later” (five to fifteen years), and “much later still,” it predicted dates when such specific goals as unmanned lunar exploration, man in space, man to moon, and planetary voyages could be realized. Eisenhower enthusiastically embraced the report as a step toward the “rule of reason” in space. Seeing its potential in moderating the space race both internationally and at home, the president asked Killian, Purcell, and York to put on briefings for the NSC, the Cabinet, and the State Department.24 The president personally sat through both the NSC and the Cabinet briefings, commenting at one point, “I think I understand this for the first time”: the satellite was not “up” there, but “out” there.25 The “show on the road” became legendary in the lore of PSAC’s education of presidents and government officials. As Purcell later put it, “The people that needed to be educated were not merely the public at large but people in responsible positions in Washington.”26 In March 1958, the White House published these briefings as one of the first PSAC reports, Introduction to Outer Space. A best seller, the report crystallized PSAC’s and most scientists’ views on space, and became one of the most significant documents of the Space Age, with great impact on the direction of the early American space efforts. In it, PSAC listed four factors that “give importance, urgency, and inevitability to the advancement of space technology”: human urge for exploration, military applications, national prestige, and scientific research. Among the “bona fide” scientific objectives, it enumerated research on the earth’s magnetic field, the van Allen belts, cosmic rays, meteorology, and astronomy—notably all physical sciences; there was no mention of exobiology (research on life outside of the earth), which had been advocated by biologist Joshua Lederberg and others outside of PSAC.27 The committee also mentioned practical space applications such as weather forecasting, telecommunications, and military reconnaissance, but discounted the popular notion of a “satellite bomber,” pointing out, as York and Purcell told Eisenhower earlier, that space was not “up” there but “out” there, and that a weapon could not be simply dropped from the sky. After all, the report said, the earth appeared still the best weapon carrier. In addition, as suggested by Rabi and Bethe, the report called for international cooperation in space. To prevent space endeavors from overshadowing nonspace scientific research, the report recommended that the latter “go forward without loss of pace,” or, preferably “at an increased pace,” implying, of course, increased federal funding. Finally, the report called on the public to support space exploration “as part of a balanced national effort in all science and technology.” In short, space should be explored for the benefit of science, not to its detriment.28 Eisenhower not only heartily endorsed the report as “a sober, realistic presentation prepared by leading scientists,” but also used it effectively to fend off

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undesirable space weapons systems or manned space programs. When he was asked, in April 1958, about a declaration by von Braun’s Army group that they could send a man in space within a year and ahead of the Soviets, Eisenhower, clearly unenthusiastic, brought out PSAC as his countering experts: I have an advisory, scientific advisory committee. I have great faith in their sincerity, in their disinterestedness so far as different services and different agencies are concerned, in bringing about the things that they believe should be discovered and accomplished in the space field. . . . [T]hey did not put a manned space vehicle, of any kind, “early.”29

In other words, Eisenhower saw the von Braun team as a parochial “pressure group” that pushed for its own selfish institutional interest while upholding PSAC as a model of disinterested professionals serving the common good. His qualifications on their disinterestedness, however, indicated that he was not unaware of their possible self-interest beyond matters of interservice rivalry.

Civilian Control of Space Indeed, as public scientists, PSAC fought for the interest of science not only in the debate over the direction of the American space program, but also in the discussion that shaped its organizational form. Whereas PSAC’s discussion on a program for space had focused on the issue of the balance between space and science, its concurrent study on organization pivoted on the matter of civilian versus military control, with much at stake for American science. At the time, four models presented themselves: the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA), an independent civilian agency with a long tradition of cooperative research in aeronautics with the military and industry; ARPA; the AEC; and a new space agency. As the Purcell panel examined these options, advocates for each made their case both in private and in public. The powerful congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy ( JCAE) thought the AEC had a claim on space because of its work on nuclear-powered rockets. The agency had great appeal to many scientists and PSAC as well, due in part to its excellent support of basic research and its mature management system. However, for several reasons the AEC soon dropped out of the race. Despite the JCAE’s rhetoric, the AEC really had little to do with space; the success of the nuclear rockets appeared far in the future. Besides, its important mission in nuclear weapons development prevented it from taking on another huge national enterprise. A new space agency starting from scratch was rejected by PSAC on the ground that, aside from a step in the proliferation of new agencies, it would take too long to set up.30 Thus, PSAC found itself choosing between ARPA and NACA, each with strong advocates and detractors within the committee. Initially many PSAC members were rather skeptical of the technical and organizational soundness of ARPA despite the fact that Killian had played a key role in its creation. At its meeting in January 1958, PSAC questioned the wisdom of ARPA’s taking on both space science

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and missile defense while separating them from ballistic missile development in the services. Furthermore, the committee did not think it wise to put the AICBM together with space science. As Land put it, “AICBM [was] urgent—no urgency on Mars.”31 Nevertheless, PSAC agreed to withhold comment about ARPA, awaiting its own comprehensive study of DOD organization.32 The question was not whether the Pentagon should get into space; it already was there and would stay there to pursue legitimate military projects such as reconnaissance. Choosing ARPA would allow for ready utilization of existing hardware and experience within the DOD. Furthermore, the DOD claimed interests even in civilian space sciences, which might have military implications. Thus, significantly, and contrary to the perception of many, President Eisenhower initially leaned toward lodging the space organization within the DOD because it had both “paramount interest” and the necessary hardware and because doing so might help avoid waste on fancy nondefense space projects. If the NSF or other scientific agencies wanted to conduct peaceful space research, they could contract with the DOD, which would act as an “operating agent,” following the pattern of the International Geophysical Year project.33 Killian, who consistently sought to strengthen the ties between the Pentagon and the scientific community, shared this view in the immediate post-Sputnik days. It seemed to him “entirely feasible for the DOD to be the major sponsor and entrepreneur of space research and development, both military and ‘non-military.’”34 Likewise, York and H. P. Robertson, chairman of the DOD’s Defense Science Board, made the case for ARPA at PSAC’s December 1957 meeting.35 Other PSAC scientists, however, felt uneasy about making ARPA the main U.S. space agency, suspecting that the military was trying to hold the American space program permanently within its own control. The question was not only one of public policy—was it best to lodge the entire space program permanently in the Pentagon—but also one of science policy. Should civilian scientists be forced to turn to the DOD for support in space research, or should there be a civilian space agency to sponsor such research? At the meeting where York and Robertson made the case for ARPA, many others spoke against it, not so much on moral as on practical grounds. Although recognizing the need for cooperation from the military, which alone had the hardware, they feared that science would be “dominated” in the DOD. Wiesner, Kistiakowsky, Berkner, and Doolittle—a former general but now chairman of NACA—all suggested an agency outside the DOD, “coupled” with the military but not dominated by it. Rabi, who had fought against the militarization of science during World War II, now spoke out most emphatically on the issue.36 The space program, he said, “would thrive best under civ[ilian] org[anization].”37 There was also concern in PSAC that giving space to the DOD might “dilute” vital defense efforts such as reconnaissance or antiballistic missile projects. Finally, it was felt that a military-controlled space organization would impede international cooperation in space.38 PSAC members’ strong opposition to the ARPA option helped change both Killian’s and Eisenhower’s mind about lodging the space program in the Pentagon.

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By the end of 1957, Killian came to share PSAC’s concern that centralization of space R&D in the DOD would restrict and militarize scientific research.39 Remarkably, then, at a meeting between Eisenhower and legislative leaders on February 4, 1958, Killian contradicted Eisenhower and spoke up about his reservations as to “the relative interest and activity of military vs. peaceful aspects.” Vice President Richard Nixon agreed with Killian, expressing his hope that nonmilitary space research would be carried forward by an agency “entirely separate from the military.” He thought letting the DOD manage the space program would damage the U.S. posture in the world and slight those peaceful projects that had no military value in sight. At this point, Eisenhower conceded that he did not preclude eventually having “a great Department of Space.” In the end, it was agreed that PSAC would tackle the problem, which led to the president’s request cited at the beginning of the chapter.40 PSAC’s push in the White House for civilian control of space research reflected and reinforced a similar movement both inside and outside the government. In a fight reminiscent of the scientists’ movement in 1946 for civilian control of atomic energy, several scientific organizations publicly opposed what they regarded as military control of space. The NSF called for a new civilian space agency and a large-scale space program “over and above” the military efforts. In a letter to Killian, Waterman expressed his view that the human urge for exploration, not Cold War rivalry, was the fundamental reason for space activities. Public opinion, he believed, strongly favored “a strictly scientific, civilian-managed program” without military overtones. Finally, he argued that space applications like weather forecasting and global communications would be expedited in a civilian agency better than in the DOD, which had to justify activities and expenditures in military terms.41 The Federation of American Scientists, which had led the scientists’ movement in 1946, again mobilized itself to lobby Congress and the administration for civilian control of space.42 PSAC, seeking an alternative to ARPA, then focused on NACA. At the committee’s December 1957 meeting on space organization, Bronk was the first to suggest that NACA might be “worth looking into.” Killian agreed, saying that he was enthusiastic for a “NACA type” of organization coupled to the DOD. James Fisk went further, suggesting that NACA itself become the space agency. It would, Fisk said, both satisfy the military needs in space and retain civilian control, just as the AEC did in the nuclear area. The leadership of NACA naturally welcomed the suggestion as an opportunity for the old agency to modernize. Speaking after Fisk, NACA director Hugh Dryden, who sat in PSAC meetings as a consultant, made a low-key appeal on behalf of his agency by highlighting its work in space and its excellent record of cooperating with the DOD and the universities. More forcefully, Doolittle, as both PSAC member and NACA chairman, made clear that it was not only desirable but imperative for NACA to enter into space. Questioned by Killian about space’s possible adverse impact on NACA’s traditional role, Doolittle responded that NACA needed the new orientation to survive.43 Thus by the end of 1957, NACA already emerged as the leading candidate among members of PSAC

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in the race to become the American space agency. Moving quickly, on January 27, 1958, NACA staff publicly proposed to take over the leadership of space research in cooperation with existing military and civilian science agencies.44 Facing NACA’s offensive, advocates for ARPA did not easily give up the fight. The presidential request to PSAC for a study on space organization in February 1958 only made the discussions at the committee meetings more charged. During that month’s PSAC meeting, York, who would soon become chief scientist of ARPA, defended ARPA against NACA, which, he pointed out, lacked contracting authority and relied on civil-service laboratories. In response, Fisk suggested that NACA could seek authorization to use “captive-contractors,” as did the AEC, which contracted with the University of California to run York’s own Livermore Laboratory. Doolittle agreed, and assured the committee that NACA, if given sufficient authority and support, could “grow up” to administer the space program in coordination with the DOD, AEC, NSF, and the NAS. Dryden was also confident that NACA could adapt to the new method, although he conceded that contracting might change NACA’s operating pattern. Waterman supported the NACA team.45 York’s continued advocacy of ARPA within PSAC soon acquired a sinister dimension in the eyes of the NACA leadership, especially after the announcement in March 1958 that he would become ARPA’s chief scientist. Indeed, NACA was suspicious of the new agency from the beginning. Dryden reported to Waterman that ARPA’s new director, Roy Johnson, a former General Electric executive, was “terrible,” with no conception of either science or space and only a strong desire to “classify everything.” Dryden claimed to have spent “an hour and a half to get started on educating him.” York knew science, but disturbed Dryden even more by his “unconcealed ambition” to become the overall manager of the U.S. space program and to build “his own empire” from ARPA. Killian, according to Dryden, was aware of the situation and would soon take Dryden, Doolittle, and York off the space panel to avoid charges of a “rigged” report on space.46 Yet, as if to confirm Dryden’s fear, ARPA did, as mentioned earlier, begin to sponsor nonmilitary space projects in early 1958.47 The worries of Dryden and many other scientists were soon laid to rest, however, as PSAC and Killian recommended to Eisenhower that NACA be expanded into the new American civilian space agency. The Purcell panel had reached such a conclusion in late February and early March 1958. Its organization subpanel, with key participation from the BOB, studied and discussed the matter widely with interested federal agencies and outside experts. Choosing NACA, the panel pointed out, would solve the problems of the militarization of space inherent in the ARPA approach. In addition, NACA had worked well with both military and civilian institutions, conducted space research, and had a high international reputation.48 Following PSAC’s lead, a consensus soon emerged within the administration that NACA indeed could be reconstituted to form a nucleus around which to build the U.S. civilian space agency. The DOD, probably not given the opportunity by the White House to recognize fully the magnitude of the planned NACA assignment, concurred in the plan. McElroy was unhappy about this outcome but Quarles, his

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deputy, agreed with Killian and PSAC that putting a man in space was primarily a civilian, not military, undertaking.49 The BOB then drafted, in cooperation with Killian’s office, a memorandum recommending such a move. In early March 1958, Killian, BOB director Percival Brundage, and Nelson A. Rockefeller, chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on Government Organization, presented the NACA proposal to Eisenhower. By now, as Killian recalled later, Eisenhower “clearly leaned toward a civilian rather than a military agency” and readily approved the recommendation.50 Why did the president change his mind? He was naturally sympathetic toward the move to reduce militarization of American life, especially after the new proposal addressed his concern over duplication between civilian and military space programs. He also might have supported a civilian agency as a way to reward the scientists for their help to him in space and other areas of national policy. As Goodpaster later commented on Eisenhower’s change of mind on the space program: He gave a lot of weight to the views of the scientists. At the same time he knew that the scientists would be happier having it [space] in a civilian organization than having it given to the military. He wanted, in a way, to placate the scientists. He wanted to draw them closer to his operation.51

After the BOB translated the memorandum into a legislative bill, there followed several rounds of give and take between the White House and Capitol Hill, which finally passed the bill with some revisions. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), based on NACA, was established in July 1958.52 The establishment of NASA, of course, did not mean the end of PSAC’s participation in space policymaking. With Eisenhower’s emphatic agreement, PSAC and the science advisers (Killian and later Kistiakowsky) continued to infl uence space policy toward its dual goals: space for science and civilian control. Partly due to these scientists’ infl uence, space spectaculars were checked, and resources not needed in the military, most notably the Army’s von Braun team, were transferred to NASA during the remainder of the Eisenhower administration.53 In December 1960, a PSAC panel under the chairmanship of Donald Hornig of Princeton reported to President Eisenhower that “man-in-space cannot be justified on purely scientific grounds,” but it also acknowledged that “international political situation” and “the dream of man’s getting into space” were major motivations for the space program. In any case, it advocated unmanned space programs both for their intrinsic scientific values and as necessary support for any manned programs. Based on information from NASA, the Hornig panel believed that the next steps in the manned space program would be expensive: sending a man around the moon would cost about $8 billion and a lunar landing by 1975 would cost between $26 billion and $38 billion.54 The figures shocked Eisenhower into talking about a complete termination of the manned space program.55 It did lead him to veto the manned lunar landing project on the grounds that it was neither scientifically nor militarily useful.56 In his annual budget message to Congress on January 16, 1961, Eisenhower announced that “further testing and experimentation will be necessary

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to establish whether there are any valid scientific reasons for extending manned space fl ight beyond the Mercury program.”57 PSAC fully shared Eisenhower’s skepticism toward the manned space program but, as discussed later, their stand proved far from the last word on the subject.

Conclusion More than anything else, it was Killian’s and PSAC’s remarkable effort to moderate the space race that earned Eisenhower’s lasting gratitude during the initial postSputnik days. When Killian resigned his position to return to MIT in mid-1959, Eisenhower wrote him a warm personal note in which he singled out his role in the space program: No one did more than you, in those days, to bring reason, fact and logic into our plans for space research and adventure. I shall never cease to be grateful for the patience with which you initiate me into the rudiments of this new science and the part that the government should play in its development, and for the skill with which you assembled a capable scientific group of people to take over many resulting responsibilities.58

In his own memoir, Killian gave the credit to PSAC scientists’ technological skepticism: “I think it fair to say that when the Sputnik panic was being used to support an orgy of technological fantasies and a speed-up in the arms race, PSAC was a voice of sense and moderation, and that this was one of the reasons it commanded the confidence of its beleaguered chief.”59 The birth and subsequent development of NASA offered an interesting contrast to that of the AEC, both being powerful science agencies. In 1946, it took a scientists’ movement, through grassroots campaigns, public appeals, and congressional lobbying, to secure civilian control of atomic energy in the form of the AEC.60 In 1958, the scientists, as represented by PSAC, had direct access to a generally sympathetic president, and worked within the system. Thanks to scientists’ infl uence, via reasoned argument, and also thanks to NASA’s own bureaucratic sensitivities, the resultant space agency was probably freer from military infl uence than the AEC. In its pursuit of civilian control of space, PSAC largely succeeded. However, on the question of space for science, PSAC was not nearly as effective when the Cold War dynamics in the 1960s, as we will see in later chapters, increasingly drove the American space program toward the pursuit of national prestige. Thus, although PSAC scientists succeeded brilliantly in advising Eisenhower on the technical aspects of the U.S. space program, the desirable conciliation between scientific interests and Cold War politics proved more elusive. PSAC’s successes and failures both point to the new reality of American science policy in the post-Sputnik era. The Soviet achievement in space and its great psychological impact linked science directly with national security. National prestige became an important factor in the Cold War struggle. For this reason, satellites with “key political, scientific, psychological or military import” were added, at Eisenhower’s personal direction, to the NSC’s “top priority” list, where they joined

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rank with ICBMs.61 Concurrently, with their contributions to space policy, scientists rebounded from their “wounds” in the McCarthy era to play a key role in national policymaking and to regain some measure of control of American science policy. PSAC scientists helped Eisenhower to curb what they perceived as “undisciplined enthusiasm” for space spectaculars, emphasizing instead moderation and balance in the program. Out of what they perceived to be both national interest and their own institutional self-interest, they pushed for science to take center stage in American space policy. Yet, the same connections to national prestige that gave science so much prominence in the post-Sputnik era also imposed restraints on science policy. The fact that NASA would, soon after the end of the Eisenhower presidency, adopt the goal of “beating the Soviets” in space glory, over PSAC objections, says as much about the limits of PSAC’s political perception as it does about the unpredictability of American politics of science.

7

Military Technology, 1957–1960

If getting the American space program off the ground provided a placating pill for the agitated American public, rationalizing the military R&D programs was the medicine Eisenhower sought to solve what he perceived as real problems. Indeed, nowhere did PSAC articulate its sense of technological skepticism better than in the area of military technology. It pointed out the limitations as well as the potentials of the various defense projects that mushroomed amidst the post-Sputnik technological rush. Their advice proved enormously helpful to the president and made him include science advice in other areas of public policy. Here, as in space, PSAC scientists often crossed the boundary between the technical and the political. They critically examined missile programs, nuclear-powered bombers, and missile defense. They helped draft and implement a major reorganization of the DOD by creating the powerful Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering (ODDRE). As Thomas Gates, Eisenhower’s last secretary of defense, saw it, “all of a sudden the scientists became very important. . . . They had great veto power.”1 Yet, there was more to scientists’ involvement in military technology than their rising infl uence. How did political considerations, for example, shape the technical assessment by the scientists? In many ways, advising on military technology was an educational process not only for President Eisenhower, but for PSAC scientists, too, as they together navigated a critical phase in the making of American nuclear strategy. To a certain extent, the prominent role of scientists in military technology policy opened opportunities for scientists to argue for increased federal funding for science. As we have seen, concerns for the funding of science were a key element in PSAC scientists’ deliberation on American space policy. Compared with space, military technology represented a larger piece of the federal budget, with potentially even more far-reaching impact on both the direction and size of the government’s support of science. Thus, much was at stake as the dialectics of science in policy and policy for science played out in the area of military research and development.

Advising on Missiles Perhaps more than anything else, the perceived American “missile gap” with the Soviet Union generated fear in Sputnik’s shadow, stirring controversies and fueling partisan politics. Eisenhower dismissed the charge as an exaggeration but, reluctant to disclose secret intelligence information, he failed to calm the public. The vast technical uncertainty in estimating Soviet military strength also impeded his effort.2 Furthermore, to Eisenhower’s dismay, the military services fought the White House and each other in a race of their own for expanded weapons programs and bigger 100

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budgets, all in the name of overcoming the “gap.” The Air Force, for example, battled the Army over the adoption of their respective Thor and Jupiter missiles. In 1955, the DOD had started the rival programs as backups to each other. When both proved feasible by 1957, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson found himself in the dilemma, as he colorfully put it, of a man “who proposed to two girls, both of whom accepted.”3 Neither he, nor Eisenhower, “not being a technician,” could make a choice in the aftermath of Sputnik.4 Indecision continued until late November 1957, when Neil McElroy, Wilson’s successor, tentatively decided, with Eisenhower’s reluctant approval, to put both missiles into initial production to soften the rising criticism of the administration.5 The costly dual production decision, however, did not end the Thor–Jupiter controversy, much less the missile gap debate. Major U.S. strategic missiles then under development fell into two classes. The IRBMs, with a reach of about 1,500 miles, included, besides Jupiter and Thor, both land-based and liquid-fueled, the Navy’s submarine-launched, solid-fueled Polaris. Much longer in range were the ICBMs, all under development by the Air Force. They were the liquid-fueled Atlas, its more advanced backup, Titan (whose fuel was storable), and the most sophisticated, solid-fueled Minuteman, eventually the workhorse of the U.S. strategic strike force during the Cold War. To help the president sort out this “missile mess” and monitor this far-fl ung enterprise, Killian and PSAC appointed a PSAC panel on missiles under Kistiakowsky with James McRae, president of Sandia Labs, and later Herbert York, as members. In his first report to Killian on November 30, 1957, Kistiakowsky expressed satisfaction with the technical progress of the missile program in general but voiced sharp criticism of the dual production decision. It made no technical, managerial, or fiscal sense and was, he and McRae concluded, “not in the national interest.” Both services, they noted with alarm, intended to pursue the next phase of costly “product improvement” on their respective missiles. “We consider that allowing both to do so will be diametrically opposed to national interests.” In general, they preferred to see Thor picked out of the two because it was closer to production.6 Killian, who was more attuned to the politics of the matter, understood Kistiakowsky’s argument but reacted differently. He knew that Eisenhower had misgivings about the dual production decision. “We should not spend money because of public pressure,” the president had said in a meeting in late November 1957, “but should do what is based on real need.”7 However, Killian also sympathized with McElroy, who four days later cited public pressure to justify a final dual production decision at a meeting with Vice President Nixon and other top administration officials (Eisenhower was recovering from a stroke). Killian supported McElroy’s argument, adding that the decision would also appease the military services—“it would make the people involved in the program very happy.”8 Thus, in his first report to Eisenhower on missiles a few weeks later, Killian avoided the Thor–Jupiter controversy altogether and delivered mainly a reassurance that the U.S. program was technically “proceeding in a satisfactory manner” despite a slight lag that was caused by a late start. Trying to boost federal support of science, Killian also advocated beefing up “basic research and development” that would improve missiles in

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the future.9 Clearly, here “basic research” was not the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, but rather the mission-oriented kind. By using the same term to describe both work on missile fuels and traditional scientific projects, Killian and PSAC rhetorically linked science and national security.10 Only in his second and third memos to Eisenhower on missiles, based on subsequent Kistiakowsky reports, did Killian alert the president about the need to choose between Thor and Jupiter (and between Atlas and Titan) beyond initial deployment of four squadrons each (each squadron consisted of fifteen missiles).11 Eisenhower appreciated the politically sophisticated technical backup he received from Killian and Kistiakowsky. At a meeting on March 10, 1958, Eisenhower told the two that he had “no problem with dropping either” of the two IRBMs, although he wondered why Thor was better than Jupiter. Kistiakowsky replied that “it is not better, but simply nearer to quantity production.” Eisenhower accepted the explanation and proposed to move the Wernher von Braun team that had worked on Jupiter “to ARPA, or even NASA,” which agreed with PSAC’s thinking. He also approved PSAC’s proposal to strengthen “basic research effort on solid propellants,” on the condition that it be carried out in ARPA, or NASA, not the services. He further agreed with PSAC that the solid-fueled Minuteman and Polaris not be rushed into production before the R&D work was completed. Hoping that all these steps would help reduce interservice rivalry, he asked Killian to “prepare for him a series of decisions” to implement them.12 Through these investigations on the missile program, Eisenhower developed a close working relationship with Killian and Kistiakowsky in military technology policy. In later reports, the Kistiakowsky panel continued to make thoughtful, specific policy recommendations.13 Based on technical considerations, it picked Thor over Jupiter and Titan over Atlas as missiles for further improvement. It also strongly supported the development of both Polaris and Minuteman as stable deterrents for the future. These judicious evaluations, untainted by loyalty to any of the military services, assisted Eisenhower in his effort to build a strong, secure, but not excessive deterrent. When troubles flared in these projects, the panel explained the causes and recommended remedies; when they proceeded smoothly, the panel looked ahead and alerted Eisenhower about potential problems, and opportunities, that lurked on the horizon. It examined not only problems in R&D, but also in deployment.14 By requesting and accepting most of these recommendations Eisenhower paved the way for PSAC scientists to move beyond the technical and into the broader policy arena. He clearly enjoyed his meetings with PSAC scientists at both the policy and personal levels. “Andy,” he once told Goodpaster after such a meeting, “this is one of the finest days I’ve had as President.”15 Time and again, Eisenhower would insist on hearing from his scientists before approving a major missile program.16

Science Advice for the Pentagon As Eisenhower became reassured about the technical soundness of the missile program, he began to turn his attention to the institutional problem that underlay

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the “missile mess,” the interservice rivalry. He sought to reform the Pentagon by strengthening the secretary of defense’s authority over the individual services, by establishing unified commands (troops from different services serving under one commander appointed by the DOD), and by centralizing military R&D.17 Convinced that modern military technology made the artificial division into separate armed services ineffective, Eisenhower had resolved, even prior to Sputnik, to reorganize the DOD along these lines, which had also long been advocated by the ODM-SAC.18 Post-Sputnik developments only reinforced Eisenhower’s determination. When retiring Secretary of Defense Wilson reported to Eisenhower on October 8 that “trouble is rising” between the Army and the Air Force over the anti-intercontinental ballistic missile (AICBM) program, Eisenhower threatened to take it out of the services and adopt the “Manhattan District” approach “for all missiles.”19 A few days later, when he met with McElroy, Eisenhower again encouraged him to think about the possibility of “a fourth service” to handle all missile construction, as the Soviets did.20 A cautious former executive of Proctor and Gamble, McElroy’s first reaction to Eisenhower’s push for DOD reform was, however, “to go slowly and carefully.” After consulting with Killian, Charles Thomas of Monsanto, and James Conant of Harvard, he established ARPA, as mentioned earlier, to handle the AICBM, satellites, and other advanced R&D projects.21 In theory, ARPA was to operate outside of the services and report directly to the secretary of defense. In practice, however, ARPA contracted much of its work back to the services.22 Even then, it met with opposition from the services and the Defense Science Board (DSB).23 Nominally the highest level science advisers in the DOD but ignored by McElroy during the creation of ARPA, the DSB bitterly opposed the new agency as a step toward the downgrading of the office of assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering, to whom the DSB in effect reported.24 In contrast to McElroy’s attitude, Killian and PSAC actively promoted Eisenhower’s Pentagon reform, especially the creation of a high-level scientific position in the Pentagon to help curb interservice rivalries and slow the arms race.25 In December 1957, PSAC won Eisenhower’s support for the appointment of a deputy secretary of defense for military R&D, a step above the assistant secretary that was recommended by the President’s Advisory Committee on Government Organization.26 Killian then prodded McElroy with a major PSAC report on DOD reorganization, which represented by far the bluntest attempt by scientists to regain a voice in military R&D policy.27 Beyond organizational changes, PSAC emphasized the urgency of a renewal of the science–military partnership that was damaged in the pre-Sputnik days. The military should “strike deep roots into our civilian scientific community” and “tap our most basic and advanced research,” it maintained. To do this, PSAC argued, a new science policy was needed: We should seek to understand the way scientists work most creatively, and those conditions of free interchange and freedom to see a project through uninhibited by administrative or budgetary badgering. We must give particular

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attention to the importance of high competence and leadership of research projects and laboratories.

Criticizing the DOD’s capricious attitude toward basic research, PSAC advocated specifically long-term and flexible support for scientists so they could pursue fruitful new ideas.28 Once again, what started out as a matter of science in policy—how to make more effective use of science in defense—turned, in the hands of PSAC, into one of policy for science (i.e., how the Pentagon could best support scientists). Despite his own growing concern over the military–science ties, Eisenhower supported the PSAC proposal as a way to solve interservice rivalry.29 In response, the DOD finally proposed the appointment of a high-level director of defense research and engineering (DDRE). Ranking just below the secretary and deputy secretary of defense, the DDRE was to advise the secretary of defense and to supervise, direct, and control all research and engineering activities in the DOD, including ARPA and the WSEG (Weapons Systems Evaluation Group). In congressional testimony, McElroy freely admitted that the idea of the DDRE came from Killian, and the office at the DDRE was modeled after Killian’s in the White House.30 Then, after what Eisenhower called “the most spectacular legislative battle of that year,” the DOD reorganization bill, with slight changes, passed into law in August 1958.31 The establishment of the ODDRE proved to be a milestone in raising the voice of scientists in defense policymaking. Throughout the remainder of the Eisenhower years, PSAC and the ODDRE became indispensable allies. In late 1958, Herbert York, then chief scientist at ARPA, was selected and confirmed as the first DDRE. With vital support from the president’s science adviser and PSAC and with a staff of highly competent scientists and engineers, York soon made his office into an effective focal point in the organization of scientific efforts in the DOD.32 By then, a detachment from the Livermore Laboratory, a new national purview, and especially an exposure to the thinking of Eisenhower and other PSAC members on the limits of the nuclear weapons had turned York away from his original, Tellerian technological enthusiasm, as he later recalled: I had gone to Washington a technological optimist, full of confidence in technological fix. I came away three and a half years later gravely concerned about the all too common practice of seeking and using technological palliatives to cover over serious persistent underlying political and social problems.33

York’s growing technological skepticism led him to see the futility of solving the problem of national security via more powerful weapons. Under his guidance the ODDRE became a key link in a system of technological check and balance: it often translated PSAC’s philosophy of technological moderation and restraints into actual program guidelines. After all, York was not only “on tap,” as an adviser to the secretary of defense and the president, but also “on top” as an administrator with budgetary power. Besides military research and development, PSAC sought to centralize the U.S. military intelligence and communications organizations. In both these endeavors,

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William O. Baker, vice-president of Bell Labs and a member of PSAC, played a central role.34 In military communication, PSAC paid special attention to the need for a central command and control system in the missile age. The last several years of the Eisenhower administration saw a radical transformation in communication technology with the advent of satellites, solid state electronics, and computers. At the time, each armed service was developing its own gigantic global communications network, with no provision for an adequate central system. After careful studies, Baker proposed in 1959 a unified DOD global communications system. This recommendation won Eisenhower’s strong support and eventually evolved, against the military services’ vehement opposition, into the Defense Communications Agency, which was established in May 1960.35

The Killian–Kistiakowsky Transition By early 1959, after nearly two years on the job during which the basic structure of government science advice and policymaking was in place, Killian felt that a more technically competent person should replace himself, a brilliant organizer but not a working scientist. Impressed with Kistiakowsky’s job in missile advising, Eisenhower accepted Killian’s recommendation of the Harvard chemist as his new science adviser (and PSAC elected him chairman).36 The Killian–Kistiakowsky transition brought both changes and continuities to the presidential science advising system. In contrast to Killian’s quiet, stately manners, the lanky Kistiakowsky, “Kisty” to his friends, was a much more forceful personality, with a sharp tongue and a relish for practical jokes. He once put a carton marked “Dynamite,” together with the Ian Fleming novel From Russia with Love, on the desk of Wilton B. “Jerry” Persons, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, as a birthday present.37 Indeed, the Ukraineborn former White Russian soldier-turned-chemist enjoyed the reputation of being a world authority on explosives. At the time of his appointment, the press delighted in recounting his role during World War II not only in perfecting implosion at Los Alamos, but especially in inventing “Aunt Jemima,” an explosive powder that could be mixed with flour, baked, and eaten—without exploding. That property had helped it to pass Japanese checkpoints and get into the hands of the Chinese resistance forces.38 In contrast to Killian’s belief in coupling American science with national security, Kistiakowsky harbored ambivalence toward the partnership throughout the postwar years. In the early 1950s, for example, he openly expressed concern that federal and especially military funding on basic research and graduate training at universities was turning the latter into “commercial development establishments.” Thus he supported Conant’s decision to ban classified research at Harvard, even though they both encouraged individual faculty members to consult for the military “to insure the flow of needed information to the Department of Defense.”39 He himself had continued to consult for the DOD and the CIA, but not without misgivings. “I have worked for the Government since 1940,” he told a reporter following his White House appointment in 1959, “and I’ve never stopped, unfortunately.”40

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In further contrast to Killian, who had, by necessity and inclination, largely operated behind the scenes and relied on other PSAC members for technical input, Kistiakowsky could and often did render his own advice directly to the president without having to consult with other PSAC members. This change enabled Kistiakowsky to respond more quickly to the problems facing the president. Soon the president not only developed a close working relationship with his new science adviser but also began to draw directly on his expertise in military technology. Hans Bethe, for one, believed that Eisenhower “liked Kistiakowsky even better than he did Killian.”41 Inevitably, however, this development introduced a subtle change in the dynamics within PSAC. As Kistiakowsky took on more and more of the daily operations in the White House, some PSAC members, especially Rabi, felt that inadequate attention was paid to broader issues.42 To Kistiakowsky’s dismay, other members’ sense of urgency also relaxed after the transition. He tried to goad them back into action, when, for example, he had lunch with Emanuel (“Mannie”) Piore in September 1959: I . . . rather sharply accused him and the rest of the PSAC of dropping me cold and not doing what PSAC did for Killian, i.e., being available in Washington for advice and discussion. Mannie was visibly embarrassed, but maintained that the original members of the PSAC have done their job and that it was up to me to find a new crew.43

In time, Kistiakowsky did recruit younger scientists into the PSAC orbit. In fact, rejuvenation of the committee had started before the Killian–Kistiakowsky transition. To replace those whose terms expired, five new members entered in February 1959: John Bardeen, physicist and co-inventor of the semiconductor, then at the University of Illinois; Britton Chance, a biophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania; Glenn T. Seaborg, at the time chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley; Cyril Smith, a metallurgist at the University of Chicago; and Piore himself. A year later, another round of rotation brought in four physicists: Harvey Brooks of Harvard, Wolfgang Panofsky of Stanford, Walter Zinn of Combustion Engineering, Inc., and Alvin Weinberg of Oak Ridge National Laboratory; a chemist, Donald Hornig of Princeton; a mathematician, John Tukey of Princeton; a biologist, George Beadle of Cal Tech; and physician Robert Loeb of Columbia, who had served on ODM-SAC. Like those they replaced, most of these new members were leading figures in their fields with administrative responsibilities as well as experience working with the federal government.44 Kistiakowsky tried, much more consciously than was the case under Killian, to diversify both PSAC’s composition and coverage, especially by expanding its focus from military technology and space to civilian concerns. Unfortunately, some of the biologists’ initiatives—a study of the conservation of natural resources, for example—did not go very far in this post-Sputnik era, due in part to the Eisenhower White House’s reluctance to get into matters that it thought belonged to the private sector. Eisenhower also disapproved of Kistiakowsky’s proposal for PSAC to study the technical aspects of birth control on the ground that it was a

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divisive political issue.45 Politically, Seaborg and Weinberg were brought in as part of an effort to attract moderate scientists who had been closely associated with politically conservative scientists such as Teller, Lawrence, and Eugene Wigner of Princeton.

The Missile Gap To say that Eisenhower developed trust in Kistiakowsky and PSAC did not mean that they always agreed on all issues, even in military technology. Likewise, to say that PSAC scientists exhibited skepticism toward military technological proposals did not mean that they were not concerned with the U.S. strategic posture in the post-Sputnik era. No case better illustrated these points than the notorious debate over the missile gap. Indeed this case revealed that presidential science advising was not, as has often been portrayed, a one-way process of scientists educating presidents about the technical reality, but the other way around, too, where the president’s broader perspective helped scientists interpret their technological evaluations. On the matter of the missile gap, it was President Eisenhower who infl uenced PSAC scientists’ thinking about the limits of military technology. Both before and after the Killian–Kistiakowsky transition, PSAC members struggled with the perceived missile gap with the Soviets. Although clearly no extremists, PSAC scientists, especially Kistiakowsky, nevertheless suspected a much bigger Soviet missile threat than Eisenhower believed was valid. Such views led them to oppose, in spring 1958, the State Department’s proposal for an international missile test ban.46 To PSAC, which had sponsored a study on the matter under Kistiakowsky for the NSC, the existing disparity in missile development meant that a ban would benefit the Soviets more than the United States.47 If a ban was negotiated in six months, the Soviets could well have completed major tests and use only peaceful rocket tests, allowed under State’s proposal, to build up an ICBM force, whereas the United States would not have conducted all the critical tests and could not cheat on peaceful tests because of “our democratic system.” Reversing PSAC’s argument, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles then proposed to reach a test ban within six months so that neither side would have ICBMs but the United States would enjoy advantages in IRBMs with its overseas bases.48 PSAC, however, believed that even an immediate test ban could not deny but only delay the Soviet ICBM program. Finally, in early May, Killian presented PSAC’s arguments in the NSC and won Eisenhower’s approval for shelving the missile test ban proposal.49 Shortly thereafter, Kistiakowsky, concerned about the accusation that PSAC improperly ventured beyond its technical boundary, suggested to Killian that a broader group than his panel reassess the matter of a missile test ban in the near future.50 Such a study was not organized, however, until early 1960 and when it was, the new report confirmed the earlier conclusion.51 This debate clearly indicated that PSAC took the missile gap seriously enough to advise Eisenhower against a major arms control initiative. It also demonstrated that, contrary to the charges by their critics, PSAC scientists did not pursue arms control at all cost. For his part, Eisenhower reacted with remarkable tranquility

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to his science advisers’ alarm over the missile gap. Although he agreed with PSAC members on their technical assessment, he differed from them on the strategic implications of a missile gap. For example, when Kistiakowsky and Killian told Eisenhower in February 1958 that the Soviets were one year ahead of the United States in ICBM propulsion and one year behind in warhead design, Eisenhower did not dispute their technical assessment, but neither did he appear overtly concerned. Unless the Soviets developed a capability to wipe out the American retaliatory force in a single blow, he would not worry about the missile gap.52 A year later, he told PSAC scientists that as long as the United States deployed a sufficient nuclear deterrence, he was ready “to beat off the self-proclaimed experts calling for sudden changes.”53 Above all, Eisenhower believed that the United States and the Soviets would not go to war with each other in the next five years.54 PSAC scientists understood Eisenhower’s reasoning, but the nagging fear of underestimating Soviet strength nevertheless continued to haunt them. Thus, in October 1958, Kistiakowsky, as a representative of PSAC, persuaded the official National Intelligence Board to adjust its estimate of Soviet capability upward to predict one hundred operational Soviet guided missiles by the end of 1959, a level the United States was not expected to reach until 1961–1962.55 Soon thereafter, Kistiakowsky found a new cause for concern when he participated in an East–West technical conference in Geneva on measures to prevent surprise attacks.56 Soviet refusal to consider any control over ICBMs indicated to him that the Soviet missile capability was even higher than the U.S. intelligence estimate had indicated. Once again, Eisenhower accepted the possibility that the Soviets might have produced some ICBMs before the United States, but he questioned their military and political significance. “If the Soviets should fire these weapons at us, where [would] this action . . . leave them[?]” he asked, and then expressed his strong faith in American deterrence to prevent a Soviet attack. 57 In essence, then, Eisenhower, as he had told the Gaither group earlier, saw no strategic or meaningful missile gap even as he conceded a technical one.58 He believed in sufficiency, not superiority in the nuclear deterrent—“What you want is enough, a thing that is adequate . . . for compelling the respect for your deterrent.”59 To be sure, neither Kistiakowsky nor other PSAC members believed extreme claims about the missile gap.60 Indeed, soon after he became Eisenhower’s science adviser, Kistiakowsky began to reevaluate the missile gap. On August 26, 1959, he heard a report on Soviet missiles at the National Intelligence Board, which he believed “should do a lot to silence those who maintain the [Soviet missile] threat is imaginary.”61 Several weeks later, however, a Pentagon briefing led him to observe that “the Soviets are ahead of us in propulsion, but that is all; that as far as IOC [initial operational capabilities] is concerned, we are almost even with them.”62 By late 1959 and early 1960, the missile gap began to recede even in the technical sense within the administration. With some surprise and relief, Kistiakowsky referred to a new CIA estimate in his diary and noted that “the missile gap doesn’t look to be very serious,” adding that “I hope this estimate is not a political effort to cut down on trouble with Congress.”63

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Even so, Kistiakowsky and PSAC supported moves in the Pentagon to speed up both the Polaris nuclear submarine program and the Alaska radar warning line, in case the missile gap did become militarily meaningful by mid-1961.64 At a PSAC meeting in March 1960, Killian echoed Kistiakowsky’s concern over the missile gap when he pronounced grimly that “we have failed to meet the problem of getting a reasonably secure deterrent.” PSAC, he continued, “has failed adequately to express its conviction that we will not have a secure deterrent.”65 Yet, even as he spoke, the “missile gap” was vanishing. By June 1960, the apparent lack of signs of progress in Soviet missiles began to baffle Kistiakowsky so much that he suspected that the U-2 had missed another missile range.66 On his instigation, the U.S. Intelligence Board abandoned its authoritative tone of the past, frankly acknowledging, in mid-1960, the great uncertainty in estimating the Soviet missile program.67 Finally, of course, it was with the help of reconnaissance satellites that President John Kennedy and his advisers laid the missile gap to rest in 1961, ending a debate that ironically had helped so much his own 1960 electoral victory.68 It is remarkable that despite their differing views of the missile gap during this period, PSAC continued to gain Eisenhower’s confidence, which testified to the strength of their rapport. PSAC tried to present balanced advice and Eisenhower appreciated PSAC’s technical honesty. PSAC enjoyed other advantages in its advising on missiles. It was independent of the particular armed services. Despite its many Democratic members, PSAC did not allow its disagreement over the missile gap to enter partisan politics and embarrass Eisenhower. One member, Jerome Wiesner, did work for John Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election campaign while remaining a PSAC member, but it was with Eisenhower’s express approval and on the condition that he did not publicly criticize administration policy. Neither did PSAC leak any privileged information on its missile investigation to the press, which must have been a welcome relief to Eisenhower after the uproar over the Gaither report. The missile gap episode also taught Kistiakowsky and other PSAC members about the limits of technology and especially military technology. Like York, Kistiakowsky attributed his transition from a soldierly sense of duty to a broader perspective and his increasing sense of social responsibility in large part to his contact with Eisenhower. Years later, in the preface to his published diary, he reflected that: I joined PSAC and then assumed the office [of presidential adviser] seeing myself as a technician whose task it was to execute the general policies set by my superiors. I believe the journal shows the growth of a skepticism about these policies, especially those of the Pentagon, as my term of office progressed. Conversations with the President, not all of which are here recorded, were especially infl uential in making me more of an independently thinking citizen, interested in the meaning and objectives of policies more than in their detailed execution.69

Thus began Kistiakowsky’s disillusionment with technological fixes that would culminate later in the Vietnam War era.70

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Fundamentally, PSAC and Eisenhower shared two beliefs in regard to defense policy. First, they agreed that it was in the interest of the United States and the world that the United States achieve a strong and secure nuclear deterrent before the Soviet Union did. Thus, Eisenhower always, although sometimes reluctantly, supported measures suggested by PSAC and others to reach this goal. Second, they both believed that to achieve a secure deterrent they did not have to succumb to the forces of the military-industrial complex that gained so much momentum during the post-Sputnik debate over American defense policy. Despite PSAC’s concern about the missile gap, it tried valiantly to assist Eisenhower in curbing what he regarded as a runaway arms buildup.71

Arms Race and Arms Control Inside the Pentagon Aside from the highly contentious debate over strategic missiles, PSAC was soon involved in decision making on a vast array of costly military R&D projects. In the wake of Sputnik, the military services and their industrial contractors waged campaigns to launch numerous new weapons systems. It fell to PSAC and the ODDRE to help Eisenhower control the arms buildup, and, at the same time, to promote federal support of basic research as a counterbalance to the military-technological momentum. At a PSAC meeting on December 15, 1958, Killian told the committee that the president placed importance “on the continuing advice and help from the Science Advisory Committee with emphasis on the need for objective scientific and technical advice.” Specifically, Eisenhower wanted PSAC to advise him on national security programs “looking toward elimination of waste and duplication” and on arms control. As a result, PSAC established a special group, which consisted of its vice chairmen and all its panel chairmen, to evaluate weapons programs.72 Throughout the late 1950s, PSAC devoted much of its attention to advising Eisenhower on military technology. “I spent less than 10% of my time on science as distinguished from technology,” Kistiakowsky later recalled.73 Half of the fourteen PSAC panels in June 1958, for example, dealt with military R&D. Later that year, PSAC initiated its all-important annual reviews of the military budget at Eisenhower’s direction. Under Kistiakowsky, these reviews became an especially effective vehicle for PSAC to infl uence defense policymaking. Succinctly written, they combined technical assessment and policy considerations to give the president unprecedented support in his effort to control the military R&D.74 In so doing, the committee went, once again, as in space, beyond the technical and into policy and political matters. Echoing the 1945 Franck report, PSAC defended the practice as necessary to draw out the full implications of technical considerations. For example, the preface to its review of the FY 1961 DOD budget for Eisenhower in November 1959 stated that: We have not found it possible to limit our review to purely technical considerations in view of the complex interaction between weapons technology and non-technical factors. Therefore, while recognizing that any special claims to competence that we might have are primarily in technical areas, we have not

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hesitated to discuss budget problems in the light of the interaction of strategic, tactical, and organizational considerations with technological developments.75

A year later, it reiterated the need to examine “broader military and organizational considerations” in its evaluation of military technology.76 Objections to such explicit declarations of scientists’ policy role did not disappear even in the post-Sputnik days, but they lost much of their former weight with Eisenhower’s PSAC. The committee’s integrative, expert, and independent evaluation was exactly what Eisenhower wanted. He was delighted to see scientists move beyond their “exacting minds” to evaluate technology in a broader context. At one point he told Kistiakowsky that he felt the reviews of the military budget were “the most important task” that PSAC could perform for him. In fact he valued the committee’s service in the field so much that he worried about its future after the end of his own term. During a meeting with Kistiakowsky on September 29, 1959, on PSAC’s role in military technology, the President launched into a strong appreciation of the committee and gave it his full endorsement. He expressed grave concern that his successor may not appreciate its full importance and may abandon or degrade it. He suggested, therefore, that we study the problem of whether it would be better to have Congress pass a bill to establish the committee and the office of the special assistant for science and technology.77

This was a remarkable turnaround for a president who had just two years earlier felt that a science adviser “simply adds to the burdens of the Presidency.” Kistiakowsky was ecstatic—“It was a very pleasant meeting, to say the least, and the degree of confidence expressed in us was most heartening”—although neither he, nor anyone else, followed up on Eisenhower’s suggestion of putting PSAC and the special assistant on a statutory basis, thus sowing the seed for its future vicissitudes.78 When the budget sessions came in November 1959, Eisenhower literally kept PSAC’s review in front of him, side by side with the Pentagon’s budget, during meetings with DOD officials.79 Technical feasibility, cost-effectiveness, and effects on the stability of the nuclear arms race were usually the most compelling reasons for PSAC to reject the many weapons systems proposed in the post-Sputnik era. Skeptical of excessive technological enthusiasm, PSAC insisted on proving a technology in the research phase before rushing into the costly development stage, which also allowed it to justify increased support for basic research. In their evaluation of the FY 1961 DOD budget in 1959, for example, Kistiakowsky and PSAC wrote in the introduction: We observed too much emphasis on remotely available, complex weapons systems as compared with less glamorous projects which could be of considerable military value sooner. At the same time, there is not enough emphasis placed on quality and focus in research and development to advance the state-of-theart which alone can lead to “quantum jump” in military capabilities. Specifically, we strongly recommend that budget allocation for basic research—our

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only true assurance of continuing strength in the future—be kept at least on the FY ’60 level. We also specifically recommend that programs in materials R&D and in oceanography be strengthened.80

This argument echoed the 1945 Bush report as well as the DuBridge and Rabi theses in the ODM-SAC days in their attempt to link federal support of basic research with national security. Indeed, PSAC’s support led to a considerable increase in funding for materials research and oceanography in the 1960s. No project better illustrated PSAC’s argument for critical, independent evaluation of military technology than aircraft nuclear propulsion (ANP), which aimed at making a nuclear-powered bomber.81 In the late 1940s, the Lexington study at MIT, as mentioned earlier, had concluded that the nuclear airplane was technically feasible, much to the dismay of some of its participants, such as Jerrold Zacharias, who opposed it as lacking either cost-effectiveness or a clear mission.82 As a new, glamorous technology promising long fl ight, ANP enjoyed enormous popularity within the Air Force and Congress, with the JCAE comparing it to the H-bomb and the nuclear submarine.83 Yet, after spending more than $600 million by 1957, the project, jointly sponsored by the Air Force and the AEC, suffered serious technical difficulties. Two technical approaches—direct and indirect cycles—were adopted for the design of the nuclear power plant, but both stumbled at the difficulties of shielding the pilots from radiation and the possibility of a nuclear disaster if the plane crashed. Eisenhower had tried to cancel the project early in his presidency, but a powerful military-industrial-congressional alliance kept it alive.84 In 1957, Sputnik breathed new life into the ANP project. The Air Force proposed to regain American prestige by winning an ANP race with the Soviets. The Navy also jumped on the ANP bandwagon by arguing that a heavy, low-performance ANP bomber would be useless to the Air Force, but it could be a great asset to the Navy in antisubmarine warfare. Congressman Melvin Price (D-IL), the ANP’s principal advocate within the JCAE, publicly urged Eisenhower to support the Air Force’s ANP program. At this point, Eisenhower turned to Killian and PSAC for an evaluation and advice.85 Killian and PSAC were well aware of the ANP’s controversial and sensitive nature, even within the White House. In an unusual move, Eisenhower’s naval aide, E. P. Aurand, had lobbied Killian for going ahead with the ANP and for giving it to the Navy.86 In contrast, PSAC believed that the ANP should not expand into the costly phase of systems development, but continue to focus on basic and exploratory research, which included reactor and engine development.87 This conclusion soon received confirmation from a PSAC panel on the ANP chaired by Robert Bacher. Following a review of past studies and site visits to ANP contractors, the Bacher panel dealt a further blow to the troubled project by questioning its technical feasibility. The panel recommended shifting the objective of the ANP project from engine and plane development to fundamental research on high-temperature materials and reactors (and turning a technical failure into a justification for basic research).88

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PSAC, Eisenhower, and even the secretary of defense embraced the Bacher report, but the controversy inevitably contributed to the politicization of science advising. At a high-level White House meeting on February 25, 1958, Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles suggested to Eisenhower that, at the risk of losing an ANP race with the Soviets and infuriating the JCAE, the administration should heed PSAC’s advice and focus on reactor development, and indefinitely postpone the construction of prototype aircraft. Eisenhower concurred in the decision, and Quarles quickly reorganized the Bacher panel as his own to back him up in Congress.89 Predictably, the JCAE reacted with fury. In a joint statement, Carl T. Durham, chairman of the JCAE, and Price, chairman of its Subcommittee on Research and Development, blasted the go-slow decision as inviting a Sputnik-like “humiliating defeat” to the United States. They blamed “the Killian Committee” for the decision and faulted the Bacher panel for conducting only a cursory review and for ignoring “the psychological importance” of the ANP race.90 The angry JCAE called a hearing on the ANP, at which members of the Bacher panel testified but refused to change their conclusions.91 The no-fl ight policy stayed, even after ANP proponents drummed up a report—false, as it turned out—that the Soviets had fl ight-tested their ANP.92 As the ANP debate raged, a war of words soon erupted among the various science advisory bodies of the government. It pitted Herbert York, who, as DDRE, took over the Pentagon’s ANP policy after Quarles’s death in 1959, and PSAC on one side, against the GE engineers, the Air Force’s Scientific Advisory Board, and the General Advisory Committee of the AEC on the other.93 In 1959, York formally and publicly announced a policy of deferring fl ight tests until a power plant became feasible.94 PSAC supported York’s position, and even went further sometimes to question the existing level of expenditure on ANP. To PSAC, the ANP was not only technically problematic, but also inefficient when compared with missiles and rapidly improving chemically powered aircraft.95 By the end of the Eisenhower presidency, York and his staff, again with strong support from PSAC, proposed to terminate work on the direct cycle and limit work on the indirect cycle to research only.96 Why was the ANP not killed outright? After all, by the end of 1959, everyone involved agreed that it was, in Kistiakowsky’s words, “definitely a technical failure.”97 As a political problem, it was kept going at a reduced level largely to placate the military-industrial complex. It appears that Killian, Kistiakowsky, and PSAC would have been happy to see it ended, but they recognized the political reality.98 Their drive to increase federal funding for science might have also led them to support the continuation of the research phase. Such an approach, however, gave rise to the growing perception that PSAC was interested only in research and led disgruntled Congressmen to resist the expansion of federal funding for science. Once again, science in policy was connected with policy for science. The controversy over the ANP did not, however, lead PSAC to back down in its evaluation of military technology. Based on technical feasibility, cost-effectiveness, and military usefulness, it questioned, for example, the Air Force’s Skybolt, an IRBM launched from aboard a bomber; Dyna-Soar, a primitive, bomb-dropping space shuttle; and the B-70 supersonic bomber.99 It criticized the Air Force’s faith in

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premature technology such as “read-out” reconnaissance satellites called SAMOS (satellite and missile observation system) that would “televise” Soviet military activities directly into the Strategic Air Command (SAC). Such reliance on oversophisticated technology, PSAC warned, would generate “a feeling of false security.” It recommended instead the reorientation of SAMOS toward a simpler operation whereby satellite photos would be dropped and recovered on the ground.100 PSAC and York also fended off repeated proposals of antisatellite weapons, believing that reconnaissance satellites were more important to the United States than to the closed Soviet Union.101 Perhaps the fiercest battle PSAC and York’s ODDRE fought together was over the Nike-Zeus antiballistic missile (ABM) system developed by the Army. Although the American ABM program had begun in the mid-1950s, it did not receive top priority until Sputnik highlighted the Soviet missile threat. At the time, the only air defense system in sight was the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). However, SAGE was born obsolete because it was designed for interception of invading bombers only.102 Following Sputnik, the Army proposed to make its Nike-Zeus into a crash project and advance the deployment date from 1963 to 1961. Such a change would increase the project’s annual budget from about $250 million to $700 million, pushing the total price tag to $7 billion. It would initiate the costly production process even before R&D work, carried out at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, could prove the technical feasibility of the system.103 Yet, the DOD and White House were under great pressure to give the go-ahead. A PSAC panel on AICBM, formed in January 1958 under Jerome Wiesner, however, concluded that the Nike-Zeus lacked technical feasibility. It could not discern decoys from real warheads, handle multiple warheads that might spring from a single missile, or protect its giant and vital radars from either blackout by nuclear explosion in space or a direct attack. In contrast, the panel believed that passive defense, such as hardening, concealment, dispersal, and shortening the reaction time of U.S. offensive missiles and bombers offered better defense for American deterrence and for the population. As a result, the panel recommended the continuation of R&D on Nike-Zeus on a priority basis but questioned the wisdom of early production. This analysis received confirmation from other studies carried out in the ODDRE and at Rand.104 The DOD accepted PSAC’s recommendations despite the Army’s vehement protest.105 At a crucial meeting in December 1958, Eisenhower approved the decision, commenting that “we have wasted too much money by going prematurely into production on various items.”106 The Army did not give up, however. In 1959, it continued to generate pressure, mainly through Congress, for early production, but PSAC and the ODDRE once again stood in its way. Although noting the many improvements in Nike-Zeus in the interim, and conceding that Nike-Zeus could provide protection against “small attacks of an accidental or mischievous nature,” the Wiesner panel nevertheless still regarded production as premature.107

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Tension between PSAC/ODDRE and the Army mounted, however, as the R&D work on Nike-Zeus progressed and as it became necessary to conduct tests of the system. In 1960, the Army asked permission to use its Jupiter missiles as targets for Nike-Zeus tests, but York denied the request. He saw the move as an excuse to continue Jupiter’s production beyond its scheduled termination and instead suggested the substitution by the Air Force’s Atlas missiles. Infuriated, Army Secretary Wilbur Brucker and some Republicans attacked York as a registered Democrat and “as a young egghead—one of those scientists trying to run the country.”108 During the ensuing clash, York was often sustained by the availability of an academic escape route: All the while the Secretary threatened me and scolded me, a thought kept circulating in my head: “He’s the Secretary of the Army, he’s furious about what I’m doing, but I’m on leave from the University of California and there is nothing this poor so-and-so can do to me that I care about, and he knows it.”109

Similar thoughts must have occurred to academic scientists who worked in the government as either advisers or administrators when they ran into confl ict with military leaders or career politicians. To the extent that the possibility of an academic retreat emboldened them to stick with their principles in the bureaucratic battles, one might indeed make a case that university scientists enjoyed an advantage over their colleagues who pursued careers within the government. To what extent one can generalize from this incident, however, is hard to say: universities, just like corporations, came to depend heavily on government funding and contracts and academic scientists might not be as free to criticize government policy as they sometimes claimed. However, at least in this case, it appeared to help York to hold his ground. York’s refusal to back down pushed the problem one notch up in the Pentagon, to Deputy Secretary Thomas Gates and Secretary McElroy. They could not resolve the controversy either, so McElroy turned to Kistiakowsky for help.110 PSAC formed a special panel to adjudicate this dispute, setting up, in effect, a “science court.” Following a dramatic two-day hearing, the PSAC panel upheld York’s decision but also made concession to the Army’s concern for autonomy by suggesting that the latter be allowed to procure Atlas directly from the contractor and to have complete control over the launching site.111 With Eisenhower’s blessing, the DOD carried out PSAC’s recommendation.112 As the test preparations began, the Nike-Zeus budget came up for review again in fall 1960. Although PSAC once again recommended against large-scale production of Nike-Zeus, it nevertheless approved a “limited deployment” of the system. Such a deployment would, PSAC argued, introduce uncertainty in Soviet strategic planning, provide limited defense of critical areas against accidental or non-Soviet attacks, help the armed forces gain operational experience, and blunt political and psychological impact of a Soviet missile defense system.113 The justification seemed to have made sense, but York knew better. He “violently opposed” the proposal,

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warning that once started, the production would inevitably develop into “a fantastically large operation with very little return.”114 His position prevailed in the making of the budget for fiscal 1962. PSAC’s recommendation for “limited deployment,” in fact, appeared out of character. Yes, there was pressure from the State Department for an early ABM to counter a possible Soviet achievement in the field.115 However, given their knowledge of the working of the military-industrial complex, it is hard to imagine that members of PSAC or its AICBM panel did not foresee what York feared. Years later, Kistiakowsky speculated that “personal friendship with the people of the Bell Telephone Laboratories [prime contractor for Nike-Zeus] . . . helped in giving Nike Zeus the benefit of the doubt.” 116 If this was true, then the episode represented a disturbing example of confl ict of interest in the process of science advising. Although no personnel from Bell Labs were on the AICBM panel, such a subtle infl uence as friendship could be unconscious and hard to pinpoint. Even more broadly speaking, PSAC scientists, as a part of the scientific community, could not avoid a confl ict of interest in the sense that all the decisions they helped make would in one way or another, at least indirectly, affect the federal support for academic science in general and for their home institutions in particular. Their bias toward extramural research and toward basic research, as Harvey Brooks of Harvard put it, “are seldom consciously self-serving; they are merely a part of human nature.”117 However, this incident does lend weight to the argument for more transparency and more robust checks and balances in the advisory system. Philosophically the ideal of “objective science adviser” might be hard, or even impossible, to define or achieve, but reasonable measures to prevent confl ict of interest should be built into the science advising process. The phenomenon of allowing personal friendship to color one’s technical advice was, of course, not limited to PSAC scientists. For example, Freeman Dyson, a distinguished theoretical physicist at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, did exactly that when he argued against PSAC’s proposal for a nuclear test ban in 1960. He did so, as he later acknowledged, “as an act of personal loyalty to Edward Teller and to his colleagues with whom I worked at Livermore” on Project Orion to produce a rocket that used small nuclear explosions for propulsion.118 Started in 1957 by the physicist Theodore Taylor at Atomic Dynamics in San Diego “as a reaction to the Russian Sputnik,” Orion was another example of the postSputnik technological push.119 It received funding from ARPA, as a way to power huge loads into space, and support from several prominent scientists, including Stanislaw Ulam, Hans Bethe, and Lloyd Berkner, who were sufficiently intrigued by the project to lobby PSAC and the science advisers on its behalf. However, Kistiakowsky was “not enthusiastic” and York remained skeptical.120 The nuclear test moratorium in the late 1950s and the limited test ban treaty in the early 1960s effectively doomed Project Orion: without nuclear tests (at 1 kiloton), it was impossible to establish the project’s engineering feasibility.121 Kistiakowsky and PSAC helped Eisenhower control the arms race by intervening not only on hardware, but also directly on policy matters. In May 1960,

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for example, Kistiakowsky brought Franklin A. Long, a Cornell chemist and his successor as chairman of the PSAC missile panel, into the White House to brief the president on two technological developments with fateful implications for the nuclear arms race. In developing the Minuteman missile systems, the Air Force had set a punishing thirty-second firing time for the missile, they told the president. Eisenhower immediately recognized that such a harsh requirement would not only inflate the complexity and cost of the system, but also create frightening instability in the nuclear arms race. He ordered a longer reaction time “to give someone high up in authority the decision.” Second, the panel recommended that the guidance system be modified so that each missile could be programmed to fire not at a single target, as then configured, but any one of several destinations to reduce “overkill,” to which Eisenhower readily agreed.122 The question of overkill took on even greater significance when the U.S. military produced its first Single Integrated Operation Plan (SIOP), at the center of which was a master list of targets for nuclear attacks in the Soviet bloc. In November 1960, Eisenhower sent Kistiakowsky on a fact-finding mission to the SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, to examine the SIOP. The Navy had instigated the investigation because it distrusted the Air Force’s SAC that dominated the making of the SIOP. Accompanied by George Rathjens of his staff and Herbert “Pete” Scoville of the CIA (also a PSAC consultant), Kistiakowsky returned from what he called his “kamikaze dive” greatly disturbed by what he learned: the SIOP raised damage criteria to such a degree “as to lead to unnecessary and undesirable overkill.”123 Under the plan, it would take, as he told Eisenhower, “eight weapons of tremendously greater size against a city of the size of Hiroshima to do the same damage” that was done by Little Boy. Reportedly, Kistiakowsky’s analysis “frighten[ed] the devil out of ” Eisenhower, not only because of the overkill, but also because of its political effects. “[T]his type of planning fails to recognize that war of the kind described no longer makes any sense,” he said.124 He later passed Kistiakowsky’s memorandum to the Kennedy administration.125 Although PSAC scientists were proud of their role in curbing militarytechnological excesses, they were not unaware of the price they had to pay for their newfound infl uence. In the post-Sputnik atmosphere of technological determinism, control over military R&D became one of the most prized and contentious objects in American politics as the debate over a missile gap fueled the 1960 presidential campaign. PSAC’s devastating reviews of the many ambitious weapons systems drew sharp attacks from the entrenched military-industrial complex. Kistiakowsky found it disturbing, if not chilling, for example, to hear that “everybody in the Air Force from the secretary down now thinks that you control the entire military R&D program.” Such a belief would, Kistiakowsky knew, make him and PSAC enemies of the military.126 Infl uential figures, such as Congressman Melvin Price of the JCAE and General John Medaris of the Army, also lamented the “obstruction” of weapons projects by civilian scientists in the Pentagon and the White House.127 Here, once again, perhaps the security of knowing that they could always return to their academic positions enabled them to withstand the enormous

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pressure from the military-industrial complex, even though that same connection sometimes colored their science advising to the president.

Conclusion Perhaps the most salient point to emerge from this examination of PSAC’s role in defense policymaking in the Eisenhower administration was the fact that it did not confine itself to technical matters alone. The scientists were willing to tread on the interface between science and technology, on the one hand, and public policy, on the other. In its investigation of the missile programs, PSAC often went beyond technical issues to make policy recommendations. In PSAC’s advocacy of the reorganization of the DOD and the centralization of military R&D, concern for a positive science–military partnership played as much a role as the advent of new weapons. In the area of strategic deterrence, the scientists did not hesitate to advise the president on priorities of various missile systems and recommend cancellation of the Jupiter IRBM and the B-70, and the acceleration of Minuteman and Polaris. In its studies of weapons systems, PSAC always incorporated cost-effective analysis and comparative assessments. Significantly, in all these cases, PSAC scientists were useful to Eisenhower not because of their technical knowledge per se, but because of their knowledge of the limitations of technology. The result was quite impressive. “Few programs or ideas that did not meet their approval got very far,” commented York and historian G. Allen Greb on PSAC’s “veto power” in the post-Sputnik “technology happy” days.128 What motivated PSAC scientists to venture outside of the technical bounds and into the policy realm? Partly, they learned well from scientists’ past mistakes when they segregated technical factors from broader policy considerations, such as happened in the Lexington Project on nuclear-powered airplanes. Thus they felt that they needed to explicate the policy implications of their technical analyses to prevent them from being obscured or distorted. This expansion of their perceived role derived from the long-held dissatisfaction, as Frank Jewett had expressed in the 1930s, of being viewed as narrow technicians. Instead, they wanted to exercise their social responsibility and look at the big picture of where their technical investigations fit into the broader social and political context. In the case of PSAC scientists, this process of transformation was greatly facilitated by their interactions with President Eisenhower himself, who taught them, in the debate over the missile gap, that technology was an important but often not a determining part of public policy. Thus PSAC scientists did not abandon technological rationality as a key factor in policy, but they expanded it to include not only technical factors but also broader considerations as well. Their common interest in arms control lay at the foundation of Eisenhower’s trust in his science advisers, which in turn enabled PSAC scientists to play such a crucial role in American military technology policy in this period. Yet, there were limits to what they could accomplish together. Actually one of the most common and revealing features of PSAC’s investigations of military projects was that almost all the weapons systems it criticized survived the Eisenhower administration and

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were terminated only during the Kennedy administration or even later. Several factors contributed to this outcome. Sputnik and its devastating impact made it difficult for the Eisenhower administration to eliminate any major defense system, as exemplified by the decision to put both Thor and Jupiter into production. American public reactions to Sputnik gave rise to a sense of technological imperative—that the United States would win or lose the Cold War on the technological front. Thus, some of the new projects, although doubtful and perhaps out of the question in normal times, had to be given a chance to prove themselves in the post-Sputnik era.129 The failure to follow through on much of what he thought was right policy also pointed to the limitation of Eisenhower’s “hidden hand” style of leadership—through groups as unorthodox as PSAC. As McGeorge Bundy and Robert Divine have pointed out, Eisenhower could have done more to dispel the missile gap scare.130 Yet, in view of the resistance they met, Eisenhower, PSAC, and York deserve great credit for accomplishing what they did. For their part, PSAC scientists undoubtedly used their evaluation of military technology to advocate increased federal support for science. Banking on their technological skepticism, they argued that the neglect of basic research was often at the root of the disarray of U.S. military technology. Indeed, suggestions for more basic and applied research to advance the state of the art formed a common thread in most of PSAC’s recommendations on military R&D in the late 1950s. It did so in the case of the ANP, Nike-Zeus, B-70, biological-chemical warfare, and other projects.131 Even though their rhetoric on the connection between basic research and military technology changed little before and after Sputnik, the crisis atmosphere lent much more weight to their argument. To be sure, PSAC’s dual emphasis on long-term research and utilization of existing capabilities easily won Eisenhower’s endorsement. Here was one scientific group that finally answered his prayer in 1956 that someone “recommend programs which we could dispense with.” However, to advocates of ambitious weapons systems, PSAC’s strategy appeared unduly conservative and amounted to one of “studying them to death.”132 The irony was, of course, that PSAC’s own justification of military support of science and technology, on the grounds that they would make new weapons possible, often was turned around to fuel the nuclear arms race they tried so hard to control.

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The Search for a Nuclear Test Ban, 1957–1960

As Sputnik ushered the Cold War world into the missile age, the prospect of a nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union became all the more deadly. Inevitably, PSAC came to reflect this concern in its advice to President Eisenhower. Remarkably, in the field of arms control, as in so many other areas, PSAC found its position much closer to Eisenhower’s than to that of the rest of the defense establishment. PSAC scientists fought passionately for a nuclear test ban, continuing a struggle that the moderate wing of the scientific community had carried on since at least the Scientists’ Movement in 1945–1946 and the debate over the H-bomb in 1949–1950. Perhaps more than their work on space and military technology, they infused a sense of moral responsibility into their pursuit to limit the momentum of the nuclear arms race. At the same time, they knew that they were entering a political context, both at home and internationally, that was highly charged, with many factors of unpredictability. It was an endeavor that linked science, technology, bureaucratic confl ict, international diplomacy, and deeply held but confl icting views of the world.

Sputnik’s Impact on Arms Control By the time of Sputnik’s launch, Eisenhower had made several attempts—Atoms for Peace and Open Skies, for example—both to score propaganda victories against the Soviet Union and to slow down the nuclear arms race, but none turned out as well as he had hoped. Gradually, the concept of a nuclear test ban emerged as the most promising approach to arms control. Worldwide protest against radioactive fallout from nuclear tests put the U.S. government on the defensive. Above all, Eisenhower increasingly feared that if unchecked, the nuclear arms race would ruin the economy, turn America into a “garrison state,” and even trigger a nuclear war.1 Eisenhower’s move toward a test ban, however, met with strong resistance within his own administration. The AEC and the DOD opposed it for fear that it would weaken U.S. nuclear superiority. During their campaign for the “clean bomb” in the summer of 1957, for example, Lewis Strauss, AEC chairman, and his science advisers, Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller, cast their appeal to Eisenhower for continued tests in moral terms. If the United States stopped testing and failed to make clean bombs, Lawrence said, it would have to use the big and “dirty” ones when war came. This, Lawrence said, would be truly a “crime against humanity.” The Soviets, added Teller, could actually succeed in making a clean bomb even under a test ban by testing secretly. If that happened, the United 120

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States would be rendered impotent because it could not use the dirty bombs for fear of world opinion. Teller also emphasized that nuclear tests were needed for the Plowshare program of peaceful nuclear explosions and that a test ban could not be effectively policed.2 Eisenhower reacted to the Lawrence–Teller clean bomb plea with ambivalence. On the one hand, he agreed that the clean bomb was a worthy goal for peaceful uses and for reducing civilian casualties in war. On the other hand, he felt that the United States could no longer ignore the global protest against nuclear tests, the division it caused in America, or the effects of Soviet propaganda—it could not “permit itself to be ‘crucified on a cross of atoms.’” It was a powerful demonstration of the effectiveness of the grassroots antinuclear movement. Furthermore, Eisenhower resented the group’s moralizing tone because he saw a test ban as a step toward the ultimate goal of stopping war.3 Yet, as a result of the clean bomb campaign, Eisenhower became confused about the desirability and feasibility of a nuclear test ban. “Our statecraft,” he commented at a meeting on the clean bomb shortly before Sputnik, “was becoming too much a prisoner of our scientists.”4 As Eisenhower pondered the wisdom of a test ban, the long-standing diplomatic talks on arms control hit a dead end. The West insisted on linking a test ban with the cut-off of production of nuclear weapons materials, whereas the Soviets wanted all nuclear weapons to be destroyed first. In late 1957, Stassen, as the U.S. representative, tried to drop the linkage but met strong opposition from other American officials. Eisenhower himself felt embarrassed by the contradictory stand of the United States when he, on the one hand, sent Stassen to negotiate a test ban, and, on the other, approved a major test series, Hardtack.5 Then the Sputnik shock brought several fundamental changes in the field of nuclear arms control. First, it revealed the alarming Soviet advances in science and technology and its potential to achieve nuclear parity with the United States sooner than expected, a danger that was reinforced by the Gaither report. Second, the Sputnik-inspired appointments of Killian and PSAC brought in scientists at the highest level of American policymaking who believed that security could be best achieved by selective measures of arms control. In contrast to Teller and Lawrence, most PSAC members did not see a technological solution to the problem of the nuclear arms race. They advocated a test ban as a first step toward reducing the Cold War tension and as a way to freeze American advantages in warhead technology. Eisenhower’s agreement with PSAC on the benefits of arms control and his increasing confidence in the committee meant a sea change in science advice on the test ban. The Strauss–Teller–Lawrence group still retained enormous infl uence in the government, but they were no longer the only recognized experts on arms control, as Eisenhower’s meeting with Rabi on October 29, 1957 indicated. Thus, Sputnik boosted both the president’s determination to work on a test ban and PSAC scientists’ role in nuclear weapons policymaking. Killian and PSAC knew that the test ban represented a political arena that was perhaps even more charged than space and military technology policy. Fearful that it would project PSAC into “the realm of political policy as well as technology,”

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Killian declined Stassen’s request in December 1957 for support of his test ban proposal, with the excuse that PSAC lacked competence and experience in the field.6 The politically astute Killian must have also sensed that Stassen had made too many political enemies in the administration to last long in his position. Thus, while keeping a low profile, Killian and PSAC established a panel on disarmament under Caryl Haskins to study the issue of the test ban “for possible reporting to the President.”7 Killian’s chance came at the NSC meeting on January 6, 1958, during which Stassen’s proposal was promptly defeated by the AEC and the DOD; citing Teller and Lawrence, Strauss questioned the adequacy of the dozen inspection stations proposed by Stassen to detect Soviet tests. When Eisenhower expressed his own misgivings about adopting the Stassen proposal before reaching a consensus with the NATO allies or “even among ourselves,” Killian rose to report on PSAC’s view that the United States “should not proceed with additional proposals” on a test ban “without up-to-date technical appraisals made in advance by the most highlyqualified U.S. scientific and technical personnel.” Specifically, PSAC recommended that the NSC sponsor two interagency technical studies on disarmament—one on nuclear test cessation, and the other on long-range rocket test limitation, which Eisenhower promptly approved and asked Killian to help organize. Thus, even though Killian sided with Stassen’s opponents, he opened the door for PSAC to get involved in arms control. The fact that Killian spoke without first being asked to speak and was able to have the PSAC recommendation accepted testified to both the rising stock of moderate scientists in the Eisenhower administration in the post-Sputnik days and the importance of the “presence” of scientists in the policymaking process that Vannevar Bush and Lee DuBridge had tried in vain to convince Robert Cutler of in 1953.8 It also pointed to a widespread post-Sputnik faith in nonpartisan science advising, although, as we will see, the phrase “technical appraisals” would soon become contested.

The Miracles of the Bethe Panel An interagency panel on a nuclear test ban was promptly formed under the chairmanship of Hans Bethe of Cornell, with members from the Pentagon, the Air Force, the AEC, and the CIA. The choice of Bethe was most unusual because his only official position was his membership on the nonstatutory PSAC. The fact that Cutler did not voice his customary opposition to this arrangement testified, again, to Sputnik’s effects on the thinking about the proper role of outside expert advisers, to his rapport with Killian, and to Killian’s skills operating in the White House political environment. Bethe was also an apt choice given the push by Eisenhower and PSAC for arms control. As a pioneer in nuclear physics, chief of the theoretical division at wartime Los Alamos, and longtime chairman of the Air Force panel in charge of collecting and interpreting data on Soviet nuclear tests, Bethe was an acknowledged nuclear expert familiar with the status of Soviet nuclear weapons design. An advocate for the test ban to freeze in American nuclear advantages, he nevertheless kept an open mind to other points of view.9 Above all, his choice

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promised to bring in fresh, independent points of view and take the debate on a test ban out of the control of representatives of the agencies, especially the DOD, AEC, and the State Department, that had mired it in internal confl ict. The Bethe panel was to consider three questions: Was it technically feasible to establish a monitoring mechanism for the enforcement of a nuclear test ban? What would be the impact of a ban on the United States? And finally, what would be its impact on the Soviet Union? In view of the strong antiban positions of the AEC and the DOD, the task of achieving some kind of agreement that did not amount to an outright rejection of a test ban was a daunting one indeed. It was testimony to Bethe’s great scientific stature and his persuasive power that the panel members, mostly physicists, actually came to the consensus that a test ban was technically feasible. The panel report of March 1958 concluded that a practical detection system could be designed to detect and identify nuclear explosions in the Soviet Union and China, except for small underground tests. The system would utilize several dozen fixed and mobile inspection units, as well as overfl ights. Even Killian was astonished by the positive conclusion of the Bethe panel.10 When the issue turned from technical feasibility to political desirability, however, consensus was harder to achieve. Although the AEC and DOD representatives on the Bethe panel agreed with Bethe that a test ban was feasible, they vehemently denied that it was desirable. Nuclear tests were necessary, they argued, to develop clean, small, and low-cost warheads for battlefield use and for ABM systems. They also argued that the United States needed more varieties of warheads for defensive purposes because the Soviets were more prone to launch a surprise attack. During the often heated panel discussion, Harold Brown of the AEC’s Livermore Laboratory and Herbert Loper, assistant to the secretary of defense for atomic energy, emerged as the most articulate and resourceful antagonists to a test ban. Calmly and persistently, Bethe countered their arguments by asking them to consider the possibility of freezing the American advantages over the Soviets in nuclear weapons designs and the beneficial effects of a test ban on the vicious arms race. In this he received some support from Herbert Scoville of the CIA and Herbert York.11 Just as PSAC’s studies of military R&D had to deal with interservice rivalry, its involvement in disarmament required it to balance between the antiban views of the DOD and the AEC on the one hand, and that of the State Department, which began to push for a test ban after Stassen’s departure. In the end, the Bethe panel report did not reach a conclusion on whether a test ban was to the net military advantage of the United States. Even this, as it turned out, was no less an achievement on the part of Bethe, because in the discussion, the majority of the panel tended to think that a test ban was detrimental to U.S. national security. At one point, Loper produced a letter from the Joint Chiefs of Staff ( JCS) that strongly opposed a test ban without linkage to production cut-off. Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles later reinforced the JCS position in a memo to Bethe that concluded that “in its overall long range effects a test cessation will operate to the distinct disadvantage of the United States.” Ruling that these views were outside the panel’s “technical” mandate, Bethe prevented

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them from being included in the panel report. His success showed that by now scientists learned not only to venture beyond the technical “boundary” but also to retreat behind it when desirable. By holding the line firm against sweeping negative assessment of a test ban, Bethe made way for PSAC to fill in the gap.12 What also helped Bethe was that General Alfred D. Starbird, as a representative of the AEC, reluctantly agreed with Bethe that a test ban might lock in the U.S. superiority in nuclear weapons designs.13 As the Bethe report was written, a fierce, concurrent debate on the test ban took place within the American political leadership. In late March 1958, the United States learned that the Soviets would soon announce a unilateral suspension of nuclear tests. It was a move calculated for propaganda advantages, because the Soviets had just finished a test series, whereas the United States was about to begin its important Hardtack series. Nonetheless, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles became concerned about its effect on world opinion. He suggested that Eisenhower “beat the Soviets to the punch” by announcing immediately that the United States would unilaterally stop testing after Hardtack. Eisenhower tended to agree; he saw it not only as a step to boost the falling moral leadership of the United States in the world, but also as a chance to move the administration toward, perhaps for the first time, serious disarmament.14 The DOD and AEC, however, stalled the Dulles initiative. At a White House meeting on March 24, 1958, Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy argued that a test moratorium would drive nuclear scientists out of the weapons labs. Eisenhower responded sharply that he thought “scientists, like other people, have a strong interest in avoiding nuclear war.” At this point, Strauss produced a letter from Teller emphasizing strongly the need for continuing tests, which Quarles corroborated. The combined opposition from the DOD, AEC, and their scientists overwhelmed Dulles. He asked to withdraw his proposal. Disappointed, Eisenhower agreed to the decision for now but served notice that it was not the end of the matter. He asked the group “to think about what could be done to get rid of the terrible impasse we now find ourselves in with regard to disarmament.”15 For his part, Eisenhower turned to PSAC in his next move toward a test ban. In a press conference on March 26, 1958, Eisenhower publicly endorsed the expected findings of the Bethe panel report about the feasibility of detecting tests and hinted that he would be flexible on the linkage issue.16 The anticipated Soviet announcement of unilateral test cessation came on March 31, together with a request that the United States and Britain join it in negotiating a test ban. As the United States scrambled to answer the Soviet challenge, Bethe formally presented his panel report to the NSC on April 4. It met with remarkably little opposition. Eisenhower and Dulles expressed concern about the difficulties of detecting underground tests, but they seemed to accept the technical feasibility of a test ban in general. Indeed, Dulles believed that a far simpler system than considered by the Bethe panel—one with a 50–50 chance of detection—would have sufficed to deter the Soviets from conducting secret tests. To the DOD’s usual argument that a test ban would be to the military disadvantage of the United States, Eisenhower and Dulles

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countered that the United States must also consider the “psychological erosion of our position” in the world.17 Subsequently, Dulles drafted Eisenhower’s reply to Khrushchev in which the United States reiterated its invitation to the Soviets for a technical conference first, mentioning the Bethe study as evidence of its sincerity.18 Then on April 9, as another example of the post-Sputnik acceptance of experts in public policy and of Eisenhower’s growing trust in his science advisers, he announced that he had asked PSAC to consider the pros and cons of a test ban. Most important, he implied that he would consider a unilateral test moratorium if PSAC recommended so, which greatly shocked and upset Strauss.19

The Puerto Rico Consensus The national spotlight in the debate on the test ban was now focused, just as it was two months before in the area of space, on PSAC. From April 8 to 10, the committee met at Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico to discuss the Bethe report and a separate report on a missile test ban by Kistiakowsky’s missile panel. After spirited debates, the committee reached a “general agreement” that an inspected nuclear test ban was to “the overall advantages” of the United States, provided that it take effect after the Hardtack test series but prior to any new Soviet tests.20 A nuclear test ban would, PSAC argued, allow the United States to keep its nuclear superiority—the United States had about twice as much yield as the Soviet Union in nearly every weight class—far longer than if tests continued. PSAC also justified a nuclear test ban as a move to “forestall” any possible Soviet pressure toward a missile test ban before the United States achieved ICBM capability. It supported the completion of the Hardtack test series—scheduled to start in April and meant largely to develop warheads for the Polaris and AICBM missiles—but pointed out that the major problems facing the AICBM were nonnuclear in nature.21 Remarkably, reduction of radioactive fallout, which occupied a central point in the public debate over the test ban, was absent from PSAC’s list of justifications. Rabi’s remark at a subsequent PSAC meeting that the “test ban as such never meant anything per se” and that it was worthwhile “only as a step toward something else,” indicated that it was arms control and national security, not fallout, that motivated PSAC in advocating a test ban.22 Given the general orientation toward arms control of most PSAC members and the strong advocacy for a test ban by Bethe and Rabi that dated back at least to the H-bomb controversy, the committee’s conclusion was not surprising. What was noteworthy was the debate within PSAC over the proper role of the group in policymaking. As the former director of the Livermore Laboratory, Herbert York, for example, objected to PSAC’s recommending a test ban to Eisenhower as going out of its areas of technical competence. In a vote taken on the matter, York cast an “abstain.” Afterward, Wiesner explained to York about the thinking of the majority. Wiesner conceded to York that PSAC members were not experts on arms control, but the truth was, he said, nobody else was. Furthermore, the president could ask for advice from anyone he wanted.23 In their willingness to move into arms control policy, several PSAC members undoubtedly recalled Eisenhower’s

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plea the previous November in connection with the Gaither study. “The Defense Department isn’t interested [in arms control] and neither is the Atomic Energy Commission,” Wiesner remembered Eisenhower saying to him and his colleagues, “Why don’t you fellows help me?”24 At the other end of the spectrum, Rabi not only regarded York as a member of the Teller–Lawrence group, and therefore too much of a hawk, but also felt that PSAC did not go far enough in considering the policy aspects of the question.25 He thought science advice should not just provide technical facts, but also help the government grasp the big picture. Science was the most forwardlooking element of modern culture, Rabi argued, and it should lead a concerted effort toward solving major national and international problems, especially those related to nuclear weapons. At the Puerto Rico meeting, he revived his earlier proposal that “a broad study of arms limitation be made interrelating technical, military, economic, international and political factors in a symmetrical way.” Other PSAC members, however, regarded it as too ambitious and therefore did not pursue this proposal.26 The York–Rabi debate over the propriety of scientists’ role in policymaking reinforced the need for PSAC to defend its action to the rest of the national security state. In its report, PSAC scientists cited their “experience with the technical aspects of military weapons systems” to justify their considerations of both technical and military aspects of the test ban. On this basis, PSAC concluded that “a test cessation would be to the over-all advantage of the United States,” especially considering the relative, not just the absolute, strength of the United States in comparison with that of the Soviet Union. Moving further into foreign policy, it argued that a test ban would not only freeze American superiority, but also serve as “an opening wedge for other inspection systems.”27 Thus, in anticipation of almost certain opposition from the military, PSAC made national security the primary justification for its recommendation. Doing so, PSAC scientists hoped, would allow them both to defend their technical claims and to reach policy conclusions. PSAC’s strategy largely succeeded. On April 17, 1958, Killian met with Eisenhower to report on PSAC’s recommendations. Acknowledging that the test ban was “a controversial subject,” he continued the delicate dance around the science–politics boundary. PSAC, he said, had limited itself to “technical aspects” of the question, but nevertheless concluded that an inspected nuclear test ban was both feasible and desirable and could serve as “an opening wedge” for general disarmament in the future. Although PSAC’s justification for a nuclear test ban to forestall a premature missile test ban did not impress Eisenhower, he reacted positively to its overall recommendations.28 In an unusual move in late April 1958, Dulles and Eisenhower bypassed the DOD and AEC to propose to the Soviets (and the British and French) a technical conference at Geneva to consider the feasibility of an inspection system for a nuclear test ban as a prelude to diplomatic talks. In contrast to Dulles’s skepticism toward Soviet acceptance of any inspected test ban, Eisenhower appeared to share PSAC’s hope that the scientists, with their common language and long tradition of international cooperation, could indeed cut

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through the Iron Curtain, as they did at the Atoms for Peace Geneva Conference in 1955, and clear the road for political agreements.29 Even though PSAC scientists were not the only voice in the government supporting Eisenhower’s push for a test ban—Dulles espoused it as at least a useful move in public relations—their scientific and technical expertise proved crucially important to him in countering the arguments from the Teller group. Indeed, as expected, PSAC’s Puerto Rico report drew violent protest from opponents of a test ban. At PSAC’s meeting on April 21 in Washington, Killian reported to the committee that both the DOD and AEC opposed a test ban unless all kinds of protections were provided, such as the development of AICBM and clean bombs by the United States. He himself had just had an emotional confrontation with Strauss over the PSAC report.30 The DOD’s Loper accused PSAC of distorting the Bethe report and failing to give “due consideration to certain basic U.S. policies [or] to geographic and international political factors.” What the AEC and DOD wanted, Killian noted, was an “absolute” advantage, not a relative advantage over the Soviets, as advocated by PSAC.31 Even though Killian disagreed with these arguments, he made sure that Eisenhower “gets more than one point of view in dealing with some of these highly complex and delicate matters.”32 These developments heightened PSAC’s internal debate over scientists’ role in policy. The fierce opposition by the DOD and AEC to the PSAC report confirmed in Rabi’s mind the need for broad studies to build an internal consensus in the American government over arms control. “[I do not] think we can get out of this box,” Rabi said, “without deeper study than we have made. . . . We must get ourselves limber.” For Rabi, a sweeping reexamination of U.S. policy on disarmament, preferably led by PSAC, was necessary not only for the achievement of a test ban but also to lay the foundation for future arms control measures and world peace in general, for which the test ban was only a first step. Scoville, however, disagreed with Rabi. He probably spoke for the rest of the committee when he expressed doubt that the views of the DOD and AEC would change with further study. Instead, most PSAC members opted for a shortcut through their access to the president. Killian confidently predicted that, despite the DOD and AEC opposition, PSAC’s recommendation had Eisenhower’s and Dulles’s backing and “will receive real attention.” For the first time, Killian noted, the top level in government had views radically different from the Pentagon and the AEC. When pressed by Rabi, Killian said that he believed that only the president and the secretary of state could resolve the internal confl ict.33 This little-known debate between Rabi and his PSAC colleagues on the test ban is significant because it highlighted the diversity and complexity in scientists’ approaches to arms control. It has been commonly assumed that the nuclear test ban polarized American scientists into two camps in this period: those led by Linus Pauling who supported it and those who rallied around Edward Teller in opposing it. What this view ignores is the divisions within each camp and the issues these divisions evoked, such as the weight of institutional self-interest in policymaking.34 Herbert York, for example, attributed his initial opposition to the test ban to his

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close association with the Livermore weapons laboratory and believed that the same pattern applied to others as well: During the period immediately prior to Sputnik, the scientific advisers who had the most impact on this issue—Strauss, Lawrence, and Teller—were all participants in the nuclear weapons program. It was their ox that was about to be gored, and they were unenthusiastic. The members of the new PSAC, except for me, had no such current involvement; indeed, some of them regarded nuclear testing as pernicious. As a result, the whole approach to the question underwent a sea change at the White House level.35

Here, as in military technology, the question of confl ict of interest was not whether one would personally profit from one’s position as a science adviser, but whether one’s institutional and professional loyalty would affect the policy advice rendered. The dilemma was thus both more general and harder to solve than what could be accomplished by the standard disclosure of financial interests. PSAC dealt with this problem by hearing both sides of the argument, but in the end steered a middle ground by rejecting both York’s contention that scientists should stay within technical bounds and Rabi’s opposite proposal that scientists should lead the formation of policy. PSAC’s deployment of the adversary process, however, was only accidental in that York was not brought in to work primarily on the test ban issue. As Bethe later recalled, “the committee at that time did not try to bring in people of widely different opinion.”36 The emphasis was not on unanimity, but rather cohesion. Indeed, support for arms control became one of the informal criteria in admitting new members to the committee. For example, in 1960, Kistiakowsky, by then the science adviser, asked Harold Brown a crucial question before recommending him for PSAC membership: Was Brown’s aim “preservation of peace or destruction of the Soviet Union”? (Brown “emphatically” said the former.)37 In this sense, one could say that PSAC followed a “party line” of its own, although one could argue that a measure of balancing was achieved within its panels which, as demonstrated in the case of the Bethe panel, included, by design, spokesmen of opposing interests. Whether such a balancing act within a closed circle of policy advisers and makers in the government was enough to guarantee a sound public policy in a democracy is, of course, open to question. However, in this period, demands for transparency in the proceedings of advisory groups such as PSAC seemed never to arise, perhaps reflecting a more trusting attitude toward the experts and the government in the pre-Watergate era.38 In one institutional respect, the PSAC system worked well for Eisenhower: PSAC scientists were his advisers and he appreciated their independent advice and their skepticism toward nuclear weapons development. Killian’s meeting with Eisenhower on April 17 marked a complete switch of Eisenhower’s trust in scientists on the issue of the test ban from the Teller group to PSAC. Ever since he learned of the split within the scientific community during his meeting with Rabi

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and Strauss on October 31, 1957, he began to observe the two groups closely. Just as he found PSAC increasingly indispensable, he grew disillusioned with the Teller group. At a press conference on April 16, Eisenhower called PSAC “my Scientific Advisory Committee” and praised its “sincerity” and “disinterestedness.” The next day, in his meeting with Killian, Eisenhower confided that he had “never been too much impressed, or completely convinced by the views expressed by Drs. Teller, Lawrence, and [Mark] Mills [of Livermore]” for continued nuclear tests. Less than half a year after Sputnik, Eisenhower made his choice of scientists between the Rabi group and the Teller group. And nowhere was this change more pronounced than in the test ban debate.39

The Geneva Conference of Experts With Eisenhower’s acceptance of PSAC’s proban recommendations, the scientific and political tango now moved into the international arena. In May 1958, PSAC’s test ban proposal received a boost when Khrushchev accepted Eisenhower’s suggestion for a technical conference. Soon thereafter, Eisenhower wrote Khrushchev to emphasize the importance of selecting competent scientists for the conference so they could reach “scientific, not political conclusions.” The opening date of the so-called Geneva Conference of Experts was set for July 1, 1958.40 As Eisenhower, Dulles, and PSAC moved toward a test ban, the AEC and DOD launched a last-ditch effort to save at least underground testing by challenging the technical soundness of PSAC’s Puerto Rico report. In early May, the GAC of the AEC, led by Teller, now a dominant member, and over the objection of Fisk, who sat on both PSAC and the GAC, denounced the PSAC report and advocated a limitation of atmospheric tests only. Any additional restriction of nuclear tests, it warned, “would seriously endanger the security of the United States.”41 On May 14, Strauss presented the GAC report to Eisenhower, but it did not seem to impress him. Neither did a similar memorandum, dated May 30, 1958, by the JCS. At the bottom of the memo, Eisenhower simply noted to Goodpaster: “Andy—I assume State is aware of these opinions and suggestions from JCS.”42 The internal division within the administration was reflected in the selection of the U.S. delegation to Geneva. On the one hand, Killian, PSAC, State, and the CIA agreed at a meeting in May that the United States should appoint three distinguished scientists to show its seriousness and to force the Soviets to do likewise, and that the chairman of the delegation should not be an “extremist” on the issue of the test ban or a “weaponeer.” Indeed, State, regarding the whole thing as primarily a propaganda move against the Soviets, believed that “it would be better to select a chairman who is known to be in favor of test suspension” to preempt Soviet charge of American insincerity if the Geneva talks faltered. Killian proposed Rabi as his “ideal choice,” citing his experience and “ability to get along with foreigners.” Scoville nominated James Fisk and Hans Bethe.43 On the other hand, the AEC was wary of the domination of PSAC members in the delegation. At a White House meeting, Eisenhower, Dulles, and Killian came up with a list of Fisk, Lawrence, and either

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Bethe or Rabi. Strauss, however, “expressed strong opposition” to both Bethe and Rabi when phoned by Eisenhower. As a result, Bacher was selected instead.44 Killian and PSAC were happy with the final selection of the three scientists. Even though Strauss vetoed Bethe and Rabi, PSAC members could count on Fisk and Bacher, their two moderate vice chairmen, to articulate a balanced case for the test ban. They were also no doubt pleased that the AEC nominated Lawrence, not Teller, as Strauss had originally intended to do. By then Lawrence had apparently experienced a remarkable change of mind on the question of the Cold War: unlike Teller, he believed that scientific contacts could actually help “break down the Iron Curtain.”45 A balanced slate of advisers to the delegation included Bethe, Scoville, and Harold Brown. Britain, France, and Canada all sent eminent scientists. Only the Soviet delegation, headed by a geophysicist, Yevgeni K. Fedorov, included a veteran diplomat, Semen K. Tsarapkin, among its members.46 PSAC was full of optimism as it held its annual meeting with President Eisenhower on June 18, 1958. Killian opened with a description of the U.S. delegation as an “extraordinary team” with a strong backup. As a “good omen,” Killian told Eisenhower, the Soviets had taken the conference seriously and “pushed out really top people.” Eisenhower shared PSAC’s enthusiasm. Responding to Killian’s concern for declassification at the conference, Eisenhower said that he would approve a “liberal and broad policy” because the United States had more to gain than lose from the conference. A report by Bethe on the difficulties in the clean bomb project also boosted the cause for a test ban. Further reflecting PSAC’s optimism about the post-Sputnik rise in the social status of science and scientists was a dialog during the meeting between Land and Eisenhower on the need to turn more and more of the American population into scientists. You “can’t have 80% of people at leisure” as a result of technological changes, Land claimed.47 The high hope for technical agreement, however, did not spread to the political arena. When PSAC asked for policy guidance during and after the Geneva conference, Eisenhower gave few hints. Partly, it was because the president himself could not yet resolve the interagency confl ict.48 In his briefing to Fisk, Lawrence, and Bacher on June 6, Dulles had told the scientists that the conference was to be strictly technical. The political decisions would be made by Washington after the conference.49 In contrast to PSAC scientists, Dulles apparently believed that it was both possible and desirable to separate the technical from the political. Dulles’ directive also reflected his view that scientists, with what Eisenhower had called their “exacting minds,” would not make good diplomats. The Bethe panel report, he had earlier complained to a group of his own advisers, had gone so far with its inspection requirements “as to be impractical.” Instead, as mentioned above, he believed that a 50–50 chance of detection would be enough of a deterrent against Soviet cheating.50 For his part, Eisenhower did establish a Committee of Principals—chaired by the secretary of state and comprising the secretary of defense, AEC chairman, CIA director, and the president’s science adviser—to assist him on arms control policy, but there was little hope that the principals would be able to overcome their own disagreements to give clear guidance to the scientists in Geneva.51

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Despite all these uncertainties, a major objective was nevertheless achieved at the Geneva Conference of Experts. All sides agreed that a system composed of certain numbers of seismic stations and on-site inspections, combined with other, nonintrusive technical means already in use, could detect nuclear explosions. Known as the Geneva system, the agreement was one of the first major breakthroughs in the Cold War. Its achievement showed that the East and West could, after all, find some common ground, even on an issue as contentious as the nuclear test ban. On the most difficult question of the detection of deep underground tests, the Western experts persuaded the Russians to accept control posts and onsite inspections in Soviet territory. The conference, nevertheless, left crucial details, such as the number of on-site inspections and control posts, to political follow-ups. The final communiqué drew the positive conclusion that it was technically feasible to ensure a “worldwide” nuclear test ban.52 Much of the world received the Geneva system with enthusiasm. The day after the Geneva conference ended, President Eisenhower proposed diplomatic negotiations on a test ban and announced that the United States would enter into a test moratorium on October 31, 1958. In so doing, Eisenhower overruled opposition from the AEC and DOD by citing the overall political advantage of a nuclear test ban. After a briefing by Teller and Norris Bradbury, directors of the Livermore and Los Alamos weapons laboratories, respectively, Eisenhower remarked that “the new thermonuclear weapons are tremendously powerful; however, they are not, in many ways, as powerful as is world opinion today.”53 It was another striking indication of both Eisenhower’s commitment to arms control and of the impact of the international antinuclear movement.54 Meanwhile, PSAC scientists’ analysis of Argus, a PSAC-promoted series of high-altitude nuclear tests, added to the weight of the argument for the test ban, as did reports on the problems with the AICBM project.55 The British, after being assured of U.S. nuclear assistance through a PSAC-advocated change in the Atomic Energy Act, accepted the proposals for a moratorium and diplomatic negotiations, as eventually did the Soviets. At this point, optimism among the proponents for arms control, which included most of the American scientific community, reached a high point. Scientific internationalism was hailed as the most effective channel to cut through Cold War confrontation.56 Russian scientists, although equally pleased with the outcome, were more cautious. At the Third Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, held in September 1958 at Kitzbuhel, Austria, Fedorov, just returning from the Geneva conference, told physicist Victor Weisskopf of MIT that he and his colleagues had worked hard to convince their government to stop tests and negotiate with the West on a test ban. The suspension of tests was to the Soviet military disadvantage, Fedorov conceded, because the United States had conducted twice as many tests as had the Soviets. The Soviets nevertheless wanted a test ban, Fedorov insisted, as a measure to counter nuclear proliferation and as a “first step” toward disarmament. Despite the success of the Geneva conference, Fedorov felt that the test ban still “hangs on a thread,” as antiban forces could easily sway Khrushchev

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in the bitter Soviet internal debate. Weisskopf promptly conveyed Fedorov’s message to Killian.57

Loopholes The Geneva system proved indeed precarious, and not only due to the threat of a Soviet reversal. Its unraveling started in December 1958, when analysis of the Hardtack II series of nuclear tests led PSAC to concluded that the Geneva system was inadequate in detecting underground tests. Specifically, Hardtack II showed that it was harder to distinguish nuclear explosions from earthquakes than previously assumed. In addition, the number of earthquakes in the Soviet Union per year was now thought to be about twice that of the prior estimate. On January 5, 1959, Killian and Fisk delivered the bad news to Eisenhower. They asked his approval to release the result to show that “we are being realistic and responsible.”58 With misgivings, Eisenhower agreed to publish PSAC’s analysis of the Hardtack II data. He would accept a greater number of control stations or higher threshold of detection, but worried that the Soviets and domestic opponents of a test ban might attack the administration for failing to indicate “the tentative nature of our findings” earlier at Geneva. Killian assured Eisenhower that he did not think the new data would invalidate the Geneva system. To boost the president’s spirit, Killian reminded him that a test ban would serve broad purposes such as setting a precedent for monitored inspection and “breaking through the iron curtain.” Eisenhower emphatically agreed, confiding that he was considering formally breaking the linkage between a test ban and production of weapons to keep the negotiations going. The U.S. dropped the linkage two weeks later.59 In the political negotiations in Geneva, U.S. representative James J. Wadsworth introduced the Hardtack II findings and requested that a technical working group, with experts from both sides, be convened to study these findings. The Soviets were, as Eisenhower had feared, infuriated by Wadsworth’s report. They charged the United States with reneging on its “official” position at the conference of experts and regarded the Wadsworth proposal as an attempt to send more Western inspectors (regarded as likely spies) to the Soviet Union. The test ban talks were thrown into turmoil.60 Back at home, the turn of events showed to many the risks of mingling science with politics. If science, by its internationality, had helped produce the Geneva system, its probing nature also led to its peril. Shifting technical arguments now posed additional obstacles to a difficult course of diplomatic negotiations. Ironically, one might say that it was PSAC and President Eisenhower who seemed to have believed in a “technical fix” of problems in arms control with their earlier faith in the Geneva system. PSAC’s critics now began to wonder aloud about the “betrayal by science.”61 Even Eisenhower, who did not blame PSAC, realized that “technology [was] beclouding the negotiations.”62 In a separate development, the physicist Albert Latter of the Rand Corporation proposed a “big hole” theory that revived the possibility of concealment of underground tests by imagining the use of a huge cave to muffle the effects of nuclear explosions. It gained legitimacy

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within the administration when PSAC visited Livermore in January 1959 and Bethe, initially skeptical, confirmed Latter’s theoretical conclusions.63 PSAC scientists began to feel the sting from their critics. At the committee’s meeting on December 15, 1958, for example, a sharp exchange took place between Gordon Gray, now Eisenhower’s national security adviser, and Edwin Land over scientists’ proper role in arms control. Gray, who had four years earlier led the charge against Oppenheimer for opposing the H-bomb on nontechnical grounds, praised PSAC’s “solid contributions to security” but admonished it to “keep itself in this posture” and to “keep out of the arena of charges and counter-charges to avoid future embarrassment of its usefulness.” In other words, he wanted PSAC scientists to stay within technical bounds and not be identified as outspoken advocates for arms control. Land resented Gray’s tone and demanded that Gray make clear “who it is that feels that the scientists are less tough minded and soft.” “It is the task of the Administration,” Land continued, “to make it clear that its science advisers are a tough minded group; that it can’t expect the PSAC to be a secret advisory group on the one hand and on the other hand to say nothing when such charges are made.” PSAC, Land added, had never “advocated agreement for agreement’s sake” and was doing “a balance job perhaps more than any other group in the country.”64 Despite the controversy and Gray’s warning, PSAC persisted in its push for a test ban. In the spring of 1959, at the request of the State Department, it established several panels to reexamine the Geneva system in light of these new problems and to find ways to improve it. A panel on seismic improvement under Lloyd Berkner confirmed the inadequacy of the Geneva system, but suggested that its effectiveness could be restored with improved equipment and facilities. The panel thought that the “Latter hole” concealment was possible but prohibitively expensive.65 Another PSAC panel, chaired by Wolfgang Panofsky of Stanford, studied the detection of nuclear explosions in outer space, a problem that was left unsolved at the Geneva conference for lack of data. After reviewing the Argus and other American tests in space, the Panofsky panel concluded that such explosions, if unshielded, could be detected by satellites, but both the tests and their detection would be, like the Latter hole, prohibitively expensive.66 Most of all, both panels noted the scarcity of available data and recommended an expansion of seismic and space research, which were eventually carried out by the DOD (Project VELA) and the AEC (Project Cowboy).67 Once again, as in Kistiakowsky’s recommendation for research on solid fuels for missiles, science in policy was linked to policy for science. Their guarded optimism notwithstanding, the Berkner and Panofsky reports’ confirmation of loopholes in the Geneva system greatly troubled Killian. They led him gradually to agree with John McCone, Strauss’s successor as AEC chairman, on limiting the ban to atmospheric tests only. The change was unmistakable. At the meeting of the Committee of Principals on January 26, 1959, Killian still argued that it would be “dangerous” to change to an atmospheric ban, because “that would imply that the fall-out hazard was real,” a position the Eisenhower administration had not officially conceded. Although the Geneva system was not perfect,

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Killian thought it probably posed sufficient deterrence to prevent any future tests.68 On March 13, however, Killian admitted that there were “very real” loopholes in detecting underground and outer space tests when he briefed Eisenhower on the conclusions of the Berkner and Panofsky reports. Pessimistically, he predicted that a comprehensive ban of all tests was probably not viable now.69 These setbacks disappointed but did not deter Eisenhower. If a comprehensive ban was difficult, how about a “threshold treaty,” which would ban all atmospheric tests and those underground tests above a threshold (e.g., ten kilotons) that could be detected with existing means? For Eisenhower, as it was for PSAC, the principal value of a test ban was not the ban itself, but the precedent it set for the establishment of a system of control stations and the right to inspect without a Soviet veto.70 As he told his top advisers on January 12, 1959, if the test ban negotiations succeeded in establishing reciprocal inspection, he thought it would help prevent war. On April 13, Eisenhower proposed the atmospheric ban to Khrushchev who, surprisingly, rejected it as not a complete ban.71 In the meantime, in anticipation of a break-off in the Geneva talks, Killian called for and the administration moved toward resumption of tests.72 Notably, members of PSAC disagreed with Killian over the risk of concealment. In approving the Berkner and Panofsky panel reports in March 1959, the committee emphasized the high cost and impracticality of the “big hole” and outer space concealments. During the discussion, Rabi pointed out that the real question was, as a national policy, “whether we should enter into arms limitation at all.” If this question was settled in the affirmative, he felt, it probably was necessary for the United States to have an arms control agreement “even in the face of possible loop holes.”73 What Rabi rendered was, of course, a political judgment, a recognition that there was no perfect technological solution to an essentially political issue, as Dulles had earlier proposed. The risk of test ban evasion, like the risk to health and environment posed by chemicals, was something that had to be managed intelligently based on a dynamic balance among science, technology, and political consensus-building. The impasse over the test ban also led PSAC, and Killian, to confront the profound asymmetry in the distribution of American technological resources for military buildup and for arms control. On the one hand, the United States tended to give “too much weight to what technology can produce” in military areas such as antimissile defense, while devoting little to arms control, as Killian observed at the committee’s March 1959 meeting. PSAC itself was an asset in arms control and Killian hoped that the committee would not become “conservative and relaxed” but could come up with technical ideas “as rapidly as possible” to control the arms race. Yet both he and other members of PSAC knew that the committee was neither a permanent solution, nor could it hope to match the enormous technical resources, including the numerous think tanks, available to the Pentagon and the AEC. The solution, they concluded, was the creation of a strong organization at the top level of the U.S. government devoted to R&D studies on disarmament. Whereas Edwin Land worried about bureaucratization, the

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idea received enthusiastic support from Wiesner, who thought it important “to establish a vested interest in this field.” A quick study by Kistiakowsky supported the idea. With PSAC’s approval, he then incorporated the idea into a letter from Killian to Gordon Gray advocating an arms control agency.74 PSAC also attempted to move the Geneva talks on a test ban forward more directly. During his meeting with Eisenhower on March 13, 1959, Killian urged a resumption of technical discussions in Geneva on detection.75 Consequently, in May, Eisenhower proposed and Khrushchev accepted technical talks, at Geneva, on the detection of nuclear explosions in space.76 Once again, Western and Eastern scientists, headed by Panofsky and Fedorov, respectively, met in Geneva and, with some difficulties, reached agreements on several alternative approaches in detecting space tests.77 However, when this so-called Technical Working Group I (TWG I) presented its report in the summer of 1959, the United States dragged its feet in following up on the recommendations. There were two seemingly contradictory reasons. On the one hand, in contrast to Killian, PSAC, and the State Department, who argued for the acceptance of certain risks in exchange for breaking the iron curtain, the AEC and DOD insisted on absolute safeguards against clandestine testing and found that none of the technical agreements reached by TWG I were satisfactory in this regard.78 On the other hand, the AEC, as Panofsky had suspected, simply did not think that, due to its high cost, high-altitude testing was a significant issue.79 As a result, TWG I turned out to be a classic case of where scientific consensus failed to solve political problems.80 The Geneva diplomatic talks made little progress before they recessed again between August 26 and October 27, 1959.81

Science for War or Peace? As the test ban process faltered, PSAC scientists became highly agitated over the antagonism to arms control at home, especially in the DOD and AEC. They decided to make arms control the main theme of their annual meeting with President Eisenhower on May 19, 1959, holding extensive preparatory discussions the day before. Whereas “freezing the advantage” had been PSAC’s positive, if unsuccessful, justification for arms control, the scientists appeared now ready to argue its case in more negative terms (i.e., the danger of an uncurbed nuclear arms race).82 Reflecting the coming of the missile age, the remarkable meeting between Eisenhower and the PSAC scientists opened on a grave note. The trend of military technology, Killian told Eisenhower, profoundly troubled the committee. Not only did the weapons systems grow ever more complex, but with them came the perilous shortening of reaction time, increasing instability, and the chances for accidental war. Quickened development of hardware also led to rapid obsolescence and wasteful overlapping of costly weapons systems. Reiterating a long-held belief of PSAC scientists, Killian added that “the Committee could not see any advances in technology which could give us overwhelming superiority.” This clear and stark expression of PSAC scientists’ technological skepticism drew Eisenhower’s emphatic agreement. He noted that “military establishments have always been obsolete.”83

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Following this sober warning against any technological fix in the arms race, Killian turned to PSAC’s recommendation to attack “anew” the problems of arms control, which constituted “an alternative [to armed buildup] that holds real possibilities.” In particular, both reflecting and narrowing Rabi’s earlier proposals, Killian called for systematic studies of the technical problems in arms control to prevent all the difficulties experienced in the hurried test ban talks. Eisenhower agreed and was willing to issue “any additional charter or directive” to carry out this idea. The president added, according to Goodpaster’s notes, “just as military men succeeded as they work themselves out of a job, the scientists should be working themselves out of the job of devoting their talent to military weapons systems.” Here, once again, one can see the seed for Eisenhower’s warning against the militarization of American science and society that he would issue in his farewell address less than two years later. Edwin Land, playing his usual role as the promoter of the scientific spirit, elaborated on PSAC’s plea for science to play a more prominent part in arms control. He started by thanking the president, on behalf of the committee, for raising public appreciation of science and making it “as popular as baseball” since their meeting in the shadow of Sputnik one and one-half years ago. Nevertheless, Land doubted that the public had a balanced image of science. The country now rightly recognized science as a vital component of national security, but it did not, Land argued, appreciate science for its potential in bringing peace, hope, and prosperity to the people. For science to make dramatic progress in arms control, scientists needed the president’s backing. Reflecting his earlier clash with Gray, Land pointed out that the military always suspected scientists who advocated arms control as being “soft or indifferent” to national security, although in fact they made vital contributions to American military technology. In conclusion, Land urged Eisenhower to make “science for arms control and peace” part of the American mission, supporting it with not only funds, but spiritual leadership. Land’s plea demonstrated that as public scientists, PSAC scientists tried to enhance not only the material support, but the social and cultural images of American science during the Cold War as well. Arms control formed an important part of American scientists’ effort to defend science’s moral standing as well as its institutional and social interest. Following Land’s lead, Wiesner advocated institutional reforms to better prepare for arms control talks. Speaking of his recent trip to Geneva, Wiesner deplored the inadequacy of preparation on the part of the United States and the resultant “overconservatism” in negotiations. Eisenhower strongly agreed with Wiesner on the need for further studies, but he was, like Land, wary of big bureaucracy. He recalled his fight for an atmospheric test ban against the DOD and AEC “three or four years ago,” but also pointed out the need to win over public opinion in a democracy. Instead of “big bodies,” he suggested the formation of a small subcommittee of PSAC to develop, together with other interested agencies and the NSC, the technical basis for disarmament. Killian promised to coordinate this with the State Department.

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PSAC scientists’ effort to shift science from a tool of war to an instrument of peace continued as Detlev Bronk, as chairman of PSAC’s panel on science and foreign affairs, urged an expansion of international scientific exchanges. Scientists, Bronk observed, had always had close associations across national boundaries, and were probably better positioned than others to build international understanding. To maximize the effects of science for peace, Bronk suggested that the United States send young scientists to work overseas for several years, anticipating, in a way, the “peace corps” that would be established later under Kennedy. Bronk also urged an “overhaul” of security rules to allow freer international scientific exchange. In support of Bronk’s proposals, Rabi described his cordial reception during a recent trip to the Soviet Union’s Dubna Laboratory and his admiration for it as an international center of nuclear research within the Eastern Bloc. Inspired by Dubna, Rabi suggested that the United States make the Brookhaven and Lawrence Radiation Laboratories “Pan-American” centers of science. Listening attentively, Eisenhower was impressed by PSAC scientists’ profound concern over the arms race. In both Bronk’s and Rabi’s suggestions, he expressed great interest and asked that the committee follow these up with specific plans. He believed that “we must get better understanding—or else.” There was no sense, he continued, for the American people to make great sacrifices merely “for a negative purpose.” In the long run, the arms race could lead to “dictatorial control or even war.” To avert this, he agreed with PSAC that scientists must turn from weapons to their control. “Science shouldn’t confine itself to military matters,” he said. Rather, echoing Rabi, Eisenhower challenged his science advisers to go beyond the imagination of the military and political leaders and help promote arms control, promising that he himself would do what he could in the same direction. Remarkably, it took a former Army general and a group of the country’s leading scientists to recognize the limits of a military-technological approach to national and international problems. This PSAC–Eisenhower encounter also shows that scientists, or at least some of their leaders, recognized fully the moral implications of how their science was put to use. Instead of being maneuvered unwittingly by the government or the military into doing their bidding, as some recent studies of scientists in the Cold War have suggested, the scientists were shown here attempting to infl uence the direction and role of science in the arms race.84 They were concerned about the nuclear arms race in the late 1950s just as much as they feared Nazi domination during World War II and Soviet expansion in the early phases of the Cold War. In all cases they sought to play a role. This sense of social responsibility might be innate among some of the traditional values in science, such as freedom of communication and internationalism. More likely, however, the scientists developed their political and moral sensitivity from their own bitter experience. During World War II, scientists fought militarization in the Manhattan Project, and in the postwar period, they campaigned against military control of atomic energy, debated the H-bomb decision, and became polarized over the Oppenheimer case.

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It was no accident that PSAC, as the most prominent advocate of arms control, included such veterans as Rabi and Bethe from all these previous cases when science was politicized.

Hope and Despair The stark reality of the Cold War ensured that the soaring words at the Eisenhower– PSAC meeting resulted in no radical departure in American policy, but it and the subsequent Killian–Kistiakowsky transition reenergized Eisenhower and PSAC’s pursuit of a test ban. In March 1959, the Committee of Principals had contemplated a retreat to an atmospheric ban, especially after Killian himself relented, whereas the State Department considered breaking off the talks. By the summer, the “whole activity” began to weigh on Eisenhower. Another PSAC panel study under Robert Bacher on the difficulties of detecting underground tests led him to sigh that perhaps “we had to give up hope” for a comprehensive ban, which McCone quickly seized to push for resumption of tests. Yet, frustrated as he was, Eisenhower did not give up hope; on Kistiakowsky’s swearing-in, he asked his new science adviser to “work hard” on a test ban.85 A new PSAC panel study under James McRae concluded that there was no urgent need for early resumption of tests to safeguard a bomb from accidental detonation if dropped, which allowed Eisenhower to deny an AEC request for that purpose.86 Then, in September, while preparing for a summit with Khrushchev at Camp David, Eisenhower proposed to the Soviets that the two sides resume technical discussions on the test ban and, much to Kistiakowsky’s delight, the latter accepted. Upon Kistiakowsky’s recommendation, Fisk was again selected to head the American delegation. Eisenhower told the Fisk group to aim at a monitoring system to detect underground tests, thus reversing the movement toward an atmospheric ban only.87 The task of Technical Working Group II (TWG II), as the conference came to be called, did not prove easy. Starting in November 1959, the new round of talks in Geneva was plagued by misunderstanding, insufficient technical preparation, and, despite Eisenhower’s general directive, lack of clear and specific policy guidance for the American scientists. Had they been instructed to aim for a 50–50 chance of detection, as Dulles had preferred, for example, the job of the TWG II would probably have been much easier. But Dulles had died on May 24 and no such instruction was forthcoming from either Christian Herter, his successor, or Eisenhower himself. Once again, the U.S. and Soviet scientists sparred over the necessity of revising the Geneva system in view of the Hardtack II data, agreeing only to undertake measures to improve seismic detection.88 The productive atmosphere of international scientific understanding created by the Geneva Conference a year earlier was poisoned to such an extent that the Geneva negotiations nearly collapsed at the end of 1959.89 On December 29, President Eisenhower announced that the United States would continue efforts for a test ban but would end the moratorium on December 31. He did promise, however, not to conduct any nuclear test “without announcing our intention in advance of any resumption.”90

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After the failure of TWG II, pressure against a comprehensive ban as unenforceable mounted, and Kistiakowsky sought a compromise. He proposed a revised “threshold test ban,” with the measure of “threshold” changed from TNT kiloton weight to the Richter seismic scale, which could be more easily monitored. Studies by an ad hoc PSAC group found the scheme technically feasible. Surprisingly, it won support from the AEC and others, but not the DOD.91 At PSAC’s meeting in February 1960, Kistiakowsky also convinced Wiesner and several other PSAC members that the compromise was indeed needed to win Senate ratification.92 Eisenhower approved the threshold proposal, with the threshold set at 4.75 on the Richter scale, for presentation at Geneva in February 1960, together with a joint seismic research program toward the ultimate goal of a comprehensive test ban.93 The Soviets agreed to negotiate on the threshold ban with the condition that all tests be stopped while the proposed research program was in progress. Over the AEC’s and DOD’s objection, Eisenhower approved a resumption of negotiations on the ground that a test ban would help to relax Cold War tension and prevent nuclear proliferation.94 Subsequently, Kistiakowsky was asked to organize the joint seismic research program designed to lower the threshold.95 For this purpose, he received an authorization of $100 million for the American part of the program, named VELA, which later expanded to cover both seismic and space detections and involved the DOD and the AEC. Another example of the interaction between science in policy and policy for science, the VELA program had a major impact on American seismic and geophysical research. “Unhappy” at the large amount of funds involved, Eisenhower reluctantly approved the proposal only after Kistiakowsky promised to “keep a sharp eye on the program.” “So I have helped to spend about 100 million bucks in the next two years,” Kistiakowsky wrote in his diary. “Poor taxpayers!”96 Despite their support for VELA, both Kistiakowsky and Eisenhower recognized by now that the test ban was primarily a political, not technical, issue. During Eisenhower’s meeting with British Prime Minister Harold McMillan in late March 1960, for example, he agreed that the key problem of the number of on-site inspections would not be decided at Geneva, but at the forthcoming summit with Soviet leaders in Paris.97 As it turned out, that summit never materialized. When the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane in May, the incident not only aborted the Paris summit, but also brought to an end Eisenhower’s hope for a test ban during his presidency.98 The grim news of the confrontation and fiasco in Paris reached the White House when PSAC was in session. Dark thoughts ran through Kistiakowsky’s head: he saw an “intensification of the cold war” on the part of the Soviet leadership. “I see bad times coming, with this crisis sharpening to God knows what extent, and very likely the Soviets testing our readiness to use a nuclear deterrent. . . .”99 Among those who were most disappointed and disheartened by this turn of events was Hans Bethe, the most infl uential advocate for a test ban within PSAC before being rotated off the committee in 1959. Privately he grew unhappy with

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President Eisenhower for allowing himself to be bogged down by internal division and for failing to “take a firmer stand” on the test ban.100 In 1960, Bethe, who remained a PSAC panel member, decided to speak out on the issue in an August 1960 Atlantic Monthly article. Recognizing the difficulties, including that posed by the Latter holes, Bethe nevertheless argued that the United States should have gone ahead with a test ban even with some risk so as to freeze American superiority in nuclear weapons. Continued tests could not improve the efficiency of nuclear weapons by a thousand times, as Teller claimed, because “Further nuclear weapons development will be limited by the laws of physics.” In the end, Bethe argued for a resumption of test ban negotiations to preserve what little military advantages the United States still enjoyed against the Soviets, to reap the political benefits of opening up the Soviet society, and, lastly, to help limit the spread of nuclear weapons to other countries such as China. To be sure, China might not adhere to a test ban, but if there was no ban, he predicted that China would gain nuclear capabilities soon—“I will not be surprised if the Chinese develop nuclear weapons before another five years pass.”101 As the first public, though gentle, criticism of the Eisenhower administration’s nuclear policy by a former member of PSAC, Bethe’s article caused unease in Kistiakowsky and his staff when the physicist sent them an advanced draft. “I am not enthused by this,” wrote Kistiakowsky, but he did not prevent its publication either.102 The article did lead at least some critics of the test ban to rethink their positions. The physicist Gregory Breit of Yale, a Los Alamos veteran, for example, wrote Bethe that it “has shaken somewhat my beliefs” in support of Teller’s position. However, Breit was now troubled by the Bethe–Teller division; he urged them to “work out a common viewpoint or compromise.”103 That, however, turned out to be impossible. In fact, Teller became so enraged by Bethe’s article—“full of factual misstatements”—that he challenged Bethe (and Wiesner) to a television debate. When Bethe refused, Teller appealed to Kistiakowsky for intervention.104 In talking to Bethe, however, Kistiakowsky was himself convinced that “nothing good could come of the proposed TV debate.”105 It is not clear what arguments Bethe used to convince Kistiakowsky of the futility of a direct confrontation with PSAC’s nemesis over the test ban. Both sides knew, however, that their battle over the test ban, one of the most momentous issues in the nuclear age, would not end even as the Eisenhower administration drew to a close.

Conclusion The ultimate cause of failure in the search for a test ban during the Eisenhower administration was the mistrust between the two superpowers and the belief on the part of the U.S. military and its supporters that continued nuclear expansion benefited the United States more than the Soviet Union. Except for Eisenhower, much of the U.S. government, especially the DOD, still thought in terms of winning a nuclear war, as Dulles lamented at the March 24, 1958 meeting in the White House.106 For this purpose, it was natural for the military to insist on having all possible weapons that technology could provide, to resist the closing of

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any option, and to feel confident only in its own military strength, even with the knowledge that the Soviets might eventually catch up to or surpass the United States in various measures of strength if the arms race continued.107 There was also the matter of a turf war over the control of American defense policy: the DOD and AEC resisted arms control because it threatened to make defense policy a matter of political decisions handled by the State Department rather than themselves. For these reasons, the DOD and AEC also resented the participation of PSAC in nuclear policy. Yet, despite strong resistance, PSAC’s involvement in the search for a test ban showed that science could exert a crucial infl uence in American Cold War policy. Through the Bethe panel, PSAC’s Puerto Rico report, the Geneva Conference of Experts, and the subsequent diplomatic and technical negotiations on a test ban, PSAC sought to and largely succeeded in putting moderate scientists back into American nuclear policymaking. It broke the spell against scientists’ participation in policymaking that was one of the legacies of the 1954 Oppenheimer case. With Eisenhower’s vital support, it even succeeded where the GAC under Oppenheimer failed in 1949 with its proposal of a ban on H-bomb tests: it helped put arms control, which had faltered since the Baruch Plan of 1946, back on the U.S. government’s agenda. As the committee’s remarkable meetings with Eisenhower on arms control in 1958 and 1959 revealed, PSAC’s advocacy for a nuclear test ban came closer to a moral questioning of unlimited technological developments—in this case nuclear weapons technology—for the good of the society than insider scientists had ever dared to argue since the H-bomb debate in 1949. In struggling with the problem of arms control, PSAC’s own thinking was transformed: it evolved from its early hope of finding a technological solution to the arms race—the Geneva system—to a strong skepticism that technology would ever solve the problem of the arms race. The collapse of the Geneva system, the deadlock over inspection and control, and the revival of Cold War tension following the U-2 incident in 1960 all indicated to PSAC that arms control was essentially a political question. Thus by the time it met with Eisenhower on July 12, 1960, PSAC came to recognize that “the United States will have to make a purely political decision” regarding the risks and benefits of a test ban.108 In recognizing the primary importance of politics in the test ban process, neither PSAC scientists nor Eisenhower denied the validity of the technical reality, such as the difficulty of test detection and the possibility of evasion. Testifying to their faith in the ultimate commonality of science and democracy, they believed that it was imperative that they not hide or distort the facts about test detection from the public. Ultimately, however, PSAC realized that, without a necessary political consensus on the part of the U.S. government, their dream of turning science from war to peace through arms control, a key item on their agenda as public scientists, would remain unfulfilled.

9

The Politics of Big Science, 1957–1960

On May 14, 1959, President Eisenhower addressed a high-profile Symposium on Basic Research in New York. Sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the conference and the presidential speech were both designed by science adviser James Killian and PSAC to enhance the public’s interest in science. Speaking on “Science: Handmaiden of Freedom,” Eisenhower dramatically announced that, on the advice of his science advisers, he would soon ask Congress to appropriate $100 million to build the largest scientific instrument in history, a two-mile-long linear electron accelerator at Stanford University. The president called the decision a deliberate step to demonstrate the federal government’s determination to further scientific research and to ensure American leadership in high-energy physics.1 It clearly indicated that in the post-Sputnik era, the Cold War was waged not only in space, over the missile ranges, or at the negotiating tables in Geneva, but also in university laboratories, places closer to the hearts of the public scientists in PSAC. Yet, despite the substantial support it enjoyed in the scientific community and the presidential endorsement, the Stanford accelerator’s path in Washington was not smooth either before or after Eisenhower’s speech. In many ways, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC as it became known) inaugurated the era of the politics of Big Science.2 Why and how should the government and society fund intriguing but expensive and apparently impractical research? Along with others, PSAC grappled with that question during its involvement in the saga of SLAC. It was PSAC’s first major role in post-Sputnik national science policy. The vicissitudes of the project, PSAC’s arguments in its support, and their effects reveal the extent to which Big Science policy, just like issues in space, military technology, and arms control, was shaped by both the Cold War and domestic politics in the post-Sputnik era.

The Origin of SLAC Stanford physicists under W. W. Hensen had pioneered the development of linear electron accelerators to study the structure of elementary particles and had, by the mid-1950s, built four such machines in the Mark series, all under the sponsorship of the Office of Naval Research (ONR), with good results. These successes inspired Stanford physicists, now under the leadership of Edward L. Ginzton and Wolfgang Panofsky, to propose to the university in October 1954 that it seek federal funding for an even bigger machine dubbed Project M, with M standing for 142

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both “multi-Bev” (billion-electron-volt)—initially fifteen but expandable to fifty— and “monster.”3 It “would keep Stanford in the forefront of physics during the next decade or two and would firmly establish the university as a center of research in high-energy physics.”4 In the shadow of the Oppenheimer hearings, the Stanford physicists declared that they would guard their autonomy despite government funding. “We would resist all attempts by the AEC or other contributing agencies to impose security restrictions on this project,” they wrote, vowing to keep the facility “not only unclassified but open to visitors, regardless of clearance and citizenship.”5 Due to both the size of the requested funding—$78 million for construction and $14 million annually for operations—and the pluralistic structure of federal funding for science, Stanford sent the proposal in April 1957 to all three potential patrons: the AEC, the ONR, and the NSF.6 Curiously, the proposal contained little to justify public funding of such a huge scientific project other than its unique value to high-energy physics. Apparently, Stanford scientists took for granted that the government would support Big Science for its own sake. Project M would be just another in a long line of federally funded accelerators. The momentum in federal funding reinforced the physicists’ tendency to concentrate on the intrinsic aspects of basic research. When they did occasionally promise technological applications, it was at best indirect.

Cold War and Turf Battles The physicists’ apparent disregard for a broad rationalization for their claim to public funds did not, of course, extend to government agencies. The AEC, for example, had to justify its ever costlier high-energy physics program to the JCAE. Although the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 authorized the AEC to conduct research and development on nuclear processes, the agency, under the chairmanship of Lewis Strauss, always charged such spending to the Cold War. Advances in the field helped to show American superiority in science and its intention to use “Atoms for Peace.”7 To keep the United States ahead of the Soviets in accelerator energy level, the AEC had decided in 1956 to build a large accelerator at its Argonne laboratory near Chicago.8 For similar reasons, the Soviets also pursued a crash program in accelerator development.9 As the Cold War competition fueled the race in high-energy physics, interagency rivalry within the U.S. government made it difficult to pursue a rational national policy. The ONR had dominated funding in nuclear physics in the early postwar years, but the AEC soon overtook its position, drawing resentment from both the ONR and the NSF, which, despite its puny budget, also wanted to get in the big game.10 Although Stanford physicists were willing to accept funding from any of the three agencies, privately they preferred the ONR, which tended to give universities more autonomy than the AEC.11 Nevertheless, neither Stanford nor the ONR could make a move without the AEC’s blessing. For its part, the AEC did not like to see its monopoly broken, but neither did it want to undertake the project until assurance came from the White House that such an expensive accelerator would not hurt its other programs.12

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There was an additional complication with the AEC sponsorship: The AEC had limited new accelerators to its existing national laboratories, a policy that was challenged not only by Stanford, but also by several other universities in the Midwestern Universities Research Association (MURA). MURA had clashed with the AEC’s Argonne Laboratory in Chicago over management policy and had tried for several years to get government funding for a huge proton accelerator of its own. The association, however, drew criticism from both science administrators and fellow scientists for using politicians from the Midwest to lobby for it in the White House and in Congress.13 Thus, by late 1957, the decision over the Stanford accelerator involved not only interagency entanglement, but also competition from MURA. The matter stood at “dead center” and became one of the most pressing issues in science policy to be decided at the presidential level in the aftermath of Sputnik.14 Initially, Sputnik invoked concern at Stanford. Panofsky thought that the Soviet victory would touch off a space race and spur further emphasis in American policy on applied research and development at the expense of basic research such as high-energy physics.15 Such fear soon subsided, however, when Frederick Terman, Stanford provost, attended a meeting in Washington of the Naval Research Advisory Committee, which he chaired. At the meeting he learned from Rabi, a member of his committee, that the ODM-SAC, which Rabi chaired, was “making strong statements” to Eisenhower in support of basic research.16 The Stanford scientists became all the more hopeful when Eisenhower singled out high-energy accelerators for wise federal investment in his “chin-up” speech on November 13, 1957. Terman and Panosfsky took the speech as a cue to “speed up the machinery in Washington” for the Stanford accelerator.17 Meanwhile, high-energy physics drew Eisenhower’s personal attention in early 1958 when he spotted an item on the construction of accelerators in the DOD’s budget. Eisenhower questioned the role of the military in such a basic research field and asked Killian to examine the matter for him. Killian took the opportunity to initiate a general review of big accelerators, in the hope of reaching an interagency policy consensus among the AEC, the DOD, and the NSF. James Fisk undertook the job for Killian and PSAC.18 Fisk soon focused on the Stanford proposal and strongly recommended it for government support on both its merits and on its role in raising national prestige. The Stanford accelerator, Fisk found, enjoyed the “enthusiastic endorsement” of the scientific community, was “thoroughly sound,” both scientifically and technically, and was critical to American leadership in the field. In contrast, the MURA proposal appeared to Fisk “less advanced.” Fisk proposed joint support of the Stanford project by the DOD, the AEC, and the NSF, arguing that it transcended the interests and present financial capabilities of any of them alone. The proposal won endorsement by PSAC at its meeting on January 2, 1958, but drew mixed reactions from the agencies. Whereas the DOD and the NSF welcomed it, the AEC vacillated between passive consent and active opposition. Without the AEC’s cooperation, the ONR and NSF could hardly afford to fund the machine on their own, despite the NSF’s newfound wealth in the wake of Sputnik. Furthermore,

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all three agencies found the Fisk proposal lacking because it failed to address the high-energy physics program as a whole. They also opposed the stated principle of joint funding as limiting their future freedom of action.19 The Stanford physicists likewise reacted to Fisk’s proposal with ambivalence. On the one hand, they welcomed it as a sign of the new national and presidential attention to basic research. On the other hand, Stanford physicists were concerned that the multiagency plan would make it much more difficult to get congressional approval for the project, because many committees would be involved. Panofsky especially worried that “the Great Men in Washington” were making premature decisions “without consulting the victims.”20 Through a network of contacts in the ONR, AEC, and NSF, Panofsky was determined to keep abreast of “Project M politics” in Washington and make his own views known. His job was made easier by his membership in many science advisory groups and, after the 1958 New Year, by his consultant work for PSAC.21 Despite his misgivings, Panofsky nevertheless urged the DOD to take the lead in moving forward the multiagency scheme.22 A bureaucratic dance ensued. Partly due to Panofsky’s push, Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles approved $3 million in March 1958 to start the Stanford project and asked the AEC and the NSF to match it.23 Whereas the NSF reacted favorably, the AEC continued to drag its feet until its opposition to the Fisk scheme received powerful backing from the BOB, which believed in streamlining federal programs.24 The AEC’s victory over PSAC came as a great disappointment to science administrators in the DOD and the NSF who had hoped to set a precedent of the PSAC overriding an agency in science policy.25 The AEC proposed to fund the Stanford accelerator on its own, but with two conditions: first, a procedure of tight fiscal management to avoid such vast cost overruns as happened at its PrincetonPennsylvania electron accelerator, which Stanford generally accepted, and second, a comprehensive White House policy, broader than the Fisk proposal, to ensure long-term support for the AEC’s role in high-energy physics.26 The ball was kicked back to Killian and PSAC. Although the AEC refused to request another study by PSAC—in the background was its chairman Lewis Strauss’s increasing animosity toward PSAC over its support of a nuclear test ban—virtually everyone else agreed that PSAC was the key to getting a presidential policy on high-energy physics. In May 1958, PSAC, spurred by Panofsky, agreed to revisit the subject of high-energy physics. The move coincided with the departure of Strauss from the AEC, which made it possible for the AEC’s scientific staff to communicate directly with PSAC.27 In June 1958, an NSF panel on accelerators studied the issue at Killian’s request and it essentially confirmed the Fisk proposal. At this point, the AEC made a move of its own: John McCone, as the new AEC chairman, proposed to Killian that the AEC’s General Advisory Committee and PSAC create a joint subcommittee to develop principles for a national high-energy physics program. Pending the BOB’s approval, the AEC also formally proposed that it sponsor the construction of the Stanford and other accelerators and the DOD and NSF join in operating them after completion.28 Killian accepted the idea of a PSAC–GAC subcommittee, and, to ensure pluralism in science funding,

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countered the AEC’s second proposal by suggesting the establishment of a federal council on high-energy accelerators with representatives from all three agencies. McCone agreed, believing that the council would keep control of the program “in the hands of government officials and not the scientists.” An engineer by training, McCone distrusted scientists in government. 29

A New Network of Science Policy When it became apparent that the AEC was to be the sponsoring agency, Stanford physicists acted quickly to learn how to deal effectively with this new patron. For this purpose, they turned to a new kind of scientific network that had emerged at the end of World War II: academic contractors with the federal government. Reflecting the state-dominated political economy of Big Science, scientists and administrators built this network not for scientific research, but for science policy, for dealing with the government. It was a key part of the world of public science that PSAC scientists, many of whom headed universities or laboratories, helped shape and would continue to defend during the Cold War. Thus, for a week in May 1958, two Stanford physicists, R. H. Moulton and F. V. L. Pindar, visited five institutions—the University of Chicago, MIT, Harvard, Brookhaven, and Princeton—that were running research laboratories under contracts with the federal government. They queried their hosts on their relations with their patron agencies, including terms of contracts, overhead costs, the hiring of subcontractors, and pay scales for scientists. Clearly, dealing with federal patrons administratively had evolved into an art form for university bureaucrats. For example, R. W. Pratt, Harvard’s director of contracted research, told the visitors, with glee, that the financial plans section of Princeton’s contract with the AEC was not carefully drawn, exposing Princeton to “subtle control of everything” by the AEC. He and other interviewees advised Stanford not only on how to resist the “encroachment” by the AEC, but also on how to make strategic concessions when necessary. Exploring the boundary between public policy and private institutions, Stanford scientists gained much from this contractors’ network on how to negotiate the rather malleable relationship between science and the state. To the scientists and science administrators in this network, who jealously guarded their autonomy, the involvement of PSAC scientists in science policy was undoubtedly a welcome development.30

Pride and Prejudice Meanwhile, in Washington, Killian and McCone established the joint PSAC–GAC panel to advise the government on a policy for high-energy physics. PSAC named Emmanuel Piore, Hans Bethe, and Leland Haworth of the AEC’s Brookhaven National Laboratory as its representatives; the GAC sent Edwin McMillan of the University of California, Berkeley, and Jesse Beams of the University of Virginia. Piore became chair of the group. Following Killian’s instruction, the Piore panel went beyond the matter of the Stanford accelerator to evaluate the importance of high-energy physics, its needs, and the role of the government. It was to

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compare the scientific merits of the Stanford and MURA proposals, consider the best administrative arrangements, and finally, explore the possibilities for international cooperation.31 As the Piore panel sprung into action, a small drama of Washington intrigues began to unfold over the fate of the Stanford Monster. Forces interacted and interests collided at both institutional and disciplinary levels in the Piore panel, rendering it a fascinating window through which to observe post-Sputnik American science policymaking. To start with, Killian’s choice of Piore as chairman of the panel favored the position of the ONR, because Piore had served as its chief scientist before moving to IBM.32 An evangelical promoter of academic basic research despite spending most of his career in the government and in industry, Piore was concerned about ONR’s losing high-energy physics to the AEC, which, he privately complained, did not do a good job in supporting research.33 Partly due to Piore’s and Panofsky’s instigation, the ONR soon countered the AEC’s move with a proposal to sponsor the Stanford accelerator on its own, citing its previous support for the university’s Mark accelerators and its electronics interests in the electron accelerator. The ONR proposal received support from others in PSAC, including Killian, but they doubted it would meet the approval of the DOD leadership, which was wary of acquiring such a Big Science project without apparent direct military relevance.34 Yet, not long into its deliberation, the Piore panel indeed seemed to lean toward the DOD as sponsor for the Stanford accelerator, which came as an unpleasant surprise to the AEC. Although this development pleased Stanford physicists, opposition to the accelerator on physical grounds by two of the most prominent physicists on PSAC stunned them. Rabi, dean of physics on the East Coast, argued before the Piore panel that the proposed scale of the Stanford project, at fifteen to forty-five Bev, far exceeded the current needs in physics. Hans Bethe, although not as critical as Rabi, agreed that seven Bev was then the highest energy at which one “knows interesting things can be studied.” To be conservative, Bethe considered twenty Bev a reasonable limit and regarded forty-five Bev as unjustified. The panel then authorized McMillan, a close friend of Panofsky, to convey these criticisms back to Stanford.35 Clearly, the Stanford physicists had to respond to Rabi’s and Bethe’s questioning of the energy range of their accelerator.36 As often was the case when scientists communicated among themselves, the Stanford physicists’ appeal to the Piore panel was void of the Cold War rhetoric of accelerator race that scientists were wont to deploy in public discussions. They did not insist on a forty-five Bev energy to beat the European or Soviet efforts, but only expressed proper concern that accelerators should not cluster around the same energy levels. For the most part, Panofsky and Ginzton concentrated on scientific and technical reasons for retaining forty-five Bev as the final energy level. Conceding to Bethe that there was no specific scientific justification for forty-five Bev as yet, they nevertheless argued strongly for retaining the expansibility to such a level. They noted that past experiments had made use of scientific instruments in unexpected ways, and went on to enumerate several fundamental problems in particle physics where

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further progress might well require energy at the forty-five Bev level. In addition, they argued that a reduction in the final energy level would probably result in very little savings.37 The argument did not persuade Rabi, who continued to oppose the Stanford project. In a phone call to Piore, Rabi referred to an article on cosmic rays to show that high-energy accelerators were no longer necessary. Both McMillan and Panofsky were “considerably upset” with this line of argument—“if a junior person had made such a statement, we would have thrown him out,” McMillan swore. Although cosmic rays could be used to simulate some of the work done with accelerators, they pointed out, the results were very crude and qualitative because cosmic rays provided only scanty and uncontrolled initial data. McMillan and Panofsky believed Rabi, not being a high-energy physicist, simply did not know “the facts of life” in the field. They asked Robert Serber, another former Berkeley friend who was now a colleague of Rabi’s at Columbia, to help enlighten Rabi on these matters.38 Despite Rabi’s criticism, Stanford’s argument won approval from the majority of the Piore panel. The panel completed its report in November 1958 and recommended go-ahead of the Stanford accelerator with ten Bev as the starting energy as a compromise between Stanford’s proposed fifteen Bev and Bethe’s seven Bev. Citing the use of advanced microwave technology in the proposed Stanford accelerator and the military interest therein, the Piore panel hinted that the DOD might be the right agency to sponsor the project. This suggestion matched the thinking of Killian and his staff. Shortly afterward, a paper apparently prepared by PSAC staff advocated a DOD sponsorship, noting that “linear accelerators . . . have at times been suggested for military weapons applications such as defeating air dropped nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles. Although these possibilities have not materialized, they further illustrated the relevance of linear accelerator technology to the long-term interests of the DOD.”39 Once again, PSAC scientists, although not strident cold warriors, could not let pass an opportunity to link basic research and American national security. The Piore report touched, as did the original Stanford proposal, only very briefly on the broad justification for continued federal financing of high-energy physics. The panel argued that such support was warranted both because of the field’s importance to science and because of its high cost, which was well beyond the capabilities of private resources. Although it cited the role of accelerators as “training ground” for young scientists both in high-energy physics and in other fields, it did not elaborate the case. Interestingly, neither did it make any explicit promise of technological spinoffs.40 It recommended that the whole high-energy program be reviewed at the presidential level, both because of the desire of the NSF and DOD to break the AEC’s monopoly, which it supported, and because of an expected quantum leap in cost from $53 million in 1959 to $125 million in 1963. As to the MURA proposal and another from the AEC’s Oak Ridge Laboratory, the Piore panel recommended continued support for study but rejected construction at the present. The panel also agreed with Killian’s proposal of a high-level

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AEC–DOD–NSF council to coordinate the nation’s high-energy physics program and international cooperation.41

Science and National Prestige The Piore report gained wide support within the government but did not solve the problem of a high-energy physics policy entirely. PSAC accepted it after a lively discussion during which Bethe withdrew his earlier reservations about the Stanford proposal and lent it strong support and Rabi sat silent. The AEC’s GAC, the other sponsor of the panel, expressed concern about the balance in the support of basic research, but nevertheless approved the Piore report. The ONR, AEC, and NSF also endorsed the report, but the crucial question of which agency was to sponsor the Stanford project remained unresolved, notwithstanding the Piore report’s vague suggestion of the DOD.42 Thus Killian hesitated to bring the report to Eisenhower for approval, because he knew of the president’s displeasure about military sponsorship. Equally troubling to the ONR and the Stanford physicists was Quarles’s coolness toward the DOD’s involvement in such a nonmilitary Big Science project, which Herbert York, as the DDRE, shared. In addition, the budget bureau refused to increase the FY 1960 budget; DOD and NSF had to try to find money for the first year of the Stanford project within existing funds if they wanted to sponsor it. When they finally did so, Killian decided to bring the Piore report to Eisenhower.43 On April 2, 1958, Eisenhower met in the White House with Killian, McCone, York, Waterman, Elmer Staats (deputy BOB director), Piore, McMillan, and others to hear the Piore report and to determine a national policy for high-energy physics. Killian opened the discussion by noting that PSAC endorsed the report and regarded the proposed program as the single most important way to strengthen American science. McMillan then gave a primer on high-energy physics, which fascinated Eisenhower.44 Inevitably, the Cold War entered the picture as McMillan emphasized Soviet progress in high-energy physics. Piore then outlined his panel’s proposal for a national program in the field. Despite the sharp increase in cost, Killian urged Eisenhower to support the program as a way to improve both American science and national prestige.45 Specifically, Killian told Eisenhower that he, McCone, Waterman, and York together recommended, among other things, the immediate approval of the Stanford accelerator as the next major American step forward in the field. To ensure its long-term prospects and public understanding, Killian also suggested that the project be specifically authorized by Congress. Finally, Killian reported that the question of which agency would take up the project was not yet decided. Although most favored the DOD’s ONR, the budget bureau did not consider it a wise management policy to divide the AEC’s responsibility in high energy physics with others, he said.46 Eisenhower readily approved the Stanford proposal but raised several issues about how to proceed with it. He questioned, for example, whether it was necessary to get Congress to authorize such a specific project. Partisan politics and harmful publicity would surely distort and confuse the case, Eisenhower feared. He rather

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preferred to build the accelerator first and then announce it. McCone and Staats replied that a construction project of such a large size needed special congressional authorization, and McMillan said it was simply impossible to conceal work on the two-mile-long machine. Eisenhower, as expected, expressed reservations about the DOD as sponsoring agency. He worried about “the psychological aspects of identification of the accelerator with military interest.” On the other hand, Eisenhower felt that if the DOD became the sponsor, it might be easier to obtain funds from Congress because the armed services committees would handle it in a “more quiet and businesslike” fashion than the JCAE, which oversaw the AEC’s budget. In the end, Eisenhower ordered further study of the agency matter.47 Eisenhower’s enthusiasm for high-energy physics was remarkable, especially in view of his earlier (pre-Sputnik) questioning of federal support of pure science.48 To be sure, Sputnik worked in the scientists’ favor, for the Stanford accelerator was widely seen as a necessary move to win the Cold War race in science and technology. However, as we have seen, Eisenhower also resisted many post-Sputnik projects in military R&D and in space purportedly to do the same. There were probably other factors as well. One factor was simply Eisenhower’s fascination with the exploratory aspect of high-energy physics. Just as he enjoyed the earlier briefing by Purcell and York on space, he seemed to derive great pleasure from learning about the “strangely beautiful” subatomic world, although it is doubtful that he understood much of the technicalities.49 Perhaps more important, Eisenhower was grateful to Killian and PSAC for helping him put the government’s space, science, and defense programs in order and for spearheading efforts in arms control. Thus, when Killian and PSAC recommended the high-energy physics program as the single most important demonstration of government support of basic research, Eisenhower was willing to go along with them, both as an indication of his trust in their judgment and likely also as a reward in policy for science for their contributions in science in policy.50 The White House meeting, especially McMillan and Killian’s invoking of Soviet progress in the field, also indicated that as the battle moved from physicists to other scientists, to bureaucrats within the executive branch, and then to Congress, justification for the Big Science project likewise shifted. It evolved from learning about the inner structure of matter, to the status of particle physics as a frontier field in science and its benefits in training scientists in other fields, to the practical results incidental to such research, and finally, to maintaining, or rather, restoring, American scientific leadership in the Cold War. Thus Sputnik added national prestige as a new argument for federal support of science to Bush’s 1945 list of national security, economy, and health as well as the DuBridge–Rabi justification on its role in shaping technological evaluations. In May 1959, as Eisenhower publicly endorsed the Stanford project at the Symposium on Basic Research in New York, the budget bureau moved successfully to make the AEC, rather than the DOD, the sponsoring agency, despite opposition from the ONR and Killian and the private wishes of the Stanford physicists. York did not fight the decision, because he agreed with Eisenhower that the DOD should

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not be looked on as the primary agency to support science.51 A Science editorial also questioned whether the DOD was the best place for the Stanford accelerator, especially in view of its requirements for security and secrecy.52 Killian, however, acquiesced to the BOB’s decision most reluctantly; he insisted that the decision should not set a precedent for narrowing the DOD’s role in basic research.53 For its part, the AEC sought and secured assurance from the BOB that the Stanford project would not hurt its other programs. It formally accepted the responsibility and requested congressional authorization of construction funds, now estimated at $105 million, to be spent in six years.54

Ways and Means When the JCAE opened hearings on the AEC’s request for authorization of the Stanford accelerator on July 14, 1959, the fight over the “monster” moved to a new arena. For the remainder of the Eisenhower administration, the debate was no longer over agency assignment or scientific merits, but rather the practical questions of financial and administrative arrangements, the site suitability, and Stanford’s confl ict of interest with suppliers for the project. In the background were partisan politics and heightened concern about the rising cost of science in the AEC and elsewhere in the government. At the JCAE hearings, the AEC justified the project as part of its mandate to conduct R&D as related to “nuclear processes.” High-energy physics was presented as a logical extension of nuclear physics, the importance of which was “evident to you.” Scientist-witnesses testified that expensive accelerators were not scientific luxury, but rather, as Norman Ramsey of Harvard put it, “a very sad necessity which nature seems to be forcing upon scientists.” They cited examples from the history of science and technology, such as electricity and digital electronic circuits, to show how discoveries in basic research on the nature and structure of matter had transformed industry and the military in the past. By and large, however, they were preaching to the converted. Although somewhat irritated by the administration’s failure to give advance notice of Eisenhower’s announcement, the JCAE, which took a proprietary view of the AEC, seemed favorably impressed with the project. An “energy Cold War” with the Soviet Union was mentioned but did not figure very prominently in the hearings.55 However, the most neatly tied package can easily unravel on Capitol Hill. On August 26, 1959, the JCAE voted to recommend authorization of the Stanford project. Before the bill was sent to the House and Senate for voting, however, the JCAE, especially its chairman, Senator Clinton Anderson (D-NM), had second thoughts. He claimed to have found “a number of uncertainties” in the original Stanford proposal. Specifically, he complained about the proposed site’s vulnerability to earthquakes, differing cost estimates, and problems in design and construction approaches. Anderson then reached an agreement with McCone that the authorization be deferred.56 Through its own channels, Stanford learned that McCone himself had, following a visit to the university, provided much of the ammunition for the JCAE and suggested the delay of authorization. Fortunately

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for its advocates, the setback to the project turned out to be minimal, because the compromise allowed the AEC to continue to sponsor engineering and geological studies on the project. To McCone’s and the JCAE’s delight, such investigations did result in changes of both the site and the construction method, from tunneldigging to the money-saving “cut and cover.”57 For his part, McCone was bothered by more than technical problems about the Stanford project. Increasingly, he resented the growing cost of science and the rising infl uence of scientists in government. Calling the Stanford machine “your accelerator,” he told York and Kistiakowsky in July 1959 that in general “scientists cause trouble in government.”58 He was sympathetic to Eugene Wigner, a politically conservative physicist from Princeton, who denounced the Piore report as “irresponsible” and jeopardizing to national defense by drawing too many young scientists from military research to particle physics.59 The debate over the nuclear test ban once again colored the AEC’s relationship with PSAC and Stanford, as McCone continued Strauss’s opposition to it and as Panofsky emerged as a principal advocate for it within PSAC.60 By late 1959, the shock of unexpectedly high costs of experimentation with the existing accelerators led McCone to reopen the question of priority to be accorded high-energy physics in the government’s support of basic research. At his request, Kistiakowsky agreed to reconvene the Piore panel to take another look at the subject.61 The reconstituted Piore panel, however, did not solve McCone’s problem. Following a two-day meeting and briefing, the group actually increased its earlier estimate of costs in the field and reaffirmed its earlier recommendation to “start immediately” the Stanford accelerator.62 The report alarmed not only McCone but also the budget bureau. Both appealed to Kistiakowsky, hoping that he could get PSAC to dampen the panel’s recommendations in view of the needs of all fields of science. Kistiakowsky, however, demurred at the AEC/BOB request, citing the incompetence of PSAC to judge scientific priorities and its lack of members from many fields, such as earth sciences, biochemistry, oceanography, and astronomy.63 Nevertheless, Kistiakowsky did convey the AEC’s and the BOB’s desires to PSAC at its meeting on February 14 and 15. During discussion of the new Piore report, Rabi again objected to the recommendation for more accelerators. Another PSAC member, Glenn T. Seaborg of Berkeley, also expressed concern that high-energy physics should not be expanded at the expense of low-energy physics. In the end, however, the majority of PSAC firmly endorsed the second Piore report.64 In this, PSAC differed markedly from the AEC’s GAC, which now viewed the expansion of the field with growing unease.65 Dissatisfied by the outcome of the second Piore report, the AEC demanded another presidential review of the high-energy physics program. On March 9, 1960, McCone met with the White House staff and Maurice Stans, BOB director, to review the matter. Reading a handwritten note from the president asking why the Stanford project was stalled, W. B. Persons, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, urged action to get it going. Stans, however, criticized the scientists for overselling their costly programs to Eisenhower. He suggested that neither the Stanford accelerator

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nor other projects be recommended to Congress in the budget request for FY 1961.66 At this point, Cold War rhetoric came to Kistiakowsky’s, and Stanford’s, rescue. He astutely responded that the high-energy physics program involved “national prestige.” To compete with the Soviet Union, the Stanford project presented a unique opportunity “to lead from strength rather than from weakness.” The allusion to the Cold War worked the intended magic and all present agreed that Kistiakowsky and McCone should study the problem in more detail before they went to see Eisenhower at a later date.67 Interestingly, despite his clever maneuvering on behalf of the Stanford project, Kistiakowsky was actually ambivalent about the rapid growth of high-energy physics. As a chemist, Kistiakowsky had his own reservations about the balance of U.S. science policy, but eventually endorsed high-energy physics both as a frontier field in science and as a symbol of American national prestige. In a letter to McCone following the meeting just mentioned, Kistiakowsky elaborated on his and PSAC’s arguments in support of the high-energy program. Kistiakowsky told about his own initial doubts about the wisdom of a large-scale expansion in high-energy physics, as recommended by the Piore panel. However, these doubts were “gradually dispelled,” he wrote, by several considerations about American science policy during the Cold War. The federal government had committed itself to the support of science to further “national welfare, health, security and prestige,” he noted. Soviet successes in several fields convinced him that the United States should, besides ensuring broad scientific progress, “push selected areas of our own at the maximum possible pace.” Kistiakowsky believed space and high-energy physics fell into the latter category. Although both contributed to national prestige, highenergy physics, Kistiakowsky pointed out, enjoyed more scientific merit.68 In the end, Eisenhower agreed with Kistiakowsky’s and PSAC’s argument. At a meeting in the White House on March 23, 1960, he “spoke most emphatically” about getting the Stanford accelerator started.69 He also approved the rest of the high-energy physics program as recommended by the Piore panel, with the condition that it be implemented at a slower pace.70 Following this presidential directive, McCone finally agreed to incorporate the Stanford accelerator and several other items in high-energy physics in the AEC’s FY 1961 budget and proposed them to the JCAE.71 The battle over the Monster was rejoined in Capitol Hill, where the JCAE, especially Senator Anderson, continued to fight the administration’s proposed project while its scientist-advocates both inside and outside of PSAC rallied to its support. On April 11, 1960, Robert E. Marshak, a physicist at the University of Rochester, sent a telegram to Anderson urging him to withdraw his opposition to the project, which he said enjoyed overwhelming support of the American scientific community. Recalling that Anderson had made an “eloquent plea” for federal support of the field four years ago at a Rochester conference on the subject, Marshak found Anderson’s current opposition to the Stanford project “difficult to understand.” Failure to approve this important project, Marshak warned, “will be serious blow both to progress in [the] most fundamental field of

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atomic science [and] American prestige abroad.”72 Anderson, however, remained unmoved. Although he drew more fire from scientists over the Stanford project “than any group on any program” since he sat on the JCAE, he refused to expedite its approval. The JCAE again turned down the AEC’s request for full appropriation of the Stanford project. Instead, it recommended a one-year $3 million grant for design and engineering, which the AEC was willing to consider despite opposition from Panofsky and Kistiakowsky.73 The JCAE cited various technical reasons for the delay of authorization, but many observers, especially Republican members of the committee, pointed to politics as the real reason for Anderson’s move. They believed that the Democrats blocked “the Republican accelerator” to deny vice president and GOP candidate Richard Nixon a photo opportunity amidst the heated presidential campaign.74 They also pointed to Senator Henry M. Jackson’s maneuver to use the Stanford accelerator as a lever to force the administration to accept the addition of powergenerating facilities, costing $95 million, to a new plutonium-producing reactor at Hanford in his home state of Washington. As the first major Big Science project in politics, the Stanford accelerator was trapped in the conventional Capitol Hill give-and-take game.75 Finally, the AEC and JCAE worked out a committee report that Stanford felt was favorable enough for it to accept the one-year authorization. The report allowed the AEC to “proceed from the present master plans” and take steps that “would lead to initiation of construction at the site with a minimum of delay after full authorization of the project.”76 As Science reported, the AEC seemed to have a go-ahead to proceed exactly as if the construction funds had been authorized.77 Most important, Panofsky won the precious right for Stanford to control the design and, later, the construction of the accelerator.78 When PSAC’s Piore panel reconvened for a third time in the autumn of 1960 at McCone’s request, its enthusiastic report on high-energy physics contained a biting commentary by Wigner, who became a member of the expanded panel. In it he made public his previous concern about the impact of an expanded high-energy physics program on other sciences and on national defense efforts.79 Kistiakowsky and PSAC, however, once again endorsed the Piore report, with the disclaimer that it represented an optimum program that had to be balanced against other programs in science and in the government.80 The question was, of course, who would do the balancing. In a concurrent proposal, Kistiakowsky and PSAC suggested that instead of PSAC, the NAS should be brought in to help make choices in science funding. However that initiative received only partial implementation because the BOB objected, echoing the debate in the 1940s over the establishment of the NSF, to private bodies and special interests shaping public policy.81 Short of complete authorization, the Stanford project, one of the most prominent scientific projects sponsored by PSAC and Eisenhower in the post-Sputnik era, faced an uncertain fate after being kicked around in Washington for three years. Eisenhower was clearly disappointed by the lack of progress on SLAC. During his last official meeting with PSAC on December 19, 1960, Eisenhower again asked

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about the status of the linear accelerator. When told by Panofsky that Congress had slowed its authorization, Eisenhower lamented bitterly the meddling of partisan politics in science policy: “The Congress authorizes things we do not want or need, and denies what we do want or need, not hesitating, even in a scientific matter like this, to set its own judgment against that of the scientists.”82 Political resistance to a pure and expensive federal science project, in both Congress and the administration, proved formidable, and the internal division in the scientific community certainly did not help.

Conclusion This story of PSAC’s involvement in the funding of SLAC makes it clear that the dynamics of the political economy of high-energy physics in this period hinged on both the pull of international politics and the push by the scientists. President Eisenhower and PSAC supported the Stanford project because it promised to maintain American leadership in the field and serve as a symbol of the administration’s support of basic research in the aftermath of Sputnik. Lacking utilitarian promises and therefore a wide constituency, however, Big Science practitioners such as the Stanford and PSAC scientists had to use the Cold War competition for national prestige and rely on a network of scientists in government to achieve their scientifically meritorious but financially hopeless goals. Sputnik marked a turning point in the politics of Big Science not only by creating a new popular enthusiasm for basic research and scientific exploration, but also by bringing scientists such as PSAC and its Piore panel into positions of infl uence. Finally, economic prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s made the expansion of high-energy physics fiscally possible. Yet, as science left its “sealing wax and string” tradition behind and entered the era of gigantism, it had to contend with other elements in the equation of national political economy. Several factors contributed to the Stanford accelerator’s difficulties. The most prominent one was what journalist Daniel Greenberg called the “immunological reaction” against such an early Big Science project.83 Its price tag alone shocked many. As one congressman pointed out at the JCAE hearings in 1959, the Stanford machine cost almost as much as all the other accelerators up to that time combined.84 Elsewhere, another congressman, John R. Pillion from New York, found it hard to believe that a pure science project could be so expensive. “I can build five or six nice blast furnaces for that type of money,” he said, “or almost a whole steel plant.” “What is the practical result of this accelerator?” he demanded. “What are the prospects of putting the knowledge that we will obtain from this accelerator into practical use? How will it aid our defense? How will it raise the standard of living of our people?” After all, he said, “we have to explain it back home.” When McCone shrewdly invoked the connection between Ernest Lawrence’s equally “pure” cyclotron and atomic energy, Pillion appeared calmed but hardly convinced.85 Several years later high-energy physicist Robert Wilson would famously defend his field in Congress by claiming that “it has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to help make it worth defending.”86 Such moving but vague justification, however, as PSAC’s

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involvement in the funding of the Stanford accelerator demonstrated, was not enough to get the kind of funding that Big Science increasingly required. Another problem for the Stanford accelerator was the persistent internecine division over the distribution of resources, both among high-energy physicists and among scientists in general, that PSAC could not manage to smooth over. As Kistiakowsky observed of one meeting of the Piore panel, “those who have machines want the money to go to the existing machines and those that don’t have them want the new ones.”87 In a way, the fight over the accelerator turned into an East–West confl ict—not the Cold War, but the Coastal War. In late 1959, Rabi continued his campaign against large accelerators in general and the Stanford machine in particular. At his instigation, several physicists wrote the AEC against the latter. “What a bastard!” Kistiakowsky wrote in his diary when he found out what Rabi did.88 In March 1960, another attack against the Stanford project came from Stanley Livingston, director of the joint Harvard–MIT Cambridge electron accelerator. Calling it “premature, unwise, and probably useless,” Livingston provided Stans a “bombshell” against Kistiakowsky.89 Thus, contrary to the common perception that all scientists got what they wanted in the post-Sputnik golden age of federal funding of science, a competition for resources clearly drove the intrascientific struggle, and it would only get worse in the future. Nevertheless, the Stanford project had also shown its strength in several respects. Its technical feasibility was unquestioned and its scientific merit, although challenged by Rabi, Wigner, and Livingston, survived crucial tests in the Piore panel. Stanford emerged from World War II as a first-rank educational and scientific institution.90 Panofsky, the project’s main proponent and later its first director, had high standing in the high-energy physics community and on the Washington science and defense advisory scene.91 Perhaps most important, Sputnik highlighted the role of national prestige in justifying public support of science and brought to the White House science advisers who kept the project alive in the Eisenhower administration. Following the election of 1960 they would try even harder to get it going, but the final resolution of the matter, like so many other science-related issues, would have to await the Kennedy administration. PSAC’s involvement in SLAC’s funding also points to the need to modify the terms of the fruitful debate among historians over “who’s using whom” in the relationship between American science and the national security state. Above all, it shows that neither the government nor the scientific community was monolithic: there were opposing views not only between the executive branch and Congress, but also within the administration, and within the scientific community. The demarcation between science and government became further blurred as the Sputnik crisis brought about a deep intermixing: scientists, as represented by PSAC, rose as infl uential advisers in both science in policy and policy for science and the government assumed an increasingly dominant role in science funding. The enhanced status of basic research after Sputnik seems to have also made scientists feel, and sometimes act, less dependent on the military than they were in the preSputnik period. As we have seen in the struggle for the funding of SLAC, defense

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institutions such as the ONR often had to appeal to the newly powerful PSAC in their interagency competition for desirable programs. Sputnik not only brought bigger budgets for science, but also a psychological boost for scientists. SLAC was not the only Big Science project that PSAC had championed in its effort to enhance basic research in the post-Sputnik era. The “Golden Age” in science support in the late 1950s and early 1960s saw federal budgets for basic research at universities leap from $127 million in 1958 to $564 million in 1964, effecting an annual increase of between 20 percent and 40 percent, far surpassing the growth of either total R&D or the gross national product.92 Yet, PSAC’s frustration along the tortuous path of SLAC also suggests that there were limits to the infl uence of the new science advisers. Although Sputnik and the Cold War had a strong accelerating effect on American science, more traditional forces, such as domestic partisan politics, bureaucratic turf wars, and competition within the scientific community continued to shape science policy. For PSAC, the growing tension between the rival forces and interests in the post-Sputnik era meant that a much more systematic restructuring of American science and technology policy was required.

10

The Control of Science Policy under Eisenhower, 1957–1960

By mid-1958, PSAC had accomplished much in the areas of Eisenhower’s immediate concerns, namely space and defense, and felt that it was time to put general science policy, beyond the Stanford accelerator and high-energy physics, under a comprehensive examination. In July, Killian asked PSAC to divest its attention from the DOD and NASA to “developing a program for American science.” The specific goals included increased science funding, better government–university ties, improved federal organization of research, and heightened public appreciation of science.1 In short, PSAC, as public scientists, set out to renegotiate the terms of the social contract between science and government in the wake of Sputnik and to regain scientists’ infl uence in science policymaking that they felt was lost during the dark days of the H-bomb debate, McCarthyism, and Charles Wilson. Its successes and failures in the increasingly politicized arena of science policy, in turn, illustrated both the cooperative and confl icting aspects of the relationship between American science and state during the Cold War.

A Department of Science and Technology? Within months of Sputnik’s launching, public pressure not only led to a great increase in government support for science and education, but also growing interest, especially in Congress, in the establishment of a Department of Science and Technology (DST) to centralize American science policymaking. The latter met with strong resistance from President Eisenhower. Although the Sputnik experience taught him that, in waging a total Cold War, science could not be left to private and local concerns alone, Eisenhower nevertheless felt uneasy about the trend toward a greater federal role in science and education as well as an expansion of the federal government, both of which he feared that a DST would encourage. A balanced science policy was needed, and for its formulation the president naturally turned to his science advisers. To examine the question of the post-Sputnik American science policy in general and the DTS in particular, in December 1957, PSAC appointed a panel on basic research chaired, once again, by the ubiquitous Emanuel Piore. As in the space and defense areas, PSAC divided the science question into policy and organization: Why and how the government should expand its support for science? Was the DST an appropriate organizational form to manage this growth? The idea of a Department of Science can be traced back to the 1880s, when the Congressional Allison Commission, chaired by Senator W. B. Allison, concluded its investigation of the matter with the conclusion that science could realize its full 158

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potential only by integrating itself into the whole structure of the government.2 The consensus held—only once was a proposal made in the Capitol, by Representative Clare Boothe Luce of New York in the 1940s, but with little support—until Sputnik rekindled congressional interest.3 John McCormack, the longtime Democratic majority leader of the House who had urged Truman to strengthen civilian control of military R&D during the Korean War, now sought to centralize civilian R&D through a DST.4 Other advocates of a DST aimed to gain control of science policy for Congress in the same way that Senator Lyndon Johnson did with space. With the huge post-Sputnik increases in federal R&D, Congress felt the need to reassert itself in the government’s science policy mechanism. Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) led this movement with bills and hearings on the subject in 1958–1959. His and several other similar proposals for a DST would put the NSF, the AEC, NASA, and other science bureaus in existing departments under the new department, with a secretary of science in the Cabinet. Besides coordinating and centralizing federal science activities, Humphrey’s DST would also establish a central clearinghouse for scientific information, reflecting the popular belief that lack of translated foreign technical publications accounted for the Sputnik surprise.5 For others, dissatisfaction with other aspects of the existing science policy underlined their interest in the DST. In a speech on the Senate floor on February 10, 1958, Senator Mike Mansfield (D-MT) warned against the increased militarization of American science. The Pentagon, he said, “is not a good site for the control and direction of creative scientific research,” thus foreshadowing his famous amendment for the same purpose that would be passed later during the Vietnam War era. Scientists working in the government also supported the idea of a DST in hope that it would improve their working conditions and status. Government science had deteriorated in the postwar period, they felt, as the departments contracted projects out to universities. On their behalf, Wallace R. Brode, a career government scientist at the National Bureau of Standards and president of the AAAS in 1958 who had been critical of Killian’s appointment, now testified in favor of a science department before Humphrey’s Subcommittee on Reorganization of the Senate Committee on Government Operations.6 From the beginning, PSAC was ambivalent about a DST. In the October 22, 1957 memo that Killian said represented the views of several ODM-SAC members, he proposed to the committee that it conduct a study on the “advisability” of a Department of Science. After becoming Eisenhower’s science adviser, Killian also discussed the question with Robert Cutler.7 Soon, however, preoccupation with space, defense, and the test ban pushed the DST off the radar screen of both Killian and PSAC. It was not that PSAC scientists lost interest in science policy; on the contrary, as the case of the Stanford accelerator indicated, they worked hard to increase federal support for science. At its December 1957 meeting, PSAC decided to develop a statement on basic research “to bring problems forcefully to the attention of government agencies in order to get more [federal] funds flowing into needed areas.” It also noted the need to provide funds for capital equipment in research, to enhance scientific institutions, to support “the most creative

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scientists,” and to improve the coordination of those research projects sponsored by several federal agencies.8 Yet, during all these discussions, the idea of a Department of Science was rarely mentioned, if at all. Part of the reason for PSAC scientists’ indifference to a Department of Science was the fact that money did start to “flow” into science. Within weeks of the launching of Sputnik, Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy restored the research funds cut by the August 17, 1957 order of his predecessor, Charles Wilson. Then, at the urging of Killian and PSAC, Eisenhower approved, reluctantly, a further $140 million emergency increase in the DOD’s research efforts.9 The NSF also received $10 million in supplemental funds for FY 1958. For FY 1959, Eisenhower agreed to a 50 percent increase in the DOD’s R&D budget, and a doubling of the NSF’s basic research funds.10 Between 1957 and 1962 federal R&D expenditure would more than double, to about $10 billion and to 10 percent of the federal budget. The Soviet feat not only made science and technology the focus of national attention, but also fulfilled scientists’ longtime wish of seeing an upsurge in federal funds for both research and scientific training.11 In the spring of 1958, with the threat of a congressional move toward a DST, however, the matter gained urgency within PSAC. To get a glimpse of the state of science in the federal government and assess the feasibility and desirability of a DST, the Piore panel conducted, on May 28, 1958, a hearing of its own with representatives from major federal agencies—the DOD, AEC, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), NSF, and the science bureaus in the Commerce and Interior Departments.12 To the delight of academic scientists on PSAC, the briefing revealed a striking feature of American science policy in the post-Sputnik era: most of the new federal funds for science would go to universities through a highly pluralistic funding system. According to the DOD, the advantage of working with the universities lay in both the superior quality of university research and the educational values of these contracts. The goal was, as stated by HEW, “to ensure that the competent people available have the money they need.” Even though, as we have seen, the flow of funds did not stop internecine competition in a Big Science field like high-energy physics, the HEW’s generous policy did characterize the beginning of a golden era in science funding. Although the Piore panel viewed the pluralistic structure—with multiple funding sources and flexible policies—as a strength, it detected an obvious defect: there was little coordination of federal programs. Some fields, such as meteorology, high-temperature materials research, and particle accelerators, enjoyed support from several agencies, but without close coordination, whereas others, such as oceanography, fell into the cracks. Without any planning, the availability of vast sums of federal funds might cause imbalance among scientific disciplines in the universities. Specialized “project grants” could lead researchers to crowd into some fields and desert others. Sometimes a university might have to divert funds from less glamorous fields into those that would attract government funds. Unconventional scientific ideas, new fields, or unfashionable subjects might also suffer. The panel found that geophysical sciences, for example, were in dire straits

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because the old-line agencies, such as the Geological Survey, had long ceased to conduct much basic research. Finally, the panel felt that national planning could also improve the nations’ scientific instruments, last refurbished in the late 1940s, and meet the needs for construction of laboratories, not only in the AEC, but elsewhere as well. The most crucial condition for the healthy growth of science, the panel concluded, was stability in governmental support. Thus it recommended that contracts be extended to three years and never should the DOD be allowed again to cut science funds the way it did in 1957—by canceling existing contracts. It also endorsed one solution that had emerged from the agency briefing: the employment of broad, long-term “program grants” or “institutional grants” that would give the universities more control and stability. Most important, it proposed that the federal government, including both the president and Congress, make a formal commitment “to support research and recognize its importance as a national resource in keeping the nation strong and economically sound.”13 Thus the Piore panel differed little in principle from scientists’ statements on science policy in the past—the Bush report of 1945 and the DuBridge–Rabi doctrines in the ODM-SAC days—but it did advocate institutional reforms to fine tune the system. Was a new DST the organizational answer to these problems? The Piore panel did not think so, because, it argued, echoing the Allison Commission, that most of the science and technology programs in the major departments were directly related to their missions, and could not be adequately administered if separated from these departments. Neither did it seem advisable to the panel to lump together the independent agencies, such as the AEC, NASA, and NSF, in one entity; each of them had its unique mission.14 Furthermore, the panel noted that the scientific community did not seem to favor a radical change, now that Sputnik had brought scientists into the White House, the DOD was reorganized, and research funds were increased. Indeed, an AAAS “Parliament of Science” in March 1958, attended by more than one hundred scientists from all fields, had opposed a Department of Science on the same grounds as articulated by the Piore panel. Equally untenable, in their view, was a proposed Department of Science for basic research alone, for it would, AAAS scientists feared, put those parts of science that were “least relevant to political issues” under the control of a secretary of science “who is automatically and properly a political appointee.” Furthermore, echoing the 1950s debate over the NSF’s role, AAAS scientists worried that a Department of Science would make it more difficult, not easier, to justify federal funding of basic research if it was not closely associated with the government’s practical missions, such as defense and health.15 Whereas some critics saw this reasoning as an argument for the status quo, its advocates regarded it as a necessary recognition of the pluralistic reality of the postwar American science policy.

A “Little Cabinet” for Science Yet, as the Piore panel recognized, there was an urgent need for coordination of federal R&D programs. If not a new cabinet department, what should take up this

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function? “A Little Cabinet” for science and technology was the panel’s answer. It proposed that, as a first step, each of the eight departments and agencies with substantial R&D programs appoint an assistant secretary for science and technology. These policy-level officials should then form a subcabinet-level committee—a Federal Council for Science and Technology (FCST)—that would report to the president through his science adviser, as the chairman of the council. The council should coordinate the government’s research activities, improve its contracting and granting procedures, and prepare annually a three-year projection of the basic and applied research needs for the federal government. The Piore panel believed that this “Little Cabinet,” together with the science adviser and PSAC, could successfully coordinate science policy without radical changes such as the creation of a DST.16 At its June 1958 meeting, PSAC members offered mixed reactions to the “Little Cabinet.” Although most members liked the idea, a few still preferred a more centralized DST. Lloyd Berkner, for example, wanted to bring some of the old science bureaus into a Cabinet department and add to it new organizations for meteorology and oceanography. This scaled-down version of a DST—some nicknamed it a “Department of Geoscience”—received only lukewarm support. In the end, PSAC endorsed the Piore report in general and the FCST proposal in particular. Calling it “one of the most important reports” the committee had worked on, Killian put it on the agenda for PSAC’s forthcoming conference with Eisenhower on June 18, 1958.17 As always, Eisenhower took science policy seriously. Coincidentally, a few hours before the meeting with PSAC, Eisenhower had a news conference where he was asked about his position on a DST. Eisenhower said he doubted it was either possible or useful, primarily because science was so widely dispersed in the government. It was “a little bit like the air you breathe,” he quipped. Nevertheless, he promised that he would refer the question to his science advisers.18 Hours later he did and PSAC said it agreed with him. To PSAC’s surprise, Eisenhower was, however, initially skeptical toward the idea of a “little cabinet for science.” “A committee could serve as a forum within which gaps and duplications would be identified, but could not have authority,” he said. Only after Piore assured him that the council would not have operative power and that the science adviser would serve as its chairman did Eisenhower grant approval.19 Following further interagency consultation, Eisenhower and the Cabinet formally approved the FCST.20 The White House published the Piore report under the title of Strengthening American Science, together with an endorsement by the president.21 On March 13, 1959, Eisenhower signed Executive Order No. 10807, establishing the FCST. On the same day, he designated his special assistant for science and technology as chairman of the FCST.22 In the meantime, despite initial protest by Waterman, the order abolished the Interdepartmental Committee on Scientific Research and Development. It also narrowed the NSF’s role in science policy to “basic research” (the original wording in the 1954 executive order was “scientific research”). The foundation, however, acquired a leadership role in coordinating

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the handling of scientific information in the federal government, as the result of another PSAC study on the subject.23 As the centerpiece of PSAC’s plan for better science policymaking, the FCST generated high expectations that it ultimately would fail to meet. In the American system of government, interagency coordination was difficult to achieve even under the best of conditions. Largely independent from each other, federal agencies enjoyed great freedom of action, guaranteed in part by their direct connections with various congressional committees. Indeed, big-ticket items in federal R&D—space, defense, and health—largely fell outside of the FCST’s purview and giant agencies often ignored it with impunity. The BOB, theoretically a natural ally, however, distrusted it as a potential rival in science policy. Within the council, frictions also developed between old-line agencies, such as the Departments of Interior and Commerce, and the new, “glamour girls” in R&D, the DOD, the AEC, and NASA.24 Thus, despite considerable effort on the part of Killian and Kistiakowsky, the council never overcame the opposing interests of member agencies to become a very effective instrument of science policy.25 Nevertheless, within these limits, the FCST did provide a forum for PSAC to translate some of its ideas into action. One of the most important such initiatives was the establishment of the national materials research program. Indispensable to both civilian and military projects, research on materials had been carried out in several agencies, but with little coordination. The field faced an acute shortage of buildings and equipment on university campuses because it did not fall neatly into traditional academic fields. Neither was it clear which, if any, federal agencies had legal (Congressional) authorization to pay for such capital facilities in nonprofit institutions. At the FCST’s first meeting in March 1958, William O. Baker of Bell Labs, the prime mover on this issue within PSAC, urged the council to support a national materials research program at universities.26 As a result, the FCST initiated the interdisciplinary laboratories (IDL) program for materials research, first supported by the DOD’s ARPA, and later also by NASA and the AEC.27 The materials program not only expedited materials research but also set a precedent for the federal sponsorship of new interdisciplinary scientific programs in universities. The FCST later coordinated federal research in oceanography, atmospheric science, high-energy physics, seismology, pesticide use, and fire control technology.28 The FCST also transformed several other recommendations of the Piore report into policies, such as those designed to improve relations between government and universities. It helped pass legislation that allowed agencies to provide buildings, such as IDLs, to universities for research and promoted wider use of institutional grants as a supplement to the traditional project grants and contracts. The FCST also functioned as a forum for information exchange within the federal R&D establishment. Furthermore, it provided a channel for the flow of ideas between the scientific community, as represented by PSAC and the NAS, and the various federal agencies. Above all, the FCST helped expand the purview of the science advisory and policy system, especially in civilian R&D. Even Kistiakowsky came to believe, as he accounted all the activities of PSAC and his office in an attempt

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to justify pay raises for his staff to the Civil Service Commission, “for a moment,” that “we are the center of the government!”29 Thus, for all its weaknesses, the science adviser–PSAC–FCST system represented a valuable attempt at long-term science policy planning.30 The establishment of the FCST did not end the debate over a DST, but helped to lessen the sense of urgency behind it. In spring 1959, Humphrey’s committee renewed hearings on the matter. Again, the majority of the witnesses, who included several science administrators, William Baker, and historian A. Hunter Dupree of Berkeley, who had completed a history of federal science policy, testified against it as unnecessary. William F. Finan of the BOB deemed the DST impractical because all the science agencies had distinct missions and organizational structures, so grouping them together did not make sense administratively. Notably, Finan also argued that the appointment of the presidential science adviser and PSAC had already gone a long way toward giving science a voice in the highest level of the government, thus obviating any need for a DST. In making this argument, Finan acknowledged a subtle expansion in PSAC’s identity from a group of scientists wholly devoted to advising the president on science in policy to one that included the role of speaking for the scientific community in government as well. Finally, Finan pointed to the creation of the FCST as a step in alleviating the need for coordination in federal science activities.31 In effect, PSAC became a symbolic surrogate for a central scientific organization in the age of affl uence when scientists enjoyed pluralistic funding sources.32 The seemingly powerful congressional drive for a Department of Science thus faltered in the face of strong resistance from the executive branch and the scientific community. The lack of public interest in the subject was noted by Humphrey, who lamented the dwindling attendance at his hearings.33 According to PSAC staff member Robert Kreidler, the DST initiative had largely come from some of the staff on Capitol Hill. Most members of Congress, with turfs to protect, did not feel strongly about the matter. With the BOB “unilaterally” laying down the administration’s objection to a DST, Kreidler predicted that none of the various DST bills would pass the Congress. None did.34 In the aftermath of the DST’s defeat, however, congressional dissatisfaction persisted with the perceived closed nature of the White House science advisory system. Senator Humphrey deplored the withholding of some PSAC and FCST reports from Congress. Presciently, Senator Ralph Yarborough (D-TX) warned about the future effectiveness or even existence of the science advisory system when the climate of opinion changed or “when the White House has a new occupant.” Senator Mike Mansfield (D-MT) once again lashed out against the military domination of American science.35 Given Sputnik’s enormous political and psychological impact, it is easy to see the period as a completely new era in many areas of American public life and in the Cold War. Yet, as this look at the Piore panel indicates, Sputnik brought surprisingly little change in science policy. Not only did the basic tenets of the grant and contract system survive, with some modifications, but the pluralistic pattern

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of science funding also persisted. To be sure, the NIH and NASA would soon replace the DOD and AEC as leading federal agencies funding science, but no one emerged as a dominant patron of science. The drive for a DST failed miserably, again. Thus, to a large degree, Sputnik enlarged the trends already set in motion in the postwar period. It highlighted the role of national prestige in the Cold War and gave scientists much more leverage to pursue a generous, if not always coherent, science policy.

Science Education In contrast to the failure of the DST, another Congressional initiative, the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), did pass in 1958, designed to improve American education in the areas of science, mathematics, and foreign languages. Within the administration, the HEW was the main agency responsible for implementing the NDEA, but Killian participated in the policymaking meetings.36 For its part, PSAC tackled a more fundamental question: how to make science attractive to Americans, especially in schools. It was a question that had preoccupied American scientists before Sputnik and one to which Eisenhower had called national attention in his post-Sputnik speeches. In May 1959, the White House issued a PSAC report on Education for the Age of Science, prepared by a panel under the chairmanship of Lee DuBridge of Cal Tech, as its formal answer to the question.37 As part of PSAC’s post-Sputnik public science agenda, the report aimed to link science with national security through a recasting of the terms of the age-old debate over the proper role of experts in a democratic society. The purpose of a strengthened education was, it argued, to “more fully meet the requirement of this age of science, and best serve the nation” in the Cold War struggle. School could no longer function merely as a laboratory of democratic “personal adjustment” as had been advocated by the infl uential American philosopher John Dewey. Indeed, the report blamed an obsession with “social techniques” for the prevalence of antiintellectualism. “The terms ‘egg-head’ and ‘intellectual’ are not always terms of approbation,” it complained, “as though there was something strange about the ‘straight A’ student.” Instead, school had to take on the responsibility of turning those “academically talented” into needed scientific manpower while providing the rest—and by extension the general public—an understanding of science and technology so they could judge wisely those public policy proposals that came from the specialists and the government.38 In many ways, the report represented, as historian John Rudolph points out, an effort to “generate greater public status for scientists.”39 The report also forcefully supported the case of women to pursue education and professional careers, but its language was couched in pragmatic terms, not on the basis of gender equality or women’s rights. “Women,” it pointed out, “constitute an enormous potential resource for research, scholarship and teaching which we have not even begun to tap. We should begin conscious efforts to assist them to make the contributions of which they are capable.”40 In a way, even though the report completely ignored the issue of race in American education, it shared

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with the 1954 Brown decision of the Supreme Court its emphasis on the pragmatic imperative of American education for the Cold War. Yet, by insisting on the public’s need and right to make informed choices in national decisions, the PSAC panel set itself apart from advocates of technocracy and scientism. The question was not whether it was the experts or the public that should decide American public policy, but how to educate the public so that it could take part in the decision-making process based on adequate knowledge and understanding of the underlying scientific and technological factors. For the public to vote on such issues as the space program, the DuBridge report argued, it needed to develop the critical mind to “check” on the advice provided by the experts, to draw on knowledge beyond that provided by “science fiction or the comic strips,” and to “think beyond the press releases and publicity statements.”41 As the panel recognized, what was at stake was not only science in policy, but also policy for science. “A national effort is required to strengthen our scientific and technological efforts in all fields, aimed at the advance of knowledge and the enhancement of the general welfare. In a democracy such an effort can succeed only if it has widespread public understanding and support.”42 Thus, as a document of American public science, the DuBridge report was certainly self-serving, because most PSAC members were university scientists or administrators and would benefit from increased governmental funding for science education, but it also linked PSAC’s technological skepticism with critical thinking as a crucial element in democratic policymaking. DuBridge and his colleagues knew that the need was to cultivate “dedication to and respect for” not just the sciences, but “learning in all fields.” Otherwise the public would continue to appreciate only the utility of science, but treat scientists as “useful strangers, dimly understood and more feared than admired.” Science, it pointed out, did have “other values,” as a training ground for critical thinking and as a humanizing intellectual force that revealed the beauty and order of nature.43 Like PSAC’s meeting with Eisenhower on arms control, such extensive comments on the public’s image of scientists reflected a heightened sensitivity of scientists to their social environment in the period. If the Piore report had helped to fulfill the institutional and financial needs of American science, the DuBridge report was designed to improve its social and cultural image.44 Specifically, to improve American education at all levels, the DuBridge report advocated doubling national education expenditure, modernizing curricula, and reforming government policies. It urged federal agencies to support higher education by avoiding granting and contracting practices that might hurt teaching in universities. It recommended the strengthening of science education for adults for the sake of democracy and, in this connection, advocated the increased use of audiovisual aids, such as public educational television. The training of science teachers should be increased and the emphasis shifted from pedagogy to scientific content. Above all, it recommended the enhancement of the salary and social standing of teachers in general to attract the best people into education.45 Eisenhower reacted with mixed feelings to the DuBridge report when Killian and DuBridge made a presentation to him and the cabinet on May 15,

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1959. Underscoring his basic conservatism, both fiscal and political, Eisenhower did not see any federal role in improving education beyond stimulating private resources.46 Neither did he share completely the scientists’ emphasis on science’s special place in education. Privately, he expressed concern that too much stress on performance, applied too early in a student’s schooling, might lead to restriction of individual choices and hurt “late bloomers.”47 Overall, however, he found the report useful in stimulating public interest in science and education. At the cabinet briefing and in a preface to the report, Eisenhower called it “an excellent statement of educational goals and needs,” endorsing especially the report’s calls to strengthen all education and to enhance teachers’ social standing.48 Public response to the published report was also mixed. Many scientists agreed with a Science editorial that the report’s recommendations were balanced and forward-looking, but it lacked suggestions for implementation.49 Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin made a laudatory speech on the Senate floor and put the report’s recommendations in the Congressional Record.50 Others, however, were more critical, faulting the report as elitist and as advocating scientism without humanistic concerns.51 The conservative Wall Street Journal applauded the report’s criticism of the social adjustment philosophy of education but denounced its call for doubling educational spending as throwing money at the problem.52 The National Science Teachers Association, as a division of the National Education Association (NEA), complained about the lack of participation of school teachers in the panel.53 The NEA itself did not endorse the report until months later.54 Nonetheless, despite its flaws, the DuBridge report opened the door for PSAC’s continued involvement in science education and many of its recommendations formed the foundation on which future reforms in science education would be built. It also helped nudge the Eisenhower administration toward recognizing a role of the federal government in education.

Government and University Science The overall success of the Piore and DuBridge reports encouraged Kistiakowsky and PSAC to launch, in the summer of 1959, a third investigation on science policy, this time focusing on a topic that was even closer to its members’ hearts: federal support of academic science and graduate education. Although the first two reports had touched on this subject, they did not go far enough in articulating academic scientists’ voice in science policy. A chemist with his own graduate students at Harvard even when he was working full time as the science adviser in the White House, Kistiakowsky brought a new drive toward returning the control of science policy from the military to the scientists, especially through increasing funds for the civilian NSF. In late 1959, for example, he fought the BOB to gain a $15 million increase in the NSF’s budget. He cited the NSF’s importance to American science, education, and the Cold War effort and argued that the relatively small amount of money could be easily deducted from the DOD’s, AEC’s, or NASA’s “pure boondoggle” projects, such as the nuclear-powered airplane. “I feel very deeply about the matter,” he wrote the White House chief of staff, W. B. Persons, “as if my

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personal integrity as a scientist were at stake.”55 Beginning with Kistiakowsky, if the science advisers and PSAC played any favor among the federal agencies, they did it with the NSF—the foundation became their own interest based on both the principle of antimilitarism and institutional self-interest. At the first PSAC meeting under his chairmanship in July 1959, Kistiakowsky proposed and the committee agreed to the formation of a panel on basic research and graduate education. Glenn T. Seaborg, recently inaugurated chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley and a PSAC member, chaired the panel. The new study was expected not only to bridge the two earlier reports, but also to help develop specific policies that would strengthen the universities.56 Seaborg brought long interest and much experience in the matter to his appointment. As early as March 1957, he had analyzed the problems and promises in federal support of university science in a thoughtful speech that argued for its expansion and a liberalization of science policy. Much of the speech would later find its way into his panel report.57 Yet, more than national interest motivated Seaborg’s speech and his guiding of the PSAC panel: his effort to establish a Space Science Laboratory at Berkeley had been hampered by a cut in NASA’s science budget and by a funding policy that preferred projects to programs or buildings. Indeed, when accepting Killian’s invitation to join PSAC in early 1959, Seaborg had hoped that his PSAC membership would enhance his position as Berkeley chancellor and that “the contacts I would make with other PSAC members would be helpful to the University.”58 In his mind and those of his fellow PSAC members, there was no doubt that their institutional self-interest meshed with the national interest in advancing science and education. Still concerned about the Soviet scientific and technological challenge, the public and Congress largely accepted the reasoning as well. The Seaborg panel, however, ran into bureaucratic politics even before it held its first meeting. The NSF at first resented PSAC’s poaching into its own area of responsibility. Kistiakowsky, however, assured Waterman that the Seaborg panel would work closely with the NSF. As a tactical move, Seaborg promptly invited Waterman to be a member of his panel.59 In contrast to the NSF’s initial coolness, the Office of Education, as part of the HEW, invited the Seaborg panel to advise on its new NDEA graduate fellowship programs. Perhaps unexpectedly, the panel of mostly natural scientists recommended that a larger proportion of the NDEA fellowships be allocated to the humanities and social sciences. In a less altruistic frame of mind, the panel reminded the Office of Education not to neglect the elite universities when it implemented the congressional will for geographic distribution of federal funds.60 Following this excursion into direct science policy and an extensive round of briefings from federal science administrators, the Seaborg panel developed a central thesis on the inseparability of basic research and graduate education. It concluded that the federal government needed to formulate a science policy that would advance both at the same time. The panel believed that the current funding mechanism of project grants or contracts and the trend toward research institutes

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on campuses favored research at the expense of graduate training. If continued, the practices could harm the long-term health of science and damage the scientific enterprise by separating research from training. To strike a balance, the panel, amplifying the Piore report, recommended more federal support to universities in the form of institutional grants. Not all PSAC members agreed with this justification of federal support for academic science, however. John Tukey of Princeton and Bell Labs, for example, questioned the “inseparability principle,” pointing out that government and industrial laboratories did excellent research without having educational programs. In response, Seaborg conceded the validity of the criticism but nevertheless emphasized the importance of graduate education to the long-term health of scientific research and the creation of a desirable atmosphere of learning at a research institution.61 The draft report also stirred a vigorous debate within PSAC over who should have control over science policy. Although most members agreed with the general philosophy of strengthening universities, they, like Eisenhower, worried about the political implications of direct federal aid to higher education. Some members feared that the panel’s recommendation of institutional grants, in contrast to project grants, would give the federal government more control of universities. Physicist John Bardeen of the University of Illinois, for example, doubted that the time was ripe for institutional grants and implored the panel to anticipate possible problems in their implementation. Would the institutional grants be awarded on merit or distributed “on a geographic or political basis?” Chemist Donald Hornig of Princeton saw no desirable alternative to merit as the criterion for allocation of funds, but he worried that the departmental structure of universities ill prepared them in the distribution of institutional grants, for a random distribution of funds among departments would not help desirable national planning in science or interdisciplinary research. Physicist Harvey Brooks of Harvard expressed his belief that the government was already “attempting” to infl uence the direction of the scientific enterprise and that, as an embodiment of society, it probably had the right to. Yet, he thought it was wrong to cede control of the direction of science to government. Panofsky, speaking of his experience working with the AEC on SLAC, warned about the risks involved in close ties between the universities and the government. Whereas the NIH and NSF largely left their scientist-grantees alone, the AEC tended to micromanage its labs, which led to an “unsatisfactory working relationship” with scientists.62 Playing the devil’s advocate from the other end of the government–university partnership, Kistiakowsky, however, tried to dampen the rhetoric of entitlement that he detected among his PSAC colleagues. Although sharing Panofsky’s concern about governmental control of science, he worried even more about justifying government support of science in the first place. Experienced in the politics of science by now, he bluntly told the Seaborg panel that its first draft was “too much a plea” for more money. It was “essential for the success of science in the White House and its impact on policy-making,” he said, that the panel avoid the appearance of

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science as a special interest. The panel should build its argument for federal support of university science not on the needs of the universities, but on the needs of the government. Thus the report should make not just ringing statements about the necessity for federal support, but also specific recommendations on how to improve the distribution and use of existing funds. As Killian put it, PSAC needed to consider “how to present these ideas in the most palatable form for this Administration.”63 Even less sympathetic was physicist Alvin Weinberg of Oak Ridge, who had just joined PSAC. He saw the draft as an “overstated and slightly hysterical” justification for federal support of academic science, especially big science such as high-energy physics. “Can we in fact prove or even document the assertion . . . that ‘strengthening of basic research’ determines ‘whether we survive at all’?”64 The final report, which was drafted by McGeorge Bundy of Harvard (a member of the Seaborg panel but not PSAC) and which tried to incorporate some of these criticisms, was a forceful statement of the need for a strong government– university partnership in science and education. Starting with the inseparability of basic research and graduate education, it asserted the unique role of the universities as “the natural holders and custodians of the knotted core” of American science and education. Reflecting Kistiakowsky’s concern, the report argued that the federal government should advance science in general and university science in particular to fulfill its—government’s—broad missions of strengthening national security and promoting public welfare. Addressing other PSAC members’ concern over the question of control, it advocated that complete scientific responsibility “remain with the universities” and that the federal government not seek to supervise technical operations directly.65 Given the fact that the government already provided a whopping 70 percent of all funds for academic science, the report’s blunt assertion that university science was a national problem and primarily the federal government’s responsibility—“From this responsibility the Federal Government has no escape”—was as much a statement of reality as an advocacy of policy.66 However, the panel did feel that there was a need to reorient federal science policy from “buying” research to ensuring the steady growth of universities—and supply of manpower—to win the Cold War for the long haul. Echoing the Piore report, it advocated institutional grants to supplement project grants and contracts, together with coverage of full indirect costs and provision of research buildings to universities. The report did not spell out criteria for selecting universities for institutional grants, although it did urge the government “to support excellence where it already exists and to encourage new centers of outstanding work.” Neither did it suggest a uniform formula for calculating overheads, or tackle the difficult issue of patents arising from federally funded research. Many of the reforms it did focus on were already in place in some federal agencies.67 Yet, the sum was greater than the parts. What the Seaborg report called for was a new and coherent science policy beyond the ad hoc responses to the Sputnik crisis, to be established by the president himself with the aid of the science adviser, PSAC, and the FCST, and carried out primarily by the NSF and the HEW.68

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The Seaborg report, first circulating in the government in its draft form, drew largely encouraging responses. The FCST formally endorsed the study at its meeting in September 1960. Although some council members urged modifications to give stronger emphasis to the need for reforms by the universities and the need for private contributions, most welcomed it as an important step toward a closer university–government partnership. NASA administrator Keith Glennan and HEW Secretary Arthur Flemming, both former college presidents, praised the report as “formidable” and “constructive.”69 Their endorsements were significant because the two agencies were in good positions to implement the report. Indeed, in the 1960s, the HEW would surpass the DOD and NASA would overtake the AEC in funding academic science, especially through the use of institutional grants.70 Once again Eisenhower was, initially and characteristically, ambivalent toward the Seaborg report’s advocacy for an expansion of the federal role in science. He was especially bothered by the report’s apparent call for increasing faculty salaries through federal grants—Kistiakowsky assured him that the report only recommended federal payment for faculty’s summer months but not as a way to increase the base salary. At his demand, the panel also added a statement on patents.71 Later, after careful study of the revised report, however, Eisenhower rather warmly endorsed it and approved its publication by the White House. In a statement drafted by Kistiakowsky for inclusion in the report, Eisenhower spoke of American science as “one of our essential resources for national security and welfare,” and called for a closer federal–university partnership to advance both basic research and graduate education.72 Indeed, the report helped convince Eisenhower to accept, as he told PSAC in their meeting on July 12, 1960, that “the federal government must provide support for basic research.” “Gentlemen, I think you have convinced me,” he said, according to Kistiakowsky, “I am convinced that basic research is a federal responsibility.”73 The scientific community and the universities received the report with much greater enthusiasm than they did the DuBridge report. Science magazine printed the document in its entirety. From the White House, Kistiakowsky’s staff also sent tens of thousands of copies to eager university presidents, graduate school deans, and other administrators in higher education across the country.74 The report’s recommendation that the government help universities to enlarge their permanent faculties, by allowing “charges against all Federal grants and contracts for time spent by faculty members on work so supported,” generated especially keen interest among university presidents.75 More than specific measures, the Seaborg report helped set the stage for the radical changes in federal policy toward higher education in the 1960s. It linked graduate education with basic research and both with national security and national prestige, thus paving the way for general aid to higher education that followed the Higher Education Act of 1963.76 As a product of the post-Sputnik enthusiasm for science and technology, the Seaborg report served, for better or worse, to formally establish the American government–university partnership on the basis of science for the Cold War. Even more than the Piore and DuBridge reports, it represented

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a major update of the Bush report in both general philosophy and specific policies as well as a peak in American public science.

A Chain of Science Policy If the Seaborg report articulated a philosophical argument for the government’s support of science, another Kistiakowsky initiative sought to revamp American science policy organizationally. Forecasting an eventual end to the post-Sputnik science funding boom, he saw the need for a system of national planning in science to make the necessary hard choices, not only within a particular field, as the Piore panel on high-energy physics did for that discipline, but also among all the sciences. For this purpose, he envisioned the involvement of the NAS and a strengthened FCST in a conduit of science advising: a list of priorities would originate with the NAS, undergo reviews by the science adviser and PSAC, and then reach the FCST, which would then compare it with a parallel list drawn by its member agencies. A compromise emerging from such a process should, like the congressional “conference report” between the House and Senate, guide the final step in national science policy in the form of budgetary allocations to different scientific fields and federal agencies.77 Implicit in this system was a desire to increase the infl uence of scientists in “policy for science.” Ambitiously, Kistiakowsky hoped that the office of science adviser and PSAC could, like Herbert York’s ODDRE in the Pentagon, act as an “authorizing committee” in science for the entire executive branch. The novelty of the Kistiakowsky plan was the prominent role it assigned the NAS in setting scientific priorities. Why not PSAC or NSF for that function? Kistiakowsky believed that PSAC could, and indeed did, call attention to the inadequacy of basic research support, but its membership was not representative of all sciences. In addition, it was too much preoccupied with national security issues and other science in policy matters. The NSF had great merit as the only federal body with a mission to support science for its own sake, but it was a government agency, and a relatively weak one at that, making it inappropriate and impractical to arbitrate the relative merits of various scientific fields.78 Kistiakowsky’s scheme met with both support and resistance. Eisenhower gave his “most vigorous” endorsement because the idea of private–public cooperation in government policymaking appealed to him.79 In contrast, several PSAC members expressed misgivings about the plan. Rabi, for example, opposed it in favor of a Department of Science “to press for science.” He was concerned that without such a department, science policies would be increasingly made by bureaucrats and not scientists. Bacher agreed that a Department of Science was needed to protect research’s proper share of government R&D funds in the face of the post-Sputnik emphasis on development. Piore likewise endorsed a DST to give better representation of science to the public and to Congress, as did Alvin Weinberg, who hoped that it would provide a better focus for government laboratories. Clearly, the matter of control was the key in the debate over science policy.80 Faced with these criticisms, Kistiakowsky defended his plan. He pointed out that a secretary of science would not help much because the Cabinet was not

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the center of policymaking. In contrast, his NAS–PSAC–-FCST chain of science policy would enjoy not only access to the president but also the vast intellectual resources of the academy to generate fresh ideas.81 However, Killian’s concern that the Kistiakowsky plan would draw PSAC and the science adviser deeply, and in his view, dangerously, into administrative and budgetary matters did give everyone a cause for pause.82 At Kistiakowsky’s request, Weinberg chaired an ad hoc panel on “science in government” to consider all the relevant issues.83 It eventually helped Kistiakowsky draft a report that retained his “conduit for advice” scheme and a set of other recommendations for Eisenhower, which won PSAC’s approval.84 The BOB, however, opposed the Kistiakowsky plan and drew up its own report on American science policy.85 The BOB’s plan was, like PSAC’s, naturally self-centered, because budgeting set priorities for all federal programs, scientific and otherwise. As proud generalists, the BOB harbored suspicion toward those it viewed as specialists or special interests. Thus when Kistiakowsky volunteered PSAC’s help in 1960 to the BOB in its evaluation of the civilian R&D budget for FY 1962, bureau director Maurice Stans turned down the offer, citing the danger of introducing another “pressure group.” Kistiakowsky thereupon told Stans that the bureau “can’t tell me how to advise the President” and that he and PSAC would fight for the science budget on their own.86 The Kistiakowsky report now presented fresh evidence to the bureau that scientists did form a special-interest group: it sought to place public policy in the hands of semiprivate groups such as PSAC and the NAS. The bureau also objected to PSAC’s advocacy of the appointment of assistant secretaries for R&D in departments or giving statutory position to PSAC as unnecessarily tying the administration’s hands.87 Finally, the BOB convinced the Eisenhower White House not to publish the Kistiakowsky report but merely transmit it to the next administration.88 Notably, neither the Kistiakowsky nor the BOB plans gave a prominent place to Congress and the public in the formulation of science policy. Congress would eventually get to dispose of what the executive branch proposed, but there was no mechanism in either plan for the public, through Congress or civil society institutions, to participate at the early stage of setting priorities in federal support of science. Thus, by the end of the Eisenhower administration, the battle over the control of American science policy was fought to a stalemate on many fronts. Capitalizing on the extraordinarily conducive atmosphere in the post-Sputnik era, PSAC scientists, especially under Kistiakowsky, made unprecedented moves to gain a voice of scientists in American science policy. They even convinced President Eisenhower that university science and basic research were a federal responsibility. Through its three reports—Piore, DuBridge, and Seaborg—PSAC not only helped fend off the drive for a DST, but also gained acceptance for several changes in science policy with far-reaching impact. The BOB’s opposition to Kistiakowsky’s chain of science policy, however, indicated that the duality problem continued to plague American public scientists even in this post-Sputnik golden age of science and scientists in the government. As the scale of federal R&D continued to skyrocket, the fight over the control of American science policy was destined to intensify.

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Figure 10.1 President Eisenhower holding his last meeting with the President’s Science Advisory Committee, 1960. Left to right, seated: James Fisk, George Kistiakowsky, Eisenhower, James Killian, I. I. Rabi; standing: George Beadle, Donald Hornig, Jerome Wiesner, Walter Zinn, Harvey Brooks, Alvin Weinberg, Glenn Seaborg (behind Weinberg), David Beckler, Emanuel Piore, John Tukey, Wolfgang Panofsky, John Bardeen, Detlev Bronk, and Robert Loeb. Courtesy of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library.

Eisenhower’s Farewell Speech As the Eisenhower administration drew to a close, the president gave a final boost to PSAC’s drive for scientists to play a prominent role in American science and public policy when they held their last conference on December 19, 1960 (see Figure 10.1) As mentioned previously, the poignant meeting, taking place shortly after Kennedy’s election victory, caught Eisenhower in a melancholy state of mind. He seemed genuinely touched when Killian, at Kistiakowsky’s request and on behalf of the committee, reviewed PSAC’s achievements and thanked the president for support and inspiration. In response, Eisenhower expressed his own gratitude to PSAC for its assistance to him in policymaking and his hope that PSAC, as a “voluntary” and “grassroots” group working with the government, would survive the transition and be able to act as an antidote to tendencies toward “centralized dictation and attitudes of omniscience” he foresaw in the Kennedy administration.89 Given this ringing endorsement of the role of his science advisers—indeed, the mutual admiration between the advisers and the advisee—PSAC scientists were shocked when, a month later, they heard the retiring president’s farewell speech in which he sounded an alarm against not only the military-industrial complex, but also the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.” Did the president mean PSAC and did he change his mind

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about its continued role in American government? Like many others then and since, they interpreted the warning as one about the possibility that science and scientists in government might serve to weaken American democratic ideals. Some scientists even feared that Eisenhower “was turning against science,” as George Kistiakowsky, who was not involved in the drafting of the address, reported to Eisenhower the day following the address.90 Eisenhower became “quite upset” by the scientists’ reaction to his speech. Following a reception in the White House, he took Kistiakowsky from the party to a private room and ordered tall scotches. He assured Kistiakowsky that he was “unhesitatingly” for basic academic research and feared only the rising tide of the militarization of science. The “scientific-technological elite” were those scientists and engineers who pushed the “military-industrial complex.”91 At the president’s direction, Kistiakowsky wrote a letter the next day to every PSAC member clarifying the president’s intent. As the most explicit and complete contemporary explanation of Eisenhower’s famous but often misunderstood second warning, it is worth quoting in its entirety: With the approval of the President, I want to inform you of the subject of a long, private conversation which we had, on his initiative, during the farewell staff party yesterday (Wednesday). The President inquired about my reaction to his reference to science and technology in the course of his TV address Tuesday night. I said that they disturbed me at the time, but that after reading his speech carefully the next day and also hearing his response to a question of the Science Newsservice reporter at the Press Conference Wednesday morning, I understood that his statement referred to a particular segment of science and technology, namely that tied to the military-munitions industry complex. I said also that our office had already received some inquiries about the meaning of his remarks. The President expressed extreme concern that his remarks could have been misunderstood. He said that he made an especial effort in wording his speech to make clear the connection of what he called the scientific-technological elite with the military-armament industry complex and to distinguish it from the true scientific research to which he paid tribute. He spoke of his concern and forebodings on seeing hundreds of pages of ads tying “science” to armament, assuring the people that research meant better missiles, etc. He said that even the educational institutions, whose task it is to support free intellectual inquiry and the acquisition of new scientific knowledge, were in the competition for big money military R&D contracts and were infl uencing research people on their staff to abandon basic research for the sake of higher monetary rewards. He believes that this emphasis on military R&D in our industry, press and institutions of higher learning is creating a most dangerous combination of special interest which is of real danger to the future of our free society. He believes that even the need for increased numbers of scientists and engineers

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may be quite artificial and due to their being hoarded by the military-industrial combine. The President was very friendly but emphatic in his comments, and as I listened to him I found an extraordinary degree of similarity between his convictions and the remarks on the same subject which I heard from most of you at many meetings of our Committee. Therefore, I believe, we should make a real effort to explain to all and sundry that may inquire what the President had on his mind when he made the statement about the “elite” in his TV address. I understood that this is his wish also.92

Here, more clearly than anywhere else, one sees the convergence of PSAC’s technological skepticism and Eisenhower’s conservatism in their shared moral concern over the militarization of American science and society. Kistiakowsky later sent an abbreviated version of his letter to the editor of Science, who promptly published it as part of an editorial.93 Similarly, during his press conference on January 18, 1961 to which Kistiakowsky referred, Eisenhower, in explaining his remarks on the “elite,” returned to the theme of his final meeting with PSAC: the role of citizens, including citizen scientists like PSAC, acting as a counterbalance to the pervasive infl uence of the military-industrial complex and its scientific-technological elite: Q. Lillian Levy, Science Service: Mr. President, last night you called attention to the danger that public policy could become the captive of a scientific technological elite. What specific steps would you recommend to prevent this? The President: I know nothing here that is possible, or useful, except the performance of the duties of responsible citizenship. It is only a citizenry, an alert and informed citizenry which can keep these abuses from coming about. And I did point out last evening that some of this misuse of infl uence and power could come about unwittingly but just by the very nature of the thing. When you see almost every one of your magazines, no matter what they are advertising, has a picture of the Titan missile or the Atlas or solid fuel or other things, there is becoming a great infl uence, almost an insidious penetration of our own minds that the only thing this country is engaged in is weaponry and missiles. And, I’ll tell you we just can’t afford to do that. The reason we have them is to protect the great values in which we believe, and they are far deeper even than our own lives and our own property, as I see it.94

This remarkable statement was consistent with Eisenhower’s earlier expressions to PSAC that science was more than weapons. Indeed, it appears clear that Eisenhower, like Robert Wilson, regarded science, as a symbol of the freedom of inquiry, to be among the values that made the country worth defending in the first place. The statement further helps us understand what he meant when he told PSAC scientists in the December 19 meeting that he hoped that they, as a “voluntary” and

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“grassroots” group, would continue into the new administration. They were an essential part of the “alert and informed citizenry” that he hoped would moderate the militarization of American society at home and the arms race internationally. Finally, it also helps us to understand his eventual acceptance of PSAC’s advocacy of federal support of basic research: as applied research and development were increasingly devoted to weaponry, it was crucial that basic research be promoted so it would not be crowded out of the collective American consciousness or in the perception of what science stood for. Whether realistic or not, science appeared to both Eisenhower and PSAC as Archimedes’s “leverage point” from which to counterbalance the onslaught of the military-technological momentum. After leaving office, Eisenhower several times expressed his appreciation for his science advisers and took pride in their achievements. In his memoir on his second term, Waging Peace, for example, he wrote that: The appointment of Dr. Killian, and later Dr. George B. Kistiakowsky of Harvard worked out wonderfully. In character and accomplishment they could have had no superiors. Whatever the tasks . . . the scientific adviser kept me enlightened. My “wizard” helped me to keep the subject of space away from becoming a “race” and from deteriorating into a series of stunts. He helped to make certain that the government was supporting both basic and applied research. Without such distinguished help, any President in our time would be, to a certain extent, disabled.95

In short, he appreciated PSAC scientists’ help in both science in policy and policy for science. They were truly his scientists. In contrast, when Herbert York pressed Eisenhower after his retirement about what particular people he had in mind when he warned the nation about the “scientific-technological elite” that might make public policy its captive, “he answered without hesitation: ‘(Wernher) von Braun and (Edward) Teller.”96 He never wavered in the choice of science advisers he made in the tense days following Sputnik.

Conclusion The evident identification of the views of Eisenhower and his science advisers on the necessity of both arms control and federal support of basic research does not obviate the need to examine more closely the nature of the justification for the science–state partnership during the Cold War. As I hope has become clear, institutional self-interest did form an important part of PSAC scientists’ motivation to strengthen this partnership in the post-Sputnik days. Contrary to Eisenhower’s belief that they were in Washington “to help the country and not help themselves,” PSAC members, as public scientists, advocated policies, especially in the area of policy for science, that benefited their profession and their institutions, if not themselves directly and personally.97 From the Piore and DuBridge studies to the Seaborg and Kistiakowsky reports, PSAC campaigned to increase federal support of basic research, especially science in universities from which most of its members came. As Killian declared “happily” at the Symposium on Basic Research in

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1959, “in the past year-and-a-half, basic research has been gaining” in comparison to applied R&D. Probably more than any other institution, PSAC was responsible for the reversal in the fortune of basic research. Federal support for basic research would continue to grow well into the next decade.98 In the meantime, in both science in policy and policy for science, PSAC became, in Killian’s words during a committee meeting, the “beachhead” of science in government.99 Yet, to argue that institutional self-interest partially motivated PSAC scientists’ advocacy of basic research did not mean that it was wholly or otherwise unjustified. In the post-New Deal American democratic system, interest-group politics increasingly became the way to distribute national resources. There were dangers of potential abuses and confl ict of interest in this system, but the solution was not for the government to keep scientists out of science policy but instead to strengthen the checks and balances in the democratic system and to introduce greater transparency in the science advisory process. As we have seen, by the end of his association with them, even President Eisenhower came to agree with PSAC scientists that federal support of basic scientific research was in the national interest. Implicitly, at least, he came to share PSAC’s conviction that government engagement in basic research might act as a counterbalance to the militaryindustrial complex’s single-minded drive to produce new technological weapons systems. In this sense, ODM-SAC and PSAC scientists’ efforts to update the Bush justification of basic research not only as a source of new technological developments but also as an antidote to rampant technological enthusiasm might have finally achieved a measure of acceptance. One might argue that it was this sense of technological skepticism built on the primacy of basic research that contributed to Eisenhower’s increasing use of science advice as much as did its independence from the military services or other parochial interests. Such a linkage among basic research, technological skepticism, and arms control also gave a certain degree of coherence to what PSAC stood for in the monumental post-Sputnik American debate over science and technology policy. In this context, it is important to recognize that the convergence of views between Eisenhower and PSAC was not merely the result, as sometimes is claimed, of the scientists’ education of the president. Yes, PSAC scientists’ clear-eyed explanations of both the potentials and limits of technological solutions to various national problems did enhance Eisenhower’s understanding of his choices, but what is striking is the way in which PSAC scientists themselves had evolved, under Eisenhower’s infl uence, in their own thinking on science, technology, and the Cold War national security state. In the early post-Sputnik days, under Killian, PSAC scientists, although skeptical of technological solutions to the Cold War, did play a prominent part in creating the atmosphere in which both “the military-industrial complex” and its “scientific-technological elite” flourished. They had steadfastly argued for the increase of military R&D, especially basic research. They wanted the military, as mentioned before, to “strike deep roots in our civilian scientific community.” Indeed, despite its moderation under Kistiakowsky, the identification of American science with national security during the Cold War was PSAC’s main

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justification for federal support of science. As the SLAC case indicated, the Sputnik crisis did allow PSAC scientists to deploy national prestige as a new rationale for public support of science. The Seaborg report did help to convince President Eisenhower of the federal role in basic research, not a mean achievement. Yet, for all their eloquence, neither the seminal Bush report of 1945 nor the several PSAC reports on American science policy in the late 1950s ever established a firm foundation for the scientists’ cherished ideal of public support of science for its own sake.100 Only by the end of the Eisenhower administration did PSAC scientists come to recognize the accelerating effects of military R&D on the arms race and the “hazards” inherent in federal domination of American science and education.101 Clearly, PSAC was aware of the dangers of technocracy, and indeed made, as detailed earlier in this book, informed and infl uential criticism of what it regarded as “undisciplined” technological enthusiasm in its advising to Eisenhower on space and military technology, but it was Eisenhower who posed the issue of militarization of American science and society most starkly before the American people. Although Eisenhower’s farewell speech amplified PSAC’s technological skepticism, it, at the same time, also transformed the public discourse on science and society. In the early post-Sputnik days, it was Eisenhower who, with PSAC’s support, put the emphasis on science’s role in serving national security. Now his twin warnings highlighted the potentials of science and technology as both a threat and an aid to the democratic system. Most PSAC scientists believed that American science and state shared common interests within the democratic framework. Eisenhower, too, was sympathetic to this ideal, but his foreboding about the thin line that separated science for peace from science for war helped, perhaps unwittingly, sow the seed for full-blown public doubts about the military–science partnership. This and other social and political developments would shape the environment for PSAC scientists as they continued to pursue their twin goals of sustaining the science–state partnership and controlling the nuclear arms race in the next decade and beyond.

11

Science at the New Frontier under Kennedy, 1960–1963

“The New Frontier is here, whether we seek it or not,” John Kennedy declared on July 15, 1960, when he accepted the Democratic Party nomination for president at the Coliseum in Los Angeles. “Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.”1 Kennedy’s highlighting of science was endorsed by Time magazine when it chose “U.S. Scientists” as “Men of the Year” for 1960, featuring several PSAC members as well as Edward Teller on its cover.2 For Kennedy, the rhetoric of the New Frontier stood not only for challenges ahead but also for liberal reforms in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Although Kennedy spelled out few specifics of this agenda during the campaign, observers such as Dwight Eisenhower and PSAC scientists widely expected an activist administration intent on pursuing a new set of domestic and international policies with profound implications for American science and technology. One of the earliest and sharpest departures came in space, where Kennedy broke Eisenhower’s policy of discouraging manned programs when he committed the nation to the ambitious Apollo Project of landing men on the moon before the end of the 1960s. However, the most important change took place in nuclear strategy, as Kennedy attempted to move from “massive retaliation” to “flexible responses” by beefing up American conventional forces. Although, as historians have increasingly come to realize, the Eisenhower–Kennedy transition represented no radical break in the American ideology of liberal consensus that was anchored on anticommunism abroad and incremental reform at home, and, indeed, nuclear deterrence remained the essence of Kennedy’s Cold War strategy, the reorientation in defense policy did pave the way for renewed American willingness to engage in limited wars in Vietnam and elsewhere.3 Like Eisenhower, Kennedy pursued the nuclear test ban vigorously, hoping not only to relax international tension, but also, to a much greater extent than did Eisenhower, to reduce radiation fallout hazard and to prevent China from acquiring the bomb.4 In domestic policy, Kennedy followed the post-New Deal Democratic and liberal tradition of seeking social reforms through the expansion of federal programs. Thus, the new administration brought not only increasing attention to domestic social problems, partly as a response to the surging civil rights movement, but also an effort to expand federal aid to education, including academic science. For American public scientists who pushed for federal support of science and for arms control and who continued to find their spokesmen in PSAC, the Kennedy years promised vast new opportunities as well as novel challenges. 183

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Wiesner, PSAC, and Kennedy The beginning of the Kennedy administration brought both changes and continuity to the presidential science advisory system, starting with the replacement of Kistiakowsky by Wiesner as the science adviser. During the 1960 election, Jerome Wiesner had served as Kennedy’s informal science adviser while remaining, remarkably, a member of Eisenhower’s PSAC on the condition that he not use classified information or publicly criticize the Eisenhower administration in the campaign.5 The Nixon camp “wasn’t very happy” with this arrangement, but Kistiakowsky, citing Eisenhower’s special permission, refused to terminate Wiesner’s PSAC membership.6 The contrast in elite scientific backing was embarrassing to the vice president: The Democrats claimed Wiesner and several former PSAC members (e.g., Hans Bethe, Edward Purcell, and Jerrold Zacharias) in their science advisory group, but none associated with the committee joined the Republican camp.7 Teller was active around Nixon, and Kistiakowsky so feared a takeover of PSAC by Teller if Nixon won the election that at one point he encouraged James Killian, as a “national service,” to join the Nixon campaign and preempt Teller.8 This episode indicated that the scientific establishment was not only “apolitical and would advise anyone who might ascend to political power,” as historian A. Hunter Dupree put it, but intentionally positioned its bipartisan resources to ensure that science and technology policy remain in the hands of moderate scientists regardless of the outcome of the election.9 Shortly after the election, Kistiakowsky met with Paul Nitze, one of Kennedy’s transition advisers, to push the new administration to give early attention to science policy, including the selection of a science adviser.10 He was disappointed to hear that, despite Kennedy’s campaign rhetoric about science at the New Frontier, science advice was not a top priority with the new team. Kistiakowsky warned that Kennedy would need help from his science adviser in handling the chaotic federal R&D system—“the fastest growing part” of the federal budget. He believed that he and PSAC had made “good progress” in beefing up technical evaluative strength in the DOD (with “York’s shop”), NASA, HEW, and the State Department, but the AEC, under Strauss and McCone, “had gone its own independent way.”11 Even military R&D was not in perfect shape, as Nitze recorded in his note of what Kistiakowsky told him: . . . the Services were squandering money and particular talent on things which couldn’t have any use. It is always possible for the Pentagon staffs to produce briefings which leave the top officials no option but to approve the project. . . . To cut through this, Kistiakowsky and his people have had to go down to the fine detail on which the important decisions depend. This often means going into the laboratories and scientific staffs of the contractors and subcontractors.12

To solve these problems, Kistiakowsky urged that Kennedy appoint a science advisor early; he nominated Wiesner because he was known to Kennedy, “young, brilliant and highly regarded by his fellow members on the Advisory Committee.”

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With his help Kennedy could further strengthen federal R&D policy with the appointments of assistant secretaries for science and technology in the various departments.13 However, Wiesner’s appointment was not immediately forthcoming. Several Kennedy advisers, including McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser-designate, were concerned about Wiesner’s reputation as a passionate advocate for arms control.14 Even Kistiakowsky had cautioned Nitze that Wiesner tended to be “an enthusiast for a single approach.”15 Wiesner’s participation at the December 1960 Pugwash conference in Moscow, where scientists from the United States, Soviet Union, and other countries met to discuss science and world affairs and where he gave a presentation on “Comprehensive Arms Limitation Systems,” aroused much controversy at home.16 Wiesner justified his role in Pugwash as a way to improve communication with Russian and Chinese scientists (and to counterbalance “wildeyed radicals”), but conservative critics charged that Wiesner and other American participants were “babes in the woods dealing with the shrewdly calculating Russians.”17 Science reported “lobbying” against Wiesner’s appointment inside the Pentagon because he was “too much interested in disarmament.”18 The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee launched an investigation of the Pugwash conferences as being infl uenced by the Communists.19 Joseph McCarthy was dead, but anticommunism still haunted Washington. In the end, Kennedy, who shared Wiesner’s commitment to arms control, decided to proceed with the appointment. “I understand some people think I am wrong for the job,” Wiesner told Kennedy when he accepted the offer, “because I’m too identified with disarmament and have a reputation for arguing too much.” “The issue of your disarmament views is for me to worry about,” Kennedy responded. “Why do you think I want you for the job?” With this vote of confidence, Wiesner went on the transition team. By the time his appointment was publicly announced on January 11, 1961, he had already worked with Kistiakowsky for several weeks, especially on a new space policy.20 He was also able, as advocated by Kistiakowsky, to advise on the appointments of assistant secretaries for research and development at most federal departments, including the appointment of the prominent oceanographer Roger Revelle as science adviser to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. All these moves bolstered scientific presence in the federal government, especially in the FCST.21 Contrary to common perceptions but confirming Eisenhower’s concern, Kennedy hesitated, at least initially, to continue Eisenhower’s PSAC when proposed by Wiesner. “Weren’t they likely to have allegiance to the other side?” he asked. Apparently Kennedy, despite several prominent Republican appointments in his administration, did care about the partisan affiliations of his appointments and did not know that at least half of PSAC members were Democrats. Wiesner assured Kennedy that PSAC’s loyalty was to the institution of the presidency. Eisenhower never asked about the political affiliation of PSAC members, he added. “If he had cared,” Wiesner smiled, “I wouldn’t have been on the committee.”22 Kennedy decided to give PSAC the benefit of the doubt by keeping it, thus reinforcing

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Eisenhower’s treatment of the committee as a nonpartisan institution. Yet, the incident indicated that Kennedy, like Eisenhower before him and other presidents following him, instinctively resisted the entry of independent scientists in the president’s intrinsically political inner world. Kennedy soon had reasons to be happy that he did not disband PSAC. With Wiesner’s encouragement, Kennedy appointed several members of the committee to key posts in his administration. Glenn Seaborg became chairman of the AEC after he clarified with the Kennedy staff that he was indeed a loyal Democrat despite some press reports that had identified him as a Nixon adviser.23 His reputation as a moderate advocate for arms control within PSAC was viewed as especially important to Kennedy’s push for a nuclear test ban. Seaborg’s new position also gave him a powerful platform to push for the implementation of his PSAC panel report on increasing federal funding for basic research and graduate education.24 Harold Brown of Livermore succeeded Herbert York as the new DDRE.25 When the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), an initiative pushed by PSAC under Eisenhower, was finally established in 1962, a third PSAC member, Franklin Long, became its assistant director for science and technology.26 Interestingly, even though these PSAC alumni now had to speak for their respective agencies’ positions, which, in the cases of Seaborg and Brown, often differed from those of Wiesner and PSAC, their moderate views helped change the internal dynamics in both military technology and arms control. Thus, due to both the broad political consensus and the institutional continuity peculiar to the science advisers, they experienced a smooth transition into the Kennedy White House. Those members not reaching the end of their terms continued, and new members were selected with the same criteria that had been adopted during the Eisenhower years: scientific qualifications, a broad perspective on government activities, and, unwritten but no less important, a commitment to arms control. Besides Brown, whose membership lasted only a few weeks before he moved to the Pentagon, other new recruits included Paul Doty, a biochemist from Harvard who had participated in the Moscow Pugwash conference with Wiesner, and Frank Press, a Cal Tech geophysicist and a consultant to PSAC on the nuclear test ban. Although these appointments indicated that national security and arms control continued to be a priority for PSAC, other new members underscored the expansion of science advising to civilian concerns, a process that had started under Kistiakowsky. Finally, disciplinary balance also figured in recruitment as PSAC shifted from science in policy to policy for science. Thus, Zacharias, the MIT physicist, returned to PSAC to promote his interest in innovation in science education. Edwin Gilliland, a chemical engineer also from MIT, was brought in to run a major study on the need for technical manpower. Colin MacLeod, a pioneering molecular biologist from New York University, would spearhead PSAC’s steppedup activities in the life sciences. As in the Eisenhower years, most of the new members had to prove their maturity, in both technical and broader policy judgment, in PSAC panels before being invited to join the parent committee. Several came through Jason, code name for

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a group of young, elite, academic theoretical physicists established in the wake of Sputnik to conduct summer studies on military and arms control issues under the nonprofit Institute of Defense Analysis, which itself was infl uenced by several PSAC veterans.27 Richard Garwin, a brash but brilliant physicist from IBM, was perhaps one of the youngest Jasons to make it into PSAC. A protégé of Enrico Fermi, Garwin was widely regarded as, like his mentor, a rare master in both theory and experiment. He had made crucial contributions to the weaponization of the first hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s as a 23-year-old consultant to Los Alamos.28 His performance on PSAC’s Strategic Delivery Panel further impressed such PSAC members as Harvey Brooks and Franklin Long. An industrial scientist with strong ties to Columbia, Garwin shared with his academic colleagues the belief in the importance of basic research as well as a commitment to arms control.29 Thus, even though Alvin Weinberg voiced reservations—he believed Garwin, undoubtedly bright, lacked balance of judgment and instead pushed for his friend Eugene Wigner—Garwin was made a PSAC member in 1962.30 With such constant rotation of members, how did PSAC maintain its institutional continuity? PSAC’s ability to select its own members was an important way to maintain its esprit de corps, which was reinforced by the president’s selection of the science adviser (and therefore PSAC chairman) out of existing membership. The stability of the staff, especially David Beckler as its executive officer, also helped, as did the appointment of past science advisers and infl uential past PSAC members as consultants at large. These veterans participated regularly in committee meetings and activities or otherwise engaged in close contact with the science advisory system. During the Kennedy years, I. I. Rabi, James Fisk, Edwin Land, James Killian, Detlev Bronk, and Emanuel Piore all turned into such éminence grise. Finally, the relatively unrestricted tenures of members of the various panels, especially in the areas of national security and arms control, also allowed some scientists, such as Hans Bethe, Garwin, and Wolfgang Panofsky, to remain infl uential in PSAC even after their rotation out of the committee itself. The domination of moderates in PSAC did not go unchallenged—one critic complained to Kennedy and Wiesner that PSAC represented only “the Oppenheimer point of view” and not “the Teller point of view” in its advising on nuclear weapons—but Wiesner and PSAC successfully defended their position by pointing to the airing of different views within the committee and their efforts to ensure a balanced presentation of scientific advice by, among other steps, bringing in Teller himself to meet with Kennedy on the issue of the test ban.31 In its effort to moderate and limit the impulse to solve national and international problems through technological fixes, PSAC found once again that a sympathetic president was crucial to its success. For his part, Kennedy recognized that most policy decisions were political in nature, not to be “confided to computers” or solved by experts, but he nevertheless looked to his science advisers for a sound basis of policymaking.32 In a letter to Wiesner designating him as chairman of PSAC based on the committee’s nomination, Kennedy expressed his “high regard for the past accomplishments of the Committee, for its objectivity, its high

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standards of performance, and its dedication to the national interest.”33 Here, even though both Kennedy and Wiesner, who drafted the letter, paid tribute to PSAC’s objectivity, they both were well aware that PSAC scientists, including Wiesner himself, were never strictly neutral advisers. They were certainly much more objective than scientists working for a particular military branch when evaluating technological projects. In many ways, however, Wiesner, for one, had long abandoned the traditional ideal of a “neutral” science adviser, at least since Eisenhower asked him and other PSAC members to help with controlling the nuclear arms race in the aftermath of Sputnik. Yet, the resultant tension between the expected neutrality and activism would continue to haunt the science advising system. After living through what was widely regarded as an era of anti-intellectualism, scientists on and off PSAC were soon charmed by Kennedy’s easy rapport with scientists. Once claiming curiosity as his best quality, Kennedy tried forever “to get someone to explain electromagnetic propagation” to him. During one of his several visits to AEC sites, he even tried his hand at manipulating radioactive materials in a hot cell through use of the remote control equipment.34 In an informal memorandum not too long after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Kennedy asked Wiesner to investigate what must have been, to many, an esoteric subject: Will you talk to Arthur Schlesinger about the report that Schlesinger has on Soviet use of cybernetics. I would like to have you and perhaps a panel take a look at what we are doing compared to what they are doing and what this means for the future.35

In 1962, Kennedy honored forty-nine Nobel laureates and their wives, including several PSAC members, at a well-publicized presidential dinner party. In his speech he praised the gathering as the most extraordinary concentration of talent and human knowledge ever assembled at the White House. The only exception, he added famously, was perhaps when Thomas Jefferson dined there “alone.”36 Like Eisenhower, Kennedy hoped to utilize the scientists’ expertise and independence in helping him solve international and domestic problems. During his first meeting with PSAC in February 1961, Kennedy referred specifically to his difficulties in getting unbiased advice from the various parts of DOD due to the competition among them (see Figure 11.1). He encouraged PSAC to continue its various studies of strategic weapon systems and doctrines, most significantly ABMs.37 At an NAS ceremony on April 25, 1961, Kennedy, accompanied by Wiesner and Seaborg, made an even broader appeal to scientists. “For those of us who are not experts and yet must be called upon to make decisions,” he told the assembled elite, “we must turn, in the last resort, to objective, disinterested scientists who bring a strong sense of public responsibility and public obligation.”38 That extemporaneous talk reflected Kennedy’s optimism that scientists could help solve major problems in American public policy.39 By then, however, Kennedy knew that PSAC scientists did not always agree with his policy initiatives. It was a tribute both to Kennedy’s sense of security and his good rapport with Wiesner and PSAC scientists, once he got to know them and

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Figure 11.1 President Kennedy meeting with the President’s Science Advisory Committee, 1961. To Kennedy’s left is Jerome Wiesner (with pipe). Courtesy of the National Archives.

especially their commitment to arms control, that he never treated their opposition to many of his policies as a sign of disloyalty. Their sharpest disagreement, as detailed later, came early in the administration over the decision to launch the Apollo Project. Wiesner also opposed the Kennedy-approved Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in early 1961.40 Then in the summer of 1961 Wiesner clashed again with Kennedy and his advisers over civil defense that the latter had promoted in response to the Berlin crisis. Wiesner, who had come to see civil defense as a futile and even provocative move in the arms race, criticized a JFK-endorsed article on fallout shelters in Life in September 1961 as “grossly misleading.”41 The Soviet construction of the Berlin Wall eased the tension before the push for the shelters went anywhere, but Wiesner persisted in his criticism of the program and backed his skepticism a year later with a major, thoughtful PSAC study on civil defense by a panel chaired by Paul Doty.42 Wiesner and PSAC’s intervention helped to moderate the shelter program, but the resistance from the public was even more lethal to its development.43 Kennedy never agreed with Wiesner’s reasoning or gave up his hope for civil defense, but to his credit, neither did he view Wiesner’s dissent as anything other than legitimate expression of well-considered advice.44

Unfinished Businesses Paradoxically, under Kennedy, presidential science advisers saw many of their longtime proposals implemented even though they could no longer claim the kind of privileged position they had enjoyed under Eisenhower. Secretary of Defense McNamara, for example, brought in his own “whiz kids” of economic

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and technical analysis, and kept PSAC, initially, at arm’s length. When Wiesner first described to him the role of his office and PSAC, McNamara responded that “If I am doing my job properly, none of these would be necessary.” However, he soon came to appreciate the independent judgments, and often support, that Wiesner and PSAC could provide him at the presidential level.45 Indeed they collaborated under Kennedy to rein in several of the runaway military technological projects that PSAC and Eisenhower had tried but failed to terminate. For example, Kennedy finally stopped, with the support of Wiesner, McNamara, and Seaborg, the ANP project to make nuclear-powered bombers. Shocked by the fifteen years and $1 billion wasted on the ANP, “the boss is thinking about the possibility of a complete shutdown,” Wiesner reported to Seaborg only weeks into the new administration. On Wiesner and Seaborg’s recommendation, Kennedy agreed to continue the research activities related to high-temperature materials and reactor designs in the AEC but eliminated the ANP as a program.46 In the end, presidential leadership and bureaucratic unity as much as technical rationality contributed to the slaying of the nuclear dragon. Wiesner and PSAC also helped Kennedy cancel or radically curtail several other projects, including the Skybolt missile, the Dynasoar space glider, the B-70 bomber, and Project Rover (nuclear-powered rocket) as lacking either cost-effectiveness or a suitable mission. As DDRE Harold Brown summarized it, Kennedy’s (and PSAC’s) attitude was: “the fact that you could do it, and that it was in some technological sense superior was not a justification for doing it.”47 Although few shed tears over the deaths of the ANP and the other projects, Wiesner and PSAC’s actions did make more enemies for themselves in the militaryindustrial-congressional complex. Curiously, the JCAE did not put up much of a fight against the ANP cancellation. The relationship between the White House and the JCAE had changed—they were both in the hands of the Democrats—and support for the ANP had waned on the Hill. Congressman Melvin Price did criticize the decision, but his main target was not Kennedy, whose decision based on the government’s priorities he said he understood, but rather the scientists in government. He castigated PSAC and the DDRE for using science for political and budgetary purposes: “I cannot help but observe that the same group of scientific advisers who have crippled advanced scientific development for the past 10 or 15 years are still around.”48 Price’s attack on PSAC contributed to a growing sense in Congress and in the public that scientists exercised far more infl uence than objectivity in the government. The Stanford accelerator project also benefited from the improved White House–JCAE relations, but its final approval was by no means assured under Kennedy. New oppositions, especially from the BOB, threatened to disrupt, once again, the march of the monster. As in the Eisenhower era, the science advisers and administrators, especially Wiesner and Seaborg, used Cold War scientific competition to push the project forward. Kennedy’s general sympathy with their argument was revealed by a telling incident during his visit to the AEC headquarters in Germantown, Maryland, in February 1961. There he was shown several charts on a board comparing accelerators in the United States and in the rest of the world:

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As the third chart was about to be snatched away, the President commented on the fact that the second chart had shown a 12.5 Bev accelerator (ZGS [zerogradient synchrotron]) as the United States effort compared with a 50.0 Bev accelerator as the Soviet effort. There were hasty explanations . . . that the ZGS was a superior machine in many other respects than the energy level shown on the chart, that Soviet machines often do not perform as well as they are supposed to, and that we are in fact at the head of the parade in high energy physics.49

This presidential, and indeed public, concern with the Bev numbers of accelerators bore a striking similarity to the world’s interest in the diameters of astronomical telescopes a half-century earlier and the weight or size of satellites more recently. All these machines captured the public’s imagination and became important measures of a country’s international prestige. In the post-Sputnik era, space travel and particle smashing, however, outshone telescope-making in glamour and publicity. A White House meeting was held shortly after Kennedy’s AEC trip, with the Stanford accelerator the first item on the agenda. Present were Kennedy, Wiesner, Seaborg, and BOB director David Bell. Whereas Wiesner and Seaborg supported the project, Bell questioned its priority in science. In an earlier memorandum for Kennedy, Bell had echoed Eugene Wigner’s criticism of high-energy physics as being “out of balance” with other disciplines: . . . I do not object to proceeding with the [Stanford] machine, but I think that, in so doing, it needs to be recognized by all concerned that this action represents a very substantial commitment of resources to the increased support of basic science and that the resources now allocated to an expansion of high energy physics cannot also be committed to other fields of science.50

Thus at the meeting with Kennedy, Bell suggested postponement of the project to FY 1963, pending a full review by PSAC. Wiesner and Seaborg disagreed, arguing that the problem of imbalance be solved by increasing funding to research fields outside of high-energy physics. American scientists, they insisted, generally agreed that the Stanford machine was needed “if we are to get ahead” in high-energy physics. President Kennedy then responded: “Let’s go ahead with it.”51 That, however, was apparently still not good enough for the BOB. Two weeks later, Bell told Seaborg that he would postpone the Stanford project to FY 1963 after all. Seaborg disagreed and decided to appeal to the White House.52 Seaborg’s (and Stanford’s) chance came when Kennedy met with leaders of the JCAE on March 23, 1961 to discuss the AEC supplemental budget for 1962. During discussion, Senator Anderson repeated his criticism of the Stanford project; he claimed that he had heard “a lot of scientists” speak against the Stanford accelerator. Seaborg, rightly counting himself a spokesman for those concerned low-energy physicists, responded that he lately found “unanimous” support for the project among high-energy nuclear physicists. Reflecting the changing White House–Capitol Hill relationship, Anderson said then “that was good enough” for him; he supported the project now. After others left, Bell stayed with Kennedy to

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work out a final version of the AEC budget. He called Seaborg later to say that, in balancing the budget, Kennedy nearly threw out the Stanford accelerator, but Bell reminded him that he should ride with Wiesner’s and Seaborg’s judgment on this matter, so it was kept in.53 Completed in the late 1960s, SLAC developed into a major site for high-energy physics in the world under Panofsky’s direction and its many achievements largely vindicated PSAC’s original faith in it, but the tension in funding Big Science it revealed would reverberate for decades to come.54 Yet another Eisenhower legacy that the Kennedy administration had to deal with was the Oppenheimer case. Even though the AEC hearing that resulted in the denial of Oppenheimer’s security clearance had taken place in 1954, it was still a controversial political issue in the early 1960s. The FAS, under the leadership of John S. Toll, mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and an old Harvard classmate of Oppenheimer’s, had campaigned for a redressing of the case at the start of the Kennedy administration. The FAS argued that revoking Oppenheimer’s security clearance not only did injustice to him and deprived the nation of his service, but also made young people reluctant to become scientists and scientists reluctant to work for the government. It believed the case was “unfinished business” and therefore urged the AEC to undertake a “complete review” of it.55 After receiving the request, Seaborg, Wiesner, and Bundy worked with Toll on a number of schemes to rehabilitate Oppenheimer, including an invitation to the 1962 Nobel party, which the latter accepted, and giving him the AEC’s Fermi Award. At the White House gathering, Oppenheimer, responding to Seaborg’s inquiry, said that he would accept the Fermi Award if offered but did not want to go through another hearing to get his security clearance restored—“not on your life.”56 Getting the Fermi Award for Oppenheimer turned out to be no simple matter, however. At the time of the Nobel party, the GAC, which had taken a conservative turn since its Oppenheimer days, was considering Edward Teller for the 1962 Fermi Award. When the AEC suggested that Teller and Oppenheimer share the award, the GAC indignantly refused, citing its prerogatives in making the nominations. However, in March 1963, the GAC did unanimously nominate Oppenheimer for the 1963 award. The AEC quickly approved it and Seaborg called Wiesner to notify him and ask him to clear it with Kennedy. The news apparently caught the White House by surprise. General Chester Clifton, the president’s military aide, called back to say that “the President is concerned about this,” referring, evidently, to the knotty problem of whether this would require the reopening of the clearance question. Seaborg explained the background of the award, that it was mainly for Oppenheimer’s scientific contributions and would not reopen the clearance issue. He urged a “go-ahead.”57 Kennedy continued to equivocate for several days. He knew from a discussion with Wiesner that the scientists would applaud the Fermi Award for Oppenheimer but others, especially some in the JCAE, would balk at it.58 Finally, he gave his approval, as Wiesner reported to Seaborg on March 30, 1963, “by writing ‘Yes’ across the face of the memorandum” that the AEC had sent him on the matter.59 When the news broke in the New York Times on April 5, Kennedy

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once again turned cautious. He directed his press secretary Pierre Salinger to tell the AEC to minimize the role of the White House in the whole process to control any possible political damage.60 By and large, reactions from the public and most of the Joint Committee members were favorable. The only exception was Senator Bourke Hickenlooper (R-IA), who tried but failed to stop the $50,000 award to Oppenheimer.61 Oppenheimer was pleased with the recognition and his friends and supporters in PSAC were also elated with the development.62 The award did not quite reverse the 1954 case, but it indicated how far the country had moved beyond the shadows of extreme domestic anticommunism. It was a ginger step in the American “rehabilitation” process to undo the wrongs of the McCarthy era.

International Scientific Exchanges International cooperation in science was another area in which Kennedy and his science advisers found mutual interest. During his first meeting with PSAC on February 10, 1961, Kennedy encouraged the committee to promote scientific exchanges with developing countries and Eastern Europe. Here his objective to win hearts and minds during the Cold War matched the scientists’ long-held, if idealistic, view that the international language of science could help break down national barriers. Thus Bruno Rossi of MIT headed a PSAC panel to look into possible U.S.–Soviet cooperation in space. I. I. Rabi worked on international exchanges in atomic energy.63 A PSAC study led to the establishment of an R&D unit in the new Agency for International Development (AID).64 Several PSAC members continued to meet with leading Soviet scientists at Pugwash conferences, despite grumbles from conservative congressmen.65 At Kennedy’s request, Wiesner and PSAC also helped devise solutions to the problems of salinity and water-logging in western Pakistan.66 With a few notable exceptions, however, state-sponsored scientific internationalism rarely succeeded in mediating tensions during the Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union did implement cooperative projects in science, technology, and education, but suspicion and heavy political control on both sides often marred the process. For example, in December 1960 Wiesner had made overtures to Chinese scientists at the Moscow Pugwash conference on behalf of the new administration. Although initially cautiously receptive, the Chinese delegation broke off contact when they found a passage in Wiesner’s precirculated paper that advocated what sounded to them as joint U.S.–Soviet actions to contain Chinese nuclear ambitions. There were other attempts to open U.S.–China scientific exchange by scientists outside of the government, but, given the open hostility between the two countries, little success came out of these initiatives.67 Indeed, the U.S. interest in international scientific collaborative projects was often as much political as scientific, as exemplified by the initiative to build a huge, 300 Bev U.S.–Soviet accelerator. Seaborg first mentioned the project to Kennedy on February 10, 1961 as a way to demonstrate superpower cooperation in science.68 As Leland Haworth, the physicist commissioner of the AEC, told Wiesner in May

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1961, the project was “very appealing” not on scientific, but on political grounds, in “opening up” Soviet technology and industrial practices.69 In addition, the project could help lessen the tension between the two countries as “infl uential intellectual leaders from the East and the West would be thrown into intimate contact for long periods of time,” an objective that had been endorsed earlier by a PSAC panel.70 Kennedy reacted favorably to the proposal, encouraging the AEC to pursue technical discussions and prepare for a policy decision.71 The joint accelerator’s potential as an instrument of diplomacy gained further momentum during the Berlin crisis in the summer of 1961, when Seaborg and the AEC proposed to Kennedy making the disputed corridor between West Berlin and the rest of East Germany into a “Switzerland for world science” under the sponsorship of the United Nations. It would contain the joint accelerator and other scientific instruments such as space research facilities and radio telescopes. The erection of the Berlin Wall by East Germany, however, defused the crisis before the science zone could be considered seriously.72 Meanwhile, some American scientists questioned the U.S. commitment to an international accelerator when it simultaneously planned a very high-energy machine of its own.73 Likewise, the Soviets concentrated their resources on the building of its own seventy Bev accelerator.74 By the summer of 1962, as Panofsky pointed out, the project was so hopeless that “it should not play a role in national planning.”75 PSAC scientists’ advocacy for international exchange sometimes also clashed with obstinate, McCarthy-era policies still in force at the State Department and elsewhere in the bureaucracy. One area that took much time and energy from Wiesner and his staff, especially Eugene Skolnikoff, concerned denials of visas for visiting scientists from Eastern Europe or those from Western Europe who had a left-liberal political background. One case early in the Kennedy administration especially galvanized the scientists. In 1961, “a storm of correspondence” poured into the science adviser’s office regarding the State Department’s refusal to issue a visa to Jan Tauc, an internationally respected semiconductor physicist from Czechoslovakia, who had applied to spend a year at Harvard.76 Tauc’s visit at Harvard, the State Department declared, “would result in a distinct advantage to the Soviet bloc in a sensitive field with applications affecting national security.”77 In his letter to Wiesner, Harvey Brooks, who had sponsored Tauc’s visit to his lab, called the denial an “incredible” and “stupid decision.” Tauc had traveled to the United States before and probably enjoyed closer contact with American scientists than with the Soviets. “I have further reason to believe,” Brooks intimated, “that he would like very much to get out of Czechoslovakia permanently.”78 John Bardeen, the usually mild-tempered Nobel laureate of 1956, co-inventor of the semiconductor, and PSAC member, wrote a strongly worded letter to Dean Rusk on Tauc’s behalf when Brooks informed him of the visa denial. He called the decision to be “against our national interest.” In the letter he elaborated a significant, pragmatic reason for encouraging international scientific exchange. The fear that Tauc’s visit might enable the Soviets to overtake the American lead in semiconductor was unfounded, Bardeen argued:

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It seems to me that there is a confusion here between basic research on semiconductors and the technology of electronic devices using semiconductors. While the United States does hold a substantial lead in technology, this is not true of basic research. Basic research findings on both sides of the Iron Curtain have been published freely and promptly and have been discussed openly at international meetings such as the one at Prague in September, 1960. We should do all we can to encourage this flow and interchange of results of basic research because our advanced technology is in by far the best position to profit by it.79

He then gave several examples where American industry benefited from semiconductor basic research carried out abroad, including Abraham Joffe’s at Leningrad and Leo Esaki’s in Japan. Having traveled extensively in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, including visits at Tauc’s institute in Prague, Bardeen, like Brooks, regarded Tauc as a competent, pro-West basic research scientist and the denial of a visa to him as “a slap in the face to a potential infl uential friend.”80 Intervention from Wiesner’s office worked in this case; Tauc was able to visit the United States, although not without complications even after his arrival.81 Then, in 1969, one year after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Tauc managed to emigrate permanently to the United States, where he first worked at Bell Labs and then as a professor at Brown University.82 Tauc’s case indicated that politically motivated denials of visas to foreign scientists did not stop with the end of the McCarthy era, but at least now their American hosts could count on sympathetic hearing, and sometimes successful interventions, in the Kennedy White House.

Civilian Technology Presidential science advising expanded not only in international affairs, but in the domestic area as well. In the early Kennedy years, PSAC organized a task force on water research that considered desalination of seawater with nuclear power, a subject of great interest to the president, although most PSAC members expressed doubt about its economic feasibility.83 The science advisers did push for civilian technology in general. In 1961, at the suggestion of Wiesner and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy ordered an interagency study on the effect of military-space R&D buildup on civilian technology.84 Several past and current members of PSAC with industrial or engineering backgrounds sat on an advisory panel. The investigation resulted in several proposals for the Department of Commerce to expedite the transition from basic research to civilian applications. These included contracts and grants to universities for applied research, for engineering training, and for “Industrial Extension Service” to aid local firms in absorbing new technologies and the expected military-space spinoffs.85 Unfortunately, this foresighted initiative stalled in Congress, which, along with some powerful corporations, denounced industrial technology policy as dangerous meddling in the marketplace.86 Interestingly, the focus on civilian technology brought to surface the longsimmering resentment among many engineers that their prominence in society

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had been eclipsed by scientists in the post-Sputnik “age of scientific revolution,” with the new push for glamorous defense and space projects. At a meeting of the Civil Technology Panel in late July 1962, for example, members noted a shift of students from chemical engineering “into the more exotic fields.” Furthermore, the defense-space emphasis had contributed to the downgrading in the popular mind of engineering, and the boosting, out of proportion, of the reputation of “science.” While even in defense and space R&D, engineers are doing most of the work, the fashionable fields are the sciences, and this fact is affecting the distribution of new graduates.87

Wiesner, himself a communications engineer, was no stranger to such complaints. A year earlier, Hugh Dryden of NASA had written him requesting a closed-circuit speech by Kennedy for a ceremony marking the founding of the United Engineering Center in New York: You are very familiar with the feeling of the leaders of the older engineering societies, that the public has insufficient knowledge of the engineering profession and understanding of its importance to our society. . . . It seems to me that some modest recognition of the work of the engineers on the part of the White House would be appropriate and useful to you in your general relations.88

The argument failed to convince Kennedy, however; instead he sent a letter of congratulations for the occasion in which he praised the engineers as “our main sources of technological progress.”89 It was ironic that even decades after what historians called the revolt of the engineers during the Progressive Era that they would still feel slighted in the age of technological enthusiasm.90 The identification of physicists with the bomb and the advocacy of basic research by PSAC scientists both before and after the Sputnik crisis probably had much to do with the continued perception of science being superior to engineering.

Office of Science and Technology The expansion in both the scale and complexity of federal scientific and technological activities also demanded organizational reform in presidential science policy and the advisory system. Between 1957 and 1962, federal R&D expenditure more than doubled, to about $10 billion a year, accounting for nearly 10 percent of the total federal budget.91 Alarmed by such trends, Congress increasingly demanded access to and accountability in executive science policy.92 The pressure added fresh fuel to the perennial drive for a DST. To head off a DST, the Senate Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery under Henry Jackson advocated the establishment of a statutory Office of Science and Technology (OST) in the Executive Office of the President that would institutionalize presidential science advising and allow its director to testify in Congress.93 In addition, Kennedy’s organizational advisers wanted to keep the presidential staff small and politically focused. In January 1961, Richard Neustadt, for example, urged Kennedy to move the entire science advising system “out of your own

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House” and locate it in the Executive Office of the President, to streamline the White House, to give science advising institutional stability, and to appease the scientific community who he believed desired permanent “status recognition” with the presidency.94 Once again, one can discern in Neustadt, as in the BOB, a subtle sense of discomfort with the presence of the scientists who might put the interest of the scientific community ahead of that of the president. Initially, Wiesner and PSAC resisted any radical change so that the Kistiakowsky chain of science policy interrelating PSAC, FCST, the NSF, and the NAS could be given a chance to succeed, but they gradually accepted the inevitable. By 1961, the science adviser’s office became one of the largest entities in the White House, with a budget approaching an unwieldy $700,000. After extensive discussions within PSAC and with the NSF, Wiesner now reluctantly agreed to accept the Jackson Committee’s OST proposal. In 1962, Kennedy signed Reorganization Plan No. 2, which established the OST, with a director and a deputy director available for testimony in Congress, and transferred to it some of the statutory science policy functions originally assigned to the NSF.95 In the latter connection, a National Science Board panel study under William O. Baker supporting the OST helped to smooth the way for the transition.96 As a result, the OST became not only the staff unit for the science adviser and PSAC, but also a central agency of science policy itself. In other words, the OST solidified the duality of science advising: it continued its science in policy role while expanding its policy for science functions. Technically, Kennedy could have appointed a separate OST director, but concerns about competing voices for science led to Wiesner’s nomination for that position. Colin M. MacLeod became the first deputy director of the OST.97 The science adviser, PSAC, and a small staff retained their White House status, with an annual budget of about $150,000.98 Wearing four hats now (science adviser, OST director, PSAC, and FCST chairman), Wiesner had to segregate his duties carefully, especially when it came to testifying in Congress. In general, he spoke as OST director to Congress on policy for science matters, and worked on science in policy issues as science adviser and chairman of PSAC.99 The OST did institutionalize science advising, but it also introduced problems of its own. In a memorandum to Kennedy, Wiesner spoke, prophetically, of the “danger” of the OST becoming isolated from the president and his staff.100 Furthermore, with the OST, Wiesner and his staff, in contrast to PSAC, began to take on a larger share of the science advising function than before, even though the latter had recognized the need for shedding the overload on its agenda. “[Because] I knew the president before he was elected,” Wiesner later reflected, “I was regarded by him as one of the group of the White House family, probably in somewhat a different sense than either Dr. Kistiakowsky or Dr. Killian had been.” That easy access had its cost as Wiesner tended to take on more issues and perhaps lost them “more easily than my predecessors.” Partly due to this development, PSAC members never developed as close a relationship with Kennedy as they did with Eisenhower. They became advisers more to Wiesner than to the president. In retrospect, Wiesner acknowledged that “this might not have been wholly good.”101 The

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main benefit of the new OST was that it allowed greater congressional, and with it public, oversight of science policymaking. As we will see later, it also provided a relatively stable base from which the science adviser, PSAC, and their staff could take on expanding activities on behalf of the president, most important in the areas of environmental protection, arms control, space, and science policy.

Conclusion In retrospect, the Kennedy administration’s decision to retain the position of the science adviser and PSAC marked a milestone in the history of American science advising. It did not seem all that significant at the time, probably because of the remarkable political convergence that governed American political beliefs in the 1950s and the early 1960s. Centered around an anticommunist foreign policy and a domestic agenda that relied on government-sponsored incremental reforms and economic progress to solve social problems, the so-called Cold War liberal consensus ensured that the transition between the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations was marked more by continuity than radical rupture, despite Kennedy’s rhetoric of the New Frontier activism and real departures in several policy areas. Within this consensus, the ideal of science as an objective pursuit of truth and scientists as a source of disinterested technical advice on public policy, although increasingly challenged, largely survived. PSAC benefited from this inertia even though it no longer maintained its close policy synchronization with the president or its centrality as a locus of technical and military analysis at the top of the government that it had enjoyed during the post-Sputnik Eisenhower years. Yet, as the Kennedy administration, with its liberal impulse, sought to encompass more of the national life under the purview of the federal government, the science advisory system began to take on a greater spectrum of activities, including civilian technologies, international scientific projects, education, and environment, than it had under Eisenhower. The establishment of the OST both reflected this trend and in turn further facilitated it. As the next chapter demonstrates, PSAC’s investigation of the problem of pesticides represented a major triumph of presidential science advising in the Kennedy years. Ironically, even as Wiesner and PSAC ventured, often quite successfully, into new areas of public policy, their advising on space, national security, and arms control, still deeply colored by their post-Sputnik experience and their interactions with President Eisenhower, met with increasing challenges in the Kennedy years. As public scientists, PSAC members needed to adapt their strategy of banking on technological skepticism for a new age of science and politics.

12

Responding to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, 1962–1963

On August 29, 1962, when President Kennedy held his forty-second press conference, foreign policy, especially the nuclear test ban and suspicion of Soviet shipment of missiles to Cuba, dominated the exchange until one reporter brought the discussion closer to home. “Mr. President,” he asked, “there appears to be growing concern among scientists as to the possibility of dangerous long-range side effects from the widespread use of DDT and other pesticides.” “Have you considered asking the Department of Agriculture or the Public Health Service to take a closer look at this?” “Yes,” Kennedy answered, “and I know that they already are. I think particularly, of course, since Miss Carson’s book, but they are examining the matter.”1 “Miss Carson’s book” was, of course, Silent Spring, a critical account of the consequences of excessive uses of pesticides by Rachel Carson, a marine biologist and popular science writer. When first excerpted in the New Yorker and then published by Houghton Miffl in that year, it evoked a strong, sympathetic public response. Many people have since credited it as the beginning of the modern environmental movement, often comparing its impact in history to that of Harriet Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.2 The initial reaction to the book from pest control scientists, the industrial establishment, and agricultural officials in the Kennedy administration, was not, however, anywhere nearly as sympathetic as Kennedy appeared. A review by the biochemist William J. Darby in the Chemical and Engineering News carried the condescending and damning title “Silence, Miss Carson.”3 The Department of Agriculture—the federal agency responsible for both the promotion and the regulation of pesticides—regarded the controversy as a “public relations problem” and aimed to “contain the damage.”4 Thus, at the time of Kennedy’s press conference, it was not at all clear that the book would ever result in any significant change of federal policy on the use of pesticides, one major goal of Carson’s. The tone changed dramatically a year later when PSAC sent Kennedy its eagerly awaited report Use of Pesticides. It was universally greeted as a vindication of Rachel Carson and became a harbinger to changes in federal policy. Although recognizing the indispensable role of pesticides in modern agriculture, the PSAC report reaffirmed Carson’s warnings about the harmful effects of persistent pesticides and called for tighter governmental control of pesticides to protect the environment and human health. Kennedy ordered federal agencies to follow up on the recommendations in the report, and Congress passed laws that were advocated by Carson and PSAC. By the weight of their proximity to presidential power and their scientific prestige, PSAC scientists helped to certify the seriousness of Carson’s 199

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seemingly radical claims of environmental cataclysms. The episode marked a high point in the history of PSAC, offering one of the most significant and successful examples of American scientists’ involvement in public policy in this period. Carson herself was clearly heartened by the report. She regarded it as one of the most important government documents in many years. “I think no one can read this report and retain a shred of complacency about our situation,” she wrote shortly after the release of the report in May 1963.5 The making and reception of the PSAC report, often mentioned but not explained in accounts of events following Silent Spring, raise fascinating questions about the role of science advisers in public policy, and the relations of science and the environment in this early stage of the modern environmental movement. How, for example, did a scientific group like PSAC, until then best known for its part in nuclear and space policy, emerge overnight as environmental experts and did so with apparent effectiveness? In this chapter I argue that it was the same sense of technological skepticism that PSAC had articulated in its evaluation of nuclear weapons that led it to embrace Rachel Carson’s critique of the chemical industry and of government pesticide policy. Examining the making of the PSAC report also shows how such government reports were constructed and especially how that process responds to many different types of input, including such popular science writing as Silent Spring, the media, and contending government bureaucracies.

Environmental Locus in the White House In 1962, PSAC did not have much of a reputation in environmental policymaking but it was not a complete novice on the topic either. It was true that nuclear and space issues dominated the agenda of the committee—so much so that several members not willing to work on these subjects resigned from it shortly after joining—but Eisenhower, if not the rest of his Republican administration, did encourage PSAC to get involved in some civilian matters, such as an evaluation of the National Institutes of Health’s research program and a study of the conservation of natural resources.6 Indeed, the “cranberry crisis” of 1959 marked PSAC’s first foray into environmental and health policy, when, just before Thanksgiving, trace amounts of an herbicide were detected in the crop leading the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to impound some shipments of cranberries. A frightened public stayed away from the fruit and related products for the holidays, which enraged cranberry farmers and their political supporters, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). They put pressure on the Eisenhower White House to revise future FDA policy on the matter, but the latter cited the Delaney Amendment that had mandated zero tolerance for any potentially carcinogenic chemicals. A PSAC panel examined the issue and recommended a reasonable moderation of the Delaney Amendment, but it was met with resistance by the HEW, and, to Kistiakowsky’s surprise, with skepticism by the full PSAC.7 In the end, PSAC’s cranberry study had very little direct impact, but it did establish the science advisers as the unit within the White House to handle environmental issues. The

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creation of a standing Life Sciences Panel in 1959 also facilitated PSAC’s expansion in these new directions.8 Even PSAC’s focus on nuclear and space matters was not without environmental relevance. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, for example, the committee had sponsored or supported several experiments in space. Project Argus (continued later under “Starfish” and other code names) exploded nuclear bombs in space to create artificial van Allen belts of electrons (as a possible shield against missiles), and Project West Ford (“Needles”) spread millions of copper filaments in space to form a communication reflector. PSAC endorsed these projects as scientifically exciting and militarily intriguing, but they carried potential global environmental risks, drawing protests and criticism especially from radio-astronomers. PSAC’s predictions that any adverse effects would be small or short-lived turned out to be largely on the mark. However, the controversy did alert the public and the scientific community about the dangers of global environmental changes made possible by modern technology. It also highlighted for PSAC the importance of open, international communication about the environmental impact of any large-scale scientific experiment. In both cases, PSAC pushed vigorously and successfully for the declassification of the projects as soon as possible.9 What might also have helped establish PSAC scientists’ credentials in the environmental area was the often-commented parallel between nuclear weapons and radiation fallout, on which they were the acknowledged experts, on the one hand, and pesticides, on the other.10 Carson herself evoked the analogy several times in her book. “Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war,” she warned, “the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total environment with such substances of incredible potentials for harm.”11 Like his predecessors, Wiesner was actively involved in the Federal Radiation Council, an interagency group set up to discuss policies on protection from radiation, especially that caused by the making and testing of nuclear weapons. Yet another factor that prepared PSAC for the pesticide study was its expansion, especially under Kennedy, in health and environmental policy. The Life Sciences Panel of PSAC was reconstituted and expanded, with ad hoc subpanels in agriculture, behavioral sciences, and bio-engineering.12 Two physicians, James Hartgering and Peter S. Bing, served on the OST staff.13 In early 1961, Wiesner put together a PSAC ad hoc panel to help the Public Health Service (PHS) evaluate its plans for what eventually became the National Institute of Environmental Health in Research Triangle, North Carolina.14 Although, strikingly, none of PSAC’s studies on agriculture or even environmental health highlighted the problem of pesticides until the publication of Carson’s work, the committee did react quickly when Carson’s articles brought the issue to its attention. In the FCST, Boisfeuillet Jones, special assistant to the secretary of HEW, first suggested the need for an interagency review of federal policy on chemicals in the environment as a response to Carson’s New Yorker articles in July 1962.15 Independently, several members within PSAC, including Richard Garwin, brought the matter up after

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reading the articles. As a result, the whole committee decided to conduct a study on pesticides.16

The Kennedy Administration Reacts to Silent Spring Thus, by the time Kennedy held his August press conference, Wiesner had already, as Kennedy indicated, set the science advisory wheels in motion to study the pesticide problem. On July 24, less than a month after the appearance of Carson’s New Yorker articles, Wiesner had asked Jones to head an ad hoc FCST panel to review federal policy and gather national data on pesticide use in preparation for “a much deeper look into this whole problem” by PSAC’s Life Science Panel.17 In contrast to the “contain the damage” strategy adopted by the USDA, Wiesner made it clear to the Jones panel that federal agencies should take real actions to understand and control the effects of pesticide use on plants, animals, and the environment. The group, which included representatives from Interior, the HEW, and the USDA, agreed that “in light of the enlarging and justifiable national concern, no government agency should minimize this problem.”18 The Jones panel quickly found that there was little federal effort to predict and control the environmental changes caused by pesticides. The Department of Commerce’s main concern with pesticides was that the national debate might adversely affect the pesticide chemical industry.19 The DOD did have a group on pest control, but it “does not concern itself with long-range ecological effects.”20 What little research went on in the USDA and HEW was mainly concentrated on the direct effects of pesticides on humans and animals, not on their ecological impact and without much coordination. In fact, in a 1961 special message to Congress on natural resources, Kennedy, anticipating Carson, had already recognized the danger of “one agency encouraging chemical pesticides that may harm the song birds and game birds whose preservation is encouraged by another agency.” Even though Kennedy directed the secretary of the interior to take the lead “to end these confl icts,” the USDA refused to give up its control over the pesticides program.21 Thus, by 1962, as Roger Revelle, science adviser to the secretary of interior, pointed out, the Fish and Wildlife Service, where Rachel Carson once worked as a marine biologist, still did not have the regulatory power but had to rely on the states to try to protect fish and wildlife from pesticides.22 The few federal coordinating bodies on pesticides were either weak or biased. The midlevel Federal Pest Control Review Board (FPCRB), for example, was so dominated by the USDA that its chairman, Robert Anderson of the PHS, had declined Wiesner’s invitation to conduct a review on pesticides for the FCST. The semipublic NAS–NRC Committee on Pest Control and Wildlife Relationships, too, came under such sway of proponents of pesticides with ties to the industry that its reports in 1962 and 1963 had served as a common reference point for hostile reviewers of Rachel Carson.23 In a way, the recognized flaws of these two players in the pesticide policy landscape facilitated the entrance of PSAC into the fray and pushed it into the center of the growing national debate. Shortly after Kennedy’s press conference, the OST began to receive, alongside the voluminous mail from

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concerned public, letters from chemical companies that attacked Rachel Carson and urged Wiesner to consult with pro-pesticide scientists. “In our opinion,” Thomas H. Jukes, a distinguished biologist and director of biochemistry of the American Cyanamid Company, wrote, “the main problem is Miss Carson.”24

The PSAC Investigation Although Wiesner and PSAC were much more sympathetic to Carson’s views than Jukes and company, they made efforts to ensure balance in their own investigation. Chaired by MacLeod, the PSAC panel included, among its most active members, James G. Horsfall, director of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station and a moderate advocate on the use of pesticides, and William H. Drury, Jr., director of the Hatheway School of Conservation Education under the Massachusetts Audubon Society, representing the views of the conservationists. 25 Other members of the MacLeod panel were mostly prominent academic biomedical researchers, including the well-known biologist James Watson of Harvard, and administrators with no apparent ties to the pesticide industry.26 There is no evidence that Kennedy had put pressure on PSAC to support Carson’s views, but they were certainly aware of his concern over the matter from his August 1962 press conference. As the reports from federal agencies came in, Chairman MacLeod became convinced that “the magnitude of this problem is going to require a distinct reorientation on the part of many.”27 By the end of the summer of 1962, the FCST group had gathered enough data about the federal pesticide programs for the PSAC panel to plunge into work evaluating them. On October 1, 1962, the MacLeod panel met with the FCST group to go over the data. Presided over by Wiesner, the meeting resulted in a broadening of the investigation from the direct effects on human health to the impact on national economy—the poisoning of fish and crabs, for example—and wildlife. The next day, the panel met with Jones to pose further questions for the agencies about the history of pesticides, the reasons for different actions of common pesticides on different species, the synergistic action of two pesticides combined, the role of federal government in the control of pesticide use outside of the federal government, and other questions relating to the chemical and ecological aspects of pesticides.28 In addition, the panel invited and received testimony from university scientists and industry representatives, including the Manufacturing Chemists Association. The staff also worked closely with consultants such as Alfred M. Boyce, dean of the College of Agriculture of the University of California, Riverside, who, like Horsfall, tended to emphasize the benefits of pesticides but was not a hardline partisan. Besides data from American sources, the panel obtained information from the World Health Organization and the British government.29 Sir Solly Zuckerman, chief science adviser to the British Ministry of Defense, for example, sent Wiesner an exchange in the House of Lords over “the story of the cannibal in Polynesia who now no longer allows his tribe to eat Americans because their fat is contaminated with chlorinated hydrocarbons.”30

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Back in the White House, the pesticide project continued to widen beyond the staff ’s original conception, as Peter Bing reported to a former OST colleague in late October 1962: As you might expect Jim [Hartgering] and I, trying to get our toes wet in the pesticide problem, have both managed to be pushed off the brink. While floundering in the soup, Jim got the superb idea of bringing in a man [John L. Buckley] from the Department of Interior to spend three months working through this whole problem. Although we have nearly completed a review of Federal pesticides programs, these constitute only 5% of the total chemicals applied in this country each year, and the picture becomes increasingly complicated technically the more we look at it.31

The choice of an Interior scientist obviously did not please pesticide proponents, but the USDA apparently did not object. The communication also indicated the important but often neglected roles staff played in the process of science advising. In January 1963, the PSAC panel invited Rachel Carson for an informal meeting to discuss her concerns. It was, as she wrote a friend, “not a command performance, but just come if I’d like to.”32 It was the first time that a woman scientist was involved in a major PSAC investigation. Believing that “perhaps it’s a chance to straighten out some thinking,” she met with the panel for nearly a day on January 26, 1963, impressing the panel members with her moderate views and reassuring especially those who had questioned some of the radical claims in her book.33 For her part, Carson was pleased with the seriousness with which the White House had taken the investigation. President Kennedy, she learned from friends in government, “often asked about the progress of the Committee and urged speed in getting out the report.”34 Two weeks after its meeting with Rachel Carson, the PSAC panel finished the first and, as it turned out, highly controversial draft of its report, simply titled “Working Paper on Pesticides.” In broad outline, the draft recognized the indispensable role of pesticides in modern agriculture and public health, but devoted most of the text to the dangers that excessive use posed for human beings, fish and wildlife, and the environment. It called for a reevaluation of toxicological data on pesticides, intensified research on pesticide effects, a shift to safer and more selective pesticides, and the elimination of “protest registration,” an incredible loophole in the law that allowed companies to market products even when disapproved by regulators. It also advocated close coordination among all federal agencies in the use and regulation of pesticides, revisions of laws to extend protection to fish and wildlife, and the establishment of a new Regulatory Commission in the Executive Office of the President, with a National Advisory Committee of distinguished citizens and experts, to replace the FPCRB in regulating pesticide use.35

Boundaries, Interests, and Negotiations The USDA reacted to the draft report with alarm and bitter criticisms. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman sent his departmental comments to Wiesner along

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with a “personal” note pleading for caution in this “very sensitive area.” “Should this be handled improperly,” Freeman wrote, “I can assure you we could have a negative effect which would make the cranberry fiasco and the problem with strontium and iodine fade into complete insignificance.”36 The USDA regarded the draft as biased—too little on pesticides’ benefits and too much on their hazards. In its present form, the PSAC report “could profoundly damage U. S. agriculture” and “lead to a breakdown of public confidence in control programs, pesticide use, research scientists and their findings, governmental regulations of pesticides, and the safety and wholesomeness of our food supply.”37 Had PSAC panel members not been prominent scientists, the USDA would probably have accused them of being “antiscience.” One USDA official urged that PSAC hear from more pesticide scientists, especially from the USDA, and have its report reviewed by the NAS–NRC committee on food protection.38 The Manufacturing Chemists’ Association also sent Wiesner a list of scientists it favored as potential witnesses.39 Self-interest similarly colored reactions from two other major federal players in the controversy. Like the USDA, the HEW feared that the report would “cast doubt on the safety of our food supply and governmental health protection measures.” One HEW official suggested that the panel merely recommend more research on the health effects of pesticides and clarification of each agency’s role in the pesticide area.40 As can be expected, the Department of Interior was more enthusiastic about the draft report. Donald L. McKernan, director of the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries of the Fish and Wildlife Service, called the report “well done,” although he was concerned that the documentation of pesticide residues in food fish (which he questioned) might expose the fishing industry to a possible “cranberry scare.” He recommended only restricted distribution of the report.41 At least one prominent entomologist outside the government saw in the draft report too much parallel with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Robert Metcalf of University of California at Riverside believed that “This document suffers from the overemotional and biased approach which has characterized the ‘Silent Spring’ and other inflammatory writings on this subject. . . . It seems to me this tenor of writing is not in keeping with the dignity of the President’s Science Advisory Committee.” Despite his critical tone, Metcalf ’s specific comments proved helpful to the panel in revising its draft.42 Clashes continued when the PSAC panel met in early March to rewrite the report, especially in response to the USDA’s criticism. Although accepting many specific changes it suggested, the panel refused to give ground on fundamental points. For example, next to a USDA comment that “Before pesticides receive a blanket indictment, there should be positive evidence of significant damage rather than localized transitory losses,” panel members and staff wrote these marginal responses: “Who says so?” / “ABSOLUTELY NO” / “Shows serious misinformation.”43 In other words, there was a fundamental division over the burden of proof: Whereas the USDA held that pesticides should be presumed innocent until proven guilty, the PSAC panel believed in the precautionary principle of erring on the side of being conservative. As to the point of balance, the panel pointed out that it had

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explicitly asked the USDA to prepare a case for the pesticides to be included in the final report. One incident illustrated for the PSAC panel the urgency of acting on admittedly incomplete information. At a meeting with USDA and HEW scientists on March 8, 1963, Wiesner and the PSAC panel members sought to clarify some disturbing new findings about the hazards of dieldrin, a pesticide ten times more toxic than DDT. They pointed to new data from Britain that seemed to indicate for the first time the presence of dieldrin in human fat tissues, and asked whether the USDA should withdraw registration of the pesticide. The USDA and FDA officials conceded that dieldrin caused tumors but contended that “we need more data before we can decide whether dieldrin tumors are cancerous or not.” In any case, even if the USDA withdrew registration, the manufacturer still could market the product as one registered “under protest.”44 The manufacturer then could take the USDA to court, forcing the agency to prove that its product was unsafe. “We would not have evidence to back up our case” on dieldrin, the USDA feared. Wiesner was incredulous: “This is a peculiar approach to the subject. We are protecting agriculture, but then we pollute the environment with the same chemical.” He and the PSAC panel encouraged the USDA to ask Congress to change the law to remove “protest registration.”45 The exchanges on dieldrin made the PSAC panel members feel far from reassured about the safeguards on pesticides. On March 11, they wrote Wiesner expressing their concern: The tolerance level of certain very stable chlorinated hydrocarbons may be too high and may conceivably result in a health hazard to the general public. . . . We guess that a significant fraction of the American people is being exposed to dieldrin at the tolerance level. . . . FDA has classified the liver adenoma as benign and thus has not felt that the Delaney amendment relating to cancerproducing chemicals is applicable. However, the distinction between benign and malignant is not always clearcut. We are concerned that farther studies may show these tumors to be malignant.46

In other words, the meeting with the USDA experts did not allay, but rather heightened, the panel members’ concern about pesticide use. The battle over the PSAC report intensified as the panel neared completion of what was expected to be the final draft in March 1963. By mid-March, the panel had finished rewriting the report and titled it Hazards of Pesticides.47 On March 19, the full PSAC approved the new draft with only minor changes. Even though the text made it clear that it was the Life Science Panel that conducted the research and drafted the report, the report now gained an enhanced status as an official PSAC draft report, no longer just a working paper of the panel. The USDA was furious that the revised version went to the full PSAC committee without its clearance and asked Wiesner to halt any further action on the report pending its own review.48 In the meantime, Elmer Staats, deputy director of the BOB, also cautioned Wiesner that “because of the high degree of sensitivity on this subject I believe we should

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arrange to get comments from the agencies directly concerned before the report gets ‘frozen.’” The White House should not commit itself to making the report public, he suggested, and definitely not make public any budgetary estimates that might tie the administration’s hands.49 The BOB was also unhappy with the PSAC recommendation that a new regulatory mechanism on pesticides be established within the Executive Office.50 There was congressional and industrial pressure on PSAC as well, as Rachel Carson revealed in a letter to a friend: This morning I had a fascinating phone call from a man on the Republican Policy Committee of the Senate. He wanted to know whether I had seen the original draft of the report of the President’s pesticide committee. Of course I haven’t. His group has heard that this draft was so “hot” that enormous pressure has been brought on the committee, especially by two senators, and also by industry, etc., and that in consequence they have watered it down considerably. I told him I hoped he was misinformed, but if not, I hoped they could be instrumental in bringing out the original report . . . Now isn’t that interesting?51

The PSAC panel, once again, tried to accommodate the USDA’s and the BOB’s criticisms without giving in on principles. It added more materials on the benefits of pesticide use, making a case for its essential role in modern society “in as strong a way as possible,” and incorporated specific suggestions from other agencies.52 It softened its advocacy of a pesticide regulatory agency to a recommendation that “existing Federal advisory and coordinating mechanisms be critically assessed and revised as necessary to provide clear assignments of responsibility for control of pesticide use.”53 Finally, it changed the title of the report from Hazards of Pesticides to the more neutral Use of Pesticides.54 The USDA considered the revised draft “a great improvement,” but was clearly still not satisfied. One of its major worries, which was shared by the FDA, was the report’s implication that widespread use of pesticides threatened the safety of the nation’s food supply. “I am deeply concerned,” Secretary Freeman wrote Wiesner again, “by the possible public impact of a report on this subject from the highest official source.” He wanted an explicit statement in the report to assure the public about American food safety. Otherwise, the Europeans would seize the report as justification for erecting new import barriers.55 In response, the PSAC panel once again made concessions on specific points but stood its ground on its main conclusions. It agreed to state that food intended for interstate and foreign commerce had very low levels of pesticide residues, due to FDA regulation. However, it refused to guarantee this for food items marketed within their state of origin, due to lax local regulations, or to make an unequivocal statement that the food of the nation was safe.56 The PSAC panel also rebuffed the USDA’s request to remove the only passage in the report where they paid a quiet but warm tribute to Rachel Carson’s work. “Writings in the public press as well as the experiences of Panel members indicate that, until the publication of Miss Carson’s book, people were generally unaware of the available information

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on pesticide toxicity,” the draft stated. The USDA objected to the mention of Carson’s book in the PSAC report because “such a reference to a commercially available publication is inappropriate in a scientific report.”57 As Hartgering reported to Wiesner, the panel did debate “at some length” before it decided to include such a reference in the report. “It is noted that it is included under the recommendations on the need to increase public awareness [of the pesticide problem]. The Panel members felt that it would be a deliberate slight if they did not make reference to the book.”58 Although the USDA and the industry grew increasingly fearful that PSAC appeared to side with Caron, Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall backed the scientists. Calling the revised draft report a “factual, unbiased treatment of the pesticide problem,” Udall’s only regret was that the draft report made no mention of the role his department should play in the evaluation of effects of pesticides on fish and wildlife. He wanted the final report to highlight Interior’s role in this respect.59 Meanwhile, the highly charged atmosphere in the pesticide debate finally began to erode the considerable camaraderie that had prevailed in the PSAC panel. During the last stage of drafting the pesticides report, perhaps not surprisingly, Drury and Horsfall tried to pull it in opposite directions. On the one hand, Drury felt that the first section of the report on the positive side of pesticides “gives tacit approval of the status quo—the situation is unfortunate but necessary,” and feared that the report might be used “as vindication of industry’s stand.” He would rather see the report “reflect the panel’s conviction that Rachel Carson is essentially correct.” He also believed that the full PSAC shared his sense of the gravity of the situation: I remember that everyone on the Committee has been surprised at the abundance of evidence of danger, that they have been irritated at the evasiveness and dishonesty of industry’s campaign, and seriously concerned that strong remedial action needs to be taken. That message doesn’t come through to me in the publication as is.60

On the other hand, Horsfall complained to Hartgering that: I do not believe the Panel thinks that the country is in danger of poisoning itself really, and yet the tone of the thing is frightening. I know that it was made to sound that way, but I still think that we might close up by indicating that we are, at least, taking a reasonable view of the matter and that we are not just saying to Miss Carson, “We, too.”61

Fortunately for MacLeod and the embattled staff, there was a strong consensus on the seriousness of the problem in the panel and enough common ground even between Horsfall and Drury for them to fashion a coherent and balanced final report.62 As federal agencies fought over the PSAC report, the media also joined the battle. On April 3, 1963, the CBS television network aired a prime-time special

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on “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson” as part of its popular CBS Reports series, hosted by Eric Sevareid. Featuring interviews with Rachel Carson and a wide selection of government officials and scientists, including two PSAC staff members, it dramatically intensified the public debate. President Kennedy was likely among the millions of viewers that night, having been alerted by Wiesner about the show earlier that day.63 What he heard probably disturbed him: “Eight months ago, the President’s Science Committee began its investigation,” Jay McMullen, reporter and producer of the program, told viewers, “but up to now no report has been issued, and CBS News has learned that dissension among government agencies is delaying that report.”64 The show brought to home to Kennedy and the American public not only the intensity of the backlash against Carson by a powerful establishment that evoked the authority of science and the government, but also a disturbing trend of experts at odds with each other over assessment of environmental pollution. A white-coated Dr. Robert White-Stevens of the American Cyanamid Company, for example, attacked Silent Spring as “completely unsupported by scientific experimental evidence.” He prophesized that “[i]f man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and disease and vermin would once again inherit the earth.” Surgeon General Luther Terry and Secretary Freeman defended pesticides as vital to public health and agriculture. Both White-Stevens and FDA Commissioner George Larrick assured the public of pesticide safety: “There is no danger to either man or to animals and wildlife” if used properly. As the program continued, however, viewers began to see that these reassurances were built on shaky ground. Larrick acknowledged that existing controls of pesticides might not be “truly sufficient” in view of rapid technological developments. Freeman conceded that damages to wildlife did take place “before” his term. Page Nicholson of the PHS told an incredulous McMullen that “in some instances” the public was drinking water contaminated with pesticides and that the PHS had no regulation over the matter. John Buckley, here identified as director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Research Center, further contradicted WhiteStevens by asserting “extensive damage to wildlife” even when the pesticides were applied in “carefully carried out programs.” Likewise, Hartgering, identified by Sevareid as “a staff member of the President’s Science Committee,” told McMullen that, at least indirectly, pesticide use could affect human reproduction as it did other animals. The best defender of Carson’s Silent Spring on the program turned out to be Carson herself. In a calm but firm voice that contrasted sharply with WhiteStevens’s stridency, Carson called on the public to maintain a healthy skepticism toward technological promises. “We’ve heard the benefits of pesticides,” Carson told Sevareid and viewers, “we have heard a great deal about their safety, but very little about the hazards, very little about the failures, the inefficiencies . . . so I set about to remedy the balance there.” Judging by the overwhelming number of favorable letters received by CBS and by Carson, it appeared that Carson’s warning

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resonated with a significant portion of the public and that a strong undercurrent of anxiety existed even in the post-Sputnik age of technological enthusiasm.65

A Closure and an Opening Perhaps the goading from CBS Reports helped. After eight months of intensive investigation, debates, and last-minute “hectic fussing between agencies and countless redrafting,” the PSAC report was finally completed and delivered to President Kennedy, who released it to the public on May 15, 1963.66 Arguably, no PSAC publication was ever fought over so fiercely because none carried as much implication for American public policy. To a striking extent, the PSAC report endorsed both the specific claims and the general philosophy Rachel Carson presented in Silent Spring. Although recognizing that “the use of pesticides must be continued” for food production and control of diseases, the report made it clear that their widespread use “may also be toxic to beneficial plants and animals, including man.” It emphasized, as did Carson, that pesticides represented only the iceberg of a broader environmental problem and that there was a need to act even before full knowledge of the problem was obtained: The Panel is convinced that we must understand more completely the properties of these chemicals and determine their long-term impact on biological systems, including man. The Panel’s recommendations are directed toward these needs, and toward more judicious use of pesticides or alternate methods of pest control, in an effort to minimize risks and maximize gains. They are offered with the full recognition that pesticides constitute only one facet of the general problem of environmental pollution, but with the conviction that the hazards resulting from their use dictate rapid strengthening of interim measures until such time as we have realized a comprehensive program for controlling environmental pollution.67

Thus the report set a powerful precedent for the argument that when faced with the potentially disastrous consequences of environmental changes, it was more prudent to take steps to mitigate the problem and err on the conservative side than to wait for all the data and proofs to come in before initiating actions. The panel pointed out that the problem admitted no quick technical or technocratic fixes; instead its solution required dynamic interactions between scientific understanding and technological progress within a democratic framework: It [the panel] can suggest ways of avoiding or lessening the hazards, but in the end society must decide, and to do so it must obtain adequate information on which to base its judgments. The decision is an uncomfortable one which can never be final but must be constantly in fl ux as circumstances change and knowledge increases.68

In demanding the public right to know and to choose, PSAC echoed Carson’s own call in Silent Spring that “The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts.”69

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Structurally, the twenty-three-page document included a general introduction summarizing the panel’s assessment of the problem and sections on “gains,” “hazard,” “pest control without chemical,” “role of the government in pesticide regulation,” and “recommendations.” The body of the report explained the classes of compounds used in pesticides, their distribution and persistence in the environment, and their biological effects on humans and animals. As if to confirm the British joke about Americans being less edible, the report revealed that indeed Americans had twelve parts per million (ppm) of DDT in their body fat as compared with two ppm for the English.70 The report encouraged, as did Carson, biological controls as an alternative to chemical pesticides, and most important, made proposals for the USDA, HEW, and Interior to strengthen pesticide regulation. Like Carson, PSAC deplored the fact that “decisions on safety are not as well based as those on efficacy despite recent improvements.” The panel blamed the domination of the USDA, with potential confl ict of interests, and the weak or nonexistent roles of the HEW and Interior in the regulatory process for this outcome. Thus it called for a role for the HEW in decisions on pesticide registrations when they were clearly related to health.71 It also pressed for the protection of fish and wildlife by their inclusion under existing federal pesticide laws and thus for an end to the exclusion of Interior in pesticide regulation.72 Above all, PSAC called for increased openness in public policy on pesticides— “The Panel believes that all data used as a basis for granting registration and establishing tolerances should be published, thus allowing the hypotheses and the validity and reliability of the data to be subjected to critical review by the public and the scientific community.”73 Significantly, what PSAC endorsed here was a profound shift in the authority of American public policy from government technocrats to a scientifically informed public, and with it a new model of policymaking based on contested rationality. Although it did not provide details as to how the system would work in practice, PSAC’s goal was no less than putting the public in public policy. In view of the BOB’s opposition, the PSAC report did not repeat its earlier advocacy for a new regulatory commission, but it persisted in calling for a critical reassessment of existing federal advisory and coordinating mechanisms so they could have the power to restrict or disapprove pesticides on the basis of “reasonable doubt” of safety. Finally, to make the federal pesticide programs “models of correct practice” for national guidance, it suggested that each of them include an “evaluation of the associated hazards.”74 The report further advocated that “every large-scale operation be followed by a complete report which would appear in the public literature,” thus anticipating the powerful Environmental Impact Reports (EIRs) as a regulatory tool.75 PSAC argued, in essence, that skepticism and transparency furnished effective antidotes to technological abuse. True to its call for transparency, the PSAC report advocated public education programs on the effects of pesticides. It not only mentioned Carson’s name, but also added the title of her book in one of the most quoted sentences of the entire report (or of any PSAC report): “Public literature and the experiences of Panel

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members indicate that, until the publication of ‘Silent Spring’ by Rachel Carson, people were generally unaware of the toxicity of pesticides.” The PSAC report recommended that “the appropriate Federal departments and agencies initiate programs of public education describing the use and toxic nature of pesticides” and that “The Government should present this information to the public in a way that will make it aware of the dangers while recognizing the value of pesticides.”76 Most controversial to the USDA and other pesticide proponents were the report’s proposed changes in federal pesticide policy. Once again echoing Carson, PSAC called for the eventual elimination of persistent pesticides such as DDT and the termination of insect eradication programs, terming them as unrealistic.77 Pesticide advocates at the USDA and elsewhere argued that long-lasting poisons were indispensable for certain applications and that such use actually helped reduce the amount of pesticides used. They also contended that eradication worked in some regions and likewise helped reduce pesticide use. What they failed to consider was the harmful effects both approaches had for fish and wildlife.78 Ultimately, what made the PSAC report a striking vindication of Rachel Carson was not only its confirmation of her specific charges about pesticide abuse, but its sympathy for her philosophical critique of misguided technological enthusiasm. Like Carson, the PSAC panel focused on the relationship between science and technology in its appraisal of the excesses and deficiencies of pesticides. In Silent Spring, Carson had argued that human abuse of the environment derived from an unfortunate imbalance between our underdeveloped science and overdeveloped technology: The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.79

PSAC, although not quite as eloquent, clearly agreed with Carson that it was important to understand nature—through science or basic research—before attempting to control it with technology. The PSAC report pointed out, for example, that the lack of basic research on the long-term, environmental effects of these chemicals was in large part responsible for the crisis facing the nation. Such basic research would serve both as a foundation for future pesticide technology and as a way to solve the environmental problems caused by its abuse. In her book Carson had lamented the “pitifully small” funds devoted to research on pesticides’ environmental effects. PSAC agreed: “approximately $20 million were allocated to pest control programs in 1962, but no funds were provided for concurrent field studies on the environment.”80 Both PSAC and Carson, who would proudly identify herself as a marine biologist in congressional testimony on pesticides, believed that scientific research

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would eventually offer a way out of the technological impasse. In Silent Spring she had cited, for example, the “brilliant successes” of biological control that had come from “the minds of imaginative scientists . . . based on understanding of the mechanism they seek to control, and of the whole fabric of life to which these organisms belong.”81 Likewise, PSAC tried (once again) to turn a flawed technological program into a justification for basic research. It called for increased federal funding for research on alternatives to conventional chemical pesticides, including biological controls, for toxicological studies of the long-term effects of pesticides on humans and wildlife, and for basic research and education at universities. The science–technology boundary remained as important a subject for negotiation in the debate over pesticides as it did in those over nuclear weapons and space programs.

Reaction to the Report Outside the circle of entrenched pesticide interests, the PSAC panel report was universally greeted as a powerful affirmation of Rachel Carson’s message in Silent Spring. “Rachel Carson Stands Vindicated,” headlined The Christian Science Monitor the day after its issuance. The New York Times announced soberly, on its front page, that “The President’s Science Advisory Committee cautioned the nation today on the use of pesticides.”82 Interestingly, some of the scientific publications that had published damning reviews of Carson’s book now joined the popular press in applauding the report.83 For example, the Chemical and Engineering News, which had published Darby’s almost personal attack on Carson, now responded to the publication of the PSAC report with a laudatory lead article in its May 20 issue. Characteristically, it found assurance in elitism: “the committee’s panel on the use of pesticides was composed of men of achievement in the scientific and public affairs, whose positions imply recognition of their judgment and responsibility. The tone of the report reflects those qualities.”84 The American Chemical Society, which published the CEN, made sure that a copy of the article was sent to every PSAC member.85 What gave particular weight to the PSAC report was, of course, Kennedy’s brief but crucial statement in the report that “I have already requested the responsible agencies to implement the recommendations in this report, including the preparation of legislative and technical proposals which I shall submit to the Congress.”86 It was a rare case where PSAC prevailed over the objection from the BOB. In a way, it marked the end of the first phase of intra-administration debate over pesticide policy, although even those recommendations in the PSAC report were subject to different interpretations.87 Rachel Carson was elated by the PSAC report. Having read the penultimate draft of the report, Carson was able to react quickly and comment on it enthusiastically to CBS on the day of its White House release: I think it’s a splendid report. It’s strong. It’s objective and I think a very fair evaluation of the problem. I feel that the report has vindicated me and my

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principal contentions. I am particularly pleased by the reiteration of the fact that the public is entitled to the facts, which after all, was my reason for writing Silent Spring.88

That evening, CBS aired Carson’s comments in a special program on the report— The Verdict on the Silent Spring of Rachel Carson. Sevareid, again in the anchor’s chair, called the report “prima facie evidence” that Carson had achieved her goal to “build a fire under the Government.”89 The next day Hartgering wrote Carson to send her copies of the published report and to thank her for her discussion with the panel and “your kind comments on the CBS program.”90 A few days later Carson’s detailed analysis of the report appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. The report “marks the end of an era of complacency,” she wrote, and if its recommendations were adopted “we shall have taken a long step forward in our search for a sane policy” over pesticide use.91 In Congress, Senator Abraham Ribicoff, a Democrat from Connecticut who had been secretary of HEW early in the Kennedy administration, saw to it that his former Cabinet colleagues follow the president’s instruction. With good timing, he opened a series of Senate hearings on interagency coordination on the pesticide problem the day after the release of the PSAC report. In his hands, the “Wiesner report,” as Ribicoff called it, became a reference point; he frequently quoted from the document and asked officials from the USDA, HEW, and Interior about how they were following up on the recommendations. As the first witness at the hearings, Wiesner made headlines with his claim that, because of the rapid increase in the use of chemicals such as pesticides, they presented potentially a much greater danger than radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing.92 In making this pronouncement, Wiesner might well have been following the advice from Margaret Mead, who told PSAC staff shortly before the release of the report that her survey research found that the public often linked the pesticide problem with fallout as top environmental issues of concern.93 Secretaries of the three departments in question gave largely positive responses to the PSAC report in their testimony, with Udall being the most enthusiastic. He wanted to see the various agencies carry out its recommendations, especially the one giving Interior a role in the protection of fish and wildlife from pesticides.94 To Congress he openly complained about the USDA’s exclusionary practice in the past, thus intensifying what he later called “a little cold war” between the two agencies.95 In his testimony, Secretary Freeman welcomed the PSAC report, crediting it, along with Silent Spring, as contributing to public awareness of hazards of pesticides. He also promised to work with Interior in working out a satisfactory registration process. Although the USDA disagreed with the PSAC report on the desirability of eradication programs, Freeman endorsed most other recommendations, including the abolition of “protest registration,” expanding public education, and increasing basic research on biological control.96 Indeed, following established practice in Washington, the USDA and the Public Health Service began to use the PSAC report to justify their requests to the BOB for increased research budgets.97

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Carson also testified at the Ribicoff hearings, elaborating on her case against unrestrained use of pesticides and giving her support to the PSAC recommendations, especially those on the elimination of persistent pesticides, medical education, basic research, and Interior’s role in pesticide regulation.98 Two days later she testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, where she called for the establishment of an independent commission within the Executive Office of the President to set pesticides policy that had been advocated in the original PSAC report draft. “Confl ict of interest should be eliminated completely,” she said, perhaps by excluding members from the government or the chemical industry. “The Commission,” she suggested, “should be made up of citizens of high professional competence in such fields as medicine, genetics, biology, and conservation.” So, even if her challenge to the chemical expertise would help erode public trust in scientific authority in general,99 she herself maintained faith in the possibility of public interest science. Carson’s positive experience with the PSAC pesticide panel probably contributed to the idea that many saw as the seed for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).100 The agricultural chemical industry greeted the PSAC report with mixed reactions. It welcomed PSAC’s recommendation for expanded educational and research efforts. The big manufacturers even supported PSAC’s call to eliminate “protest registration,” for, with their enormous research resources and intimate connections with the USDA, they were confident that their products could pass the registration process without resorting to antagonistic procedures. The industry as a whole, however, disliked PSAC’s call for tighter federal control and regulation of pesticides, regarding it as unnecessary interference with American “free enterprise.”101 PSAC’s recommendation of phasing out a pesticide if a less poisonous one could do the job raised especially the long-feared specter that the government would meddle in the marketplace, arbitrarily picking one pesticide producer over another.102 Jukes of Cyanamid now emerged as a prolific spokesman for the pesticide industry, arguing that the PSAC report marked the first time “that segment of society represented by the antivivisectionists, antifl uoridationists and organic farmers is interpreted to have obtained official endorsement by a committee of the Federal Government against current scientific technological practice.”103 Given the high scientific stature of the PSAC panel members, however, it was not so easy to tar them as antiscience. “I don’t think it is necessary to be an expert in toxicology to understand what is a good control experiment,” William McElroy, chairman of the Department of Biology at Johns Hopkins and a PSAC panel member, replied to Jukes.104 Like Jukes, a number of agricultural scientists and public health officials disagreed with PSAC on the danger of pesticides and the desirability of eliminating persistent pesticides. Emil M. Mrak, chancellor and professor of food science of the University of California at Davis, for example, called a PSAC statement that pesticides were “affecting biological systems in nature and may eventually affect human health” as “contrary to the present body of scientific knowledge.”105 Several witnesses questioned the expertise of PSAC and its pesticide panel. Representatives

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of chemical companies complained to the White House about PSAC’s exclusion of industry scientists in its panel.106 PSAC responded that it did receive input from industry. Furthermore, the panel’s focus was not the applications of pesticides, but their environmental effects. Industrial scientists might have been highly qualified in the former, they were “in no better position to evaluate the toxicological effects,” as Bing answered one chemical company executive.107 Indeed, the point of the PSAC report was that there were no experts on the environmental effects of pesticides. Ecologists were the one professional group most closely associated with the study of the environment and, by the early 1960s, had been well-established in American academia.108 Among all scientists they responded, as a profession, most warmly to Rachel Carson’s book. Yet, their voices were surprisingly muted in both the controversy over Silent Spring and the ensuing debate over public policy.109 As ecologist F. R. Fosberg reviewed the pesticides controversy, he was struck by the disappearance of his colleagues: “where were the ecologists, whose proper concern is the environment in which we live?”110 Apparently they were neither invited, nor did they demand, to be represented on the PSAC pesticides panel.

Conclusion This study of PSAC’s involvement in the debate over pesticides, especially the contrast between PSAC’s prominence and the ecologist’s absence in it, tells us something about the negotiation of environmental expertise during the early years of the modern environmental movement. Much still needs to be done to understand how environmental expertise and ecological consciousness emerged and gained acceptance in American society and public policy. Here, in the early 1960s, it appears that environmental expertise as we understand the term today, an interdisciplinary body of knowledge about the natural and social aspects of environmental problems, with the goal of controlling and regulating them through public policy, was still in its infancy. There were experts in a variety of fields that would contribute to the new discipline, such as ecology, public health, agricultural science, toxicology, and epidemiology. However, the concept of environmental expertise, especially in the arena of public policy, seemed to be a new one, to be invented and contested. In fact, the PSAC pesticide study represented, for the first time, a synthesis of state-of-the-art research findings on a major environmental problem from different agencies, sources, and disciplines, generating new knowledge and helping establish the field of environmental studies in the process. In many ways, PSAC’s role in environmental policy in the early 1960s resembled its experience in arms control in the late 1950s. PSAC’s involvement in the environmental field also resembled its work on arms control in the sense that it achieved only mixed success. Its study did result in several far-reaching changes in the federal pesticide policy. It helped to eliminate the “protest registration,” reduce the dosage of and eventually ban the use of DDT and several other persistent chemicals in the United States, increase research and education on the hazards of pesticides as well as on alternative methods of

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controlling pests, and bring about a stronger Federal Committee on Pest Control to replace the weak Federal Pest Control Review Board.111 As the Consumer Union pointed out, the PSAC report also helped focus public attention on the hazards of household pesticides.112 Respectable, this list of specific achievements was, however, probably not as impressive as PSAC, Carson, or other environmentalists had hoped for. As Shirley A. Briggs, Carson’s fellow crusader against excessive pesticide use and later executive director of the Rachel Carson Council, stated, the volume of pesticides produced and used increased every year after Silent Spring and the PSAC report.113 Perhaps even more disturbingly, at the height of the national controversy over pesticides, the U.S. military began its massive program of applying herbicides, such as Agent Orange, in Vietnam, which was not mentioned in the PSAC report at all.114 In retrospect, the real contribution of the PSAC report was its critical role in changing public and official perception of the environmental problems discussed in Carson’s Silent Spring. The panel’s scientific reputation, its balanced but clear articulation of the risks of pesticides, and Kennedy’s strong endorsement combined to give a powerful jolt to the complacent attitude of the pesticide establishment. It was no longer convincing to paint Rachel Carson and her supporters as “antiscience” in alliance with, as one reviewer put it, “organic gardeners, the anti-fl uoride-leaguers, the worshippers of ‘natural foods’ and other pseudoscientists and faddists.”115 Furthermore, with its reasoned treatment of the issue based on compromise among the various interests involved, the PSAC report offered an early example of what scholars have called a “negotiated model of regulatory science,” a process that admits of scientific uncertainties but still encourages policymaking to be guided by dynamic research and by conservative assessment of potential risks.116 In many ways, PSAC’s pesticide study helped pioneer environmental studies as a serious, interdisciplinary scientific field. This examination of the PSAC pesticide study also shows that in the area of the environment, as clearly as in military technology and arms control, the president needed expert but independent science advising. Without the timely and effective backing of the PSAC, it would have been difficult for Kennedy to stem the scientific and bureaucratic tide of attacks on Carson and her book.117 PSAC scientists’ institutional loyalty to, and connection with, the presidency gave them certain freedom from being swayed by the parochial interests of federal agencies. The resistance to policy change by the USDA, FDA, and the BOB confirmed historian Samuel Hays’s assertion that “the administrative agencies and the Executive Office of the President sought to exercise restraint on environmental demands.”118 However, Kennedy’s creative use of outside science advice helped him overcome such resistance, and the domination of university scientists also made it easier for them to fend off pressure from the chemical industry. In addition, PSAC’s flexible panel system made it possible to combine expert depth in the panel with interdisciplinary breadth of the full committee. By conscientiously seeking members of different points of view on the panel, as well as input from rival agencies, PSAC also reaped the benefits of the adversarial process to ensure balance and

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credibility in its final advice to the president. Thus, largely as a result of this PSAC study on pesticides, the science adviser’s office became even more the center for environmental activism in the White House and the federal government, at least until the establishment of the EPA in 1970. Above all, PSAC’s technological skepticism, its appreciation of the limitations of technological solutions, acquired during the long struggle with the nuclear arms race, played a key role in shaping its approach to the problems of both pest control and pesticide effects. Just as it cast doubt over the promise of new nuclear weapons as a solution to the political problem of the Cold War, it drew attention to the danger of misguided enthusiasm for chemical control of pests. Just as it realized that the achievement of the nuclear test ban was a political problem that could not be solved by technical designs, PSAC recognized that the pesticide problem, and environmental problems in general, could not be left to the experts. That was why in the pesticide report they, echoing Carson, called on society to decide on the use of pesticides based on adequate information. Once again, they emphasized the need for the public to recognize the limits of any technological solution in the complex social, political, and natural/ecological context. It was a view much less technocratic than the NAS–NRC pest control panels and much more in tune with that of Carson. There was no question, of course, about the Rachel Carson’s crucial role in the entire process as a popular, woman science writer. If it were not for Carson’s book, PSAC probably would not have undertaken its investigation on pesticides for several years, if at all. Both the clarity with which Carson argued her case and the accompanying public interest pushed PSAC to go beyond the needs for further research and make forceful proposals for policy change. They certainly helped to garner crucial presidential attention for the issue and to weaken the bureaucraticindustrial resistance to the committee’s recommendations. Carson’s appearance was a historical milestone for PSAC, which had by then been largely a world without women. It was no accident that the first major PSAC report on a topic other than the masculine military technology, space, and science policy, was instigated by a woman scientist and science writer, belonging to a marginal group in the hierarchical scientific community. As recent studies have indicated, the movement toward appropriate technology, with its recognition of the limits of technological fixes, represented a feminization of American culture in the 1960s and 1970s.119 In the end, it took incisive political leadership, enlightened technological rationality, and scientifically informed public activism to turn the pesticide debate into the beginning of a modern environmental movement.

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Testing the Limits, 1961–1963

In contrast to their remarkable effectiveness in the new area of environmental policy, the presidential science advisers, ironically, faced mounting challenges in space and arms control, their traditional strongholds, during the Kennedy years. In both these arenas, PSAC scientists remained committed to a set of ideals formed during the post-Sputnik Eisenhower years and under his infl uence. They wanted the United States to follow a space program of substance, preferably one guided by scientific merit, and not one geared toward propaganda effects; they cautioned against a resurgent technological enthusiasm for manned space programs. In arms control, they agreed with Eisenhower’s argument for nuclear “sufficiency” as the basis for American deterrence, and advocated a vigorous course of negotiations with the Soviet Union to abolish nuclear testing. They continued to believe that there were limits to any technological solutions of essentially political and social problems such as the space race and the nuclear arms race. Shifting domestic politics and Soviet actions, however, increasingly tested such beliefs, which also resulted in an altered ecology of science advising and policy.

The Apollo Decision Initially, PSAC’s opposition to manned space seemed to prevail into the Kennedy administration. Under Eisenhower, PSAC had consistently and effectively advised the president that there was essentially no scientific justification for a manned space program, although it recognized other factors involved. In January 1961, Wiesner’s ad hoc committee on space for Kennedy, which included such PSAC veterans as Donald Hornig, Edwin Land, and Edward Purcell and former defense officials such as Trevor Gardner, presented to the president-elect a “more vigorous” space program.1 While recognizing the importance of national prestige and the human urge to explore, the sharply worded report criticized NASA’s focus on manned space programs, such as Project Mercury, as playing to Soviet strength and American weakness, and its neglect of science and national security in space planning.2 It even advocated the cancellation of Mercury and shifting of the resources to programs of intrinsic scientific, technological, and military value. Other recommendations were also aimed at turning space to science and security: the revitalization of the Space Council, a stronger technical leadership at NASA, assigning “a prominent place” for scientific objectives in space planning, and the centralization and strengthening of military space programs, including the “surveillance and target reconnaissance” of the Soviet Union and China using the SAMOS satellites.3 In the area of manned space exploration, Wiesner simply did not see that there was much the United States could do in view of the Soviet strength in boosting 219

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power. Wiesner had learned from Soviet scientists during his recent trip to the Moscow Pugwash that the Soviets would soon attempt a man-in-space shot. “Probably the right approach is to make a hero of the Soviet astronaut and offer him a movie contract,” he facetiously wrote Kennedy’s speech writer Theodore Sorensen. The United States could attempt a moon landing, but the cost would run between $30 billion and $40 billion. “It is hard to justify these expenditures for any imaginable military or scientific objective,” he argued. They could only be justified “by prestige arguments and possibly as a great adventure.” Echoing Kistiakowsky’s post-Sputnik reactions, Wiesner worried about the new space program “because these vast sums of money if spent on space adventures will undoubtedly impair our ability to support other areas of governmental activity, including real science.” Wiesner mentioned international cooperation in space as a way to both reduce the cost and lessen Cold War tensions.4 The Wiesner committee’s views soon found reverberations among yet another group, under Gardner, that was examining space for the Air Force. The Gardner report moved even further beyond the Wiesner report in demanding a reorientation of the space program toward activities of intrinsic value, especially those of military utility. As music to the ears of its sponsor, the Gardner group advocated that the Air Force be made the central agent for military space programs, including manned space fl ight.5 Even though Wiesner, who sat on the Gardner Committee, opposed “giving the military total responsibility for space,” it is not clear that he had much control over the content of the final Gardner report.6 To a disgusted James E. Webb, the new NASA administrator, the Gardner report was a blatant call for turning “everything over to the military.” In a conversation with Glenn Seaborg, Webb indignantly commented that, as far as he was concerned, “President Eisenhower was probably right when he said that the combination of industry and military is a matter that requires the gravest kind of thought.” He invited Seaborg to join him in a meeting to confront Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara over this issue. Seaborg, although sympathetic, declined, citing his concern that “we were all civilians but we in AEC overlapped tremendously with the military,” implying that he did not want to get involved in a major battle over military–civilian relations. So much for the civilian control of atomic energy that the Scientists’ Movement had fought so hard to establish in the AEC.7 Webb had more powerful allies on his side, however. Soviet space feats, mounting public pressure, and potent forces in Congress and within the administration soon came to his rescue. They helped not only to curtail the military ambitions in space, but also overturned PSAC’s advocacy for a moderate, scientifically oriented space program. In the first few months of the Kennedy presidency, the Soviets indeed launched, as predicted by Wiesner and others, a cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, into space. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was made chairman of the revitalized Space Council, and Overton Brooks, chairman of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, emerged as powerful advocates for NASA and its manned space programs. Even Lloyd Berkner, who had emphasized the value of

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a vast space program in the post-Sputnik PSAC discussion on the topic, managed to get the Space Science Board of the NAS to come out with a strong statement in support of manned space programs.8 A review of American space policy, under Johnson’s overall direction, concluded, in the words of a joint report from Webb and McNamara, that: This nation needs to make a positive decision to pursue space projects aimed at enhancing national prestige. Our attainments are a major element in the international competition between the Soviet system and our own. The non-military, noncommercial, non-scientific but “civilian” projects such as lunar and planetary exploration are, in this sense, part of the battle along the fl uid front of the cold war.9

Just as PSAC scientists used national prestige to push for high-energy physics projects like the Stanford accelerator, the space advocates saw the Cold War rivalry both as a driving force and the most compelling public justification for their programs. Kennedy was concerned by the cost of the project, according to Wiesner, but after the success of NASA’s Project Mercury on May 5, which carried Alan Shepard into suborbital space, “the President was not interested in hearing any arguments against the manned lunar mission.”10 Another discussion in the White House concluded that without a large space program there would be oversupply of aerospace manpower. “This took away all argument against the space program,” Wiesner recalled.11 Kennedy appeared before Congress on May 25, 1961 to declare the goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade.12 In the end, the Apollo decision was made against a complex background of Soviet space challenges and calculation of broad U.S. national interest, with farreaching implications for American science policy in general.13 Yet, the momentous decision was made without consulting PSAC, which, along with much of the scientific community, had opposed manned space projects as costly stunts for Cold War propaganda effects.14 Wiesner did initially oppose it, but he could not match the pro-Apollo forces, which included Vice-President Lyndon Johnson and the NASA leadership. When the Space Council was reconstituted in this period, Johnson kept Wiesner out of it, as Webb reported to Seaborg, on the ground that “if Wiesner had anything to say, as Special Assistant to the President, he could and should say whatever he thinks directly to the President.”15 Eventually, Wiesner decided to support the Apollo decision, not on scientific but on political grounds. Wiesner’s conversion earned him praise within the White House, but also drew criticism from some members of PSAC for not giving the committee an opportunity to argue its case with Kennedy.16 Wiesner and PSAC went along with the Apollo decision, and actually worked closely with NASA to ensure the project’s success, but its relationship with the space policymakers remained uneasy and was worsened by a major dispute concerning the best route to the moon. Whereas PSAC (and initially NASA) favored an earth orbit rendezvous that envisioned the launching of a big spacecraft into orbit around

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the earth first and sending from it a smaller “boat” to accomplish the lunar landing, NASA eventually came to prefer a lunar orbit rendezvous, by first going to an orbit around the moon and then making the lunar landing from there. PSAC argued that the earth orbit mode was safer and would result in more useful spinoff applications, including military ones. NASA, however, insisted that the lunar mode was faster in meeting Kennedy’s deadline. Above all, NASA, whose position eventually prevailed, regarded the matter as an internal technical decision and deeply resented PSAC’s encroachment. Wiesner’s hiring of Nicholas Golovin, a strong-willed former NASA scientist who broke with his colleagues over lunar landing modes, as PSAC staff member on space did not help smooth the relationship. Yet, in the end, many observers felt that the debate was beneficial for the space program.17 The Wiesner–Webb feud continued when they found themselves on opposing sides during a major debate that erupted within the Kennedy administration in November 1962 over the priority of Apollo in NASA. Whereas Webb argued, perhaps to Wiesner’s surprise, for a balanced space program with a strong, broadbased space science program, as vital to Apollo and to the American space program on a long-term and broad basis, Kennedy was clearly intent on making the Apollo a crash project to achieve its political effects: . . . the policy ought to be that this is the top-priority program of the agency and one of the two—except for defense—the top priority of the United States Government. . . . [O]therwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money because I’m not that interested in space. I think it’s good; I think we ought to know about it; we’re ready to spend reasonable amounts of money. But we’re talking about . . . we’ve spent half the expenditures, we’ve wrecked out budget on all these other domestic programs, and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in the pell-mell fashion is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind it, as we did by a couple of years, by God, we passed them. I think it would be a helluva thing for us.18

Wiesner supported Webb on the need for research associated with Apollo. “We don’t know a damn thing about the surface of the moon” and therefore needed to carry out scientific research before sending a man there. However, he also sided with Kennedy that only those projects associated with Apollo should be given the highest priority—“The scientific programs that aren’t associated with the lunar program can have any priority we please to give them.” Webb, however, remarkably, did not back down. The following dialogue is revealing about the place of national prestige in Kennedy’s own thinking not only about space, but about other scientific and technological projects, especially highenergy physics: President Kennedy: . . . I think everything that we do ought to really be tied in to getting onto the moon ahead of the Russians. .... Webb: Why can’t it be tied to preeminence in space. . . .

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President Kennedy: We can’t because, by God, we keep—we’ve been telling everybody we’re preeminent in space for five years. Nobody believes us because they’re—they have the booster and the satellite. We know all about the number of satellites we put up—the two or three times the number of the Soviet Union—we’re ahead scientifically. It’s like that instrument you got at Stanford, which is costing us $125 million, and everybody tells me that that—we’re the number one in the world, and what is it—I can’t even think what it is. [Several voices say “accelerator” or “nuclear accelerator.”] President Kennedy: Accelerator. That’s wonderful, but nobody knows anything about it.

In the end, however, equally remarkably, Kennedy actually followed largely Webb’s (and to a certain degree Wiesner’s) recommendation to not reallocate funds to Apollo at the expense of other scientific projects.19 Wiesner’s and PSAC’s marginalization in the Apollo decision and subsequent setbacks in advising on the space program was emblematic of the growing resistance to its advocacy of moderation in an age of rampant technological enthusiasm. Clearly, PSAC no longer played the role in space policy it once did in the Eisenhower administration. Its dissent in the Apollo decision was fresh evidence to its critics, who believed that the committee’s stand reflected its tendency to speak for the special interest of academic science. Its persistent criticism of manned space spectaculars as irrelevant to either national security or basic research appeared to be out of touch with the public and Congress, which placed increasing importance on national prestige. In short, in space, PSAC’s strategy of banking on technological skepticism faced a major challenge.20 Even George Kistiakowsky, the leading critic of a prestige-oriented space policy, grew concerned about the negative image of PSAC. In mid-1963 he wrote Donald Hornig, his old graduate student and protégé, who now chaired PSAC’s space science panel, about an early proposal for a space shuttle (“recoverable space boosters”): I hope very much that you will study this material carefully. It may be bunk but if it isn’t, this scheme may represent a unique opportunity for PSAC to take the leadership in a positive way toward really spectacular achievements. Since the days of pushing the development of certain missile systems and the nuclear test cessation agreement, we have been on the whole rather conservative, criticizing others by and large. This is your opportunity perhaps.21

Fortunately for PSAC, Kennedy apparently still appreciated its service as a gadfly in the space program. In November 1963, he selected Hornig as the new presidential science adviser to succeed Wiesner largely based on his space expertise.22 For his part, Wiesner remained bitter about the space program. When he was interviewed by Eugene Skolnikoff, a former PSAC staff member, in 1967, when both were back at MIT, Wiesner revealed the depth of his resentment about both the Apollo and the lunar orbit decisions:

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Gene, I have made a policy decision myself when I came back from Washington which was to not talk about the space program. I really, as you know, didn’t approve of much of what was done in the present program. I would have done it differently but I decided that at this stage to talk about it publicly would be to hurt something that couldn’t be changed anyway.23

The Limited Test Ban Compared with its frustrations in the area of space policy, PSAC met with greater success in arms control during the Kennedy years. Among all the objectives of the new administration, PSAC identified most strongly with its renewed drive for a nuclear test ban. However, as in space, the landscape of expertise in national security decision making changed dramatically in the Kennedy administration: the position of the national security adviser was now strengthened and filled by the highly analytical McGeorge Bundy; Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg chaired the AEC, which did not always agree with PSAC on the test ban despite his own general support for arms control; and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which PSAC helped to establish, now began to function and utilize experts of its own. In other words, the science adviser and PSAC no longer played as central a role in arms control as they did in the Eisenhower years, even though Wiesner continued to be highly infl uential with Kennedy and PSAC maintained a strong interest in the subject and helped organize several technical studies. At the very beginning of the Kennedy presidency, PSAC scientists were involved in the formulation of policy on the test ban. On January 25, 1961, the White House announced the formation of a panel under James Fisk, president of Bell Labs and former vice chairman of PSAC, to conduct a review of the test ban negotiations before their resumption in Geneva. In particular, it was to determine whether the Geneva system of nuclear detection was still technically feasible. The Fisk panel was not strictly a PSAC panel; it reported to John McCloy, Kennedy’s special assistant on disarmament. However, its membership was dominated by former and current members of the committee, including Hans Bethe, Harold Brown, Wolfgang Panofsky, Frank Press, and Herbert York, along with people from the AEC, DOD, and Rand who were much less enthusiastic about a test ban.24 The panel report, submitted promptly to McCloy on March 1, 1961, essentially reaffirmed the soundness of the Geneva system that the Bethe panel had helped devise. Even without stations in the Soviet bloc, the United States could already detect most nuclear explosions in the atmosphere and underwater, as well as some underground—“60–90 percent probability” of tests down to 5–10 KT—in the Soviet Union and China, but to distinguish the latter from earthquakes would require on-site inspections. Improvement in detection technology by 1965 would enable the United States not only to make such distinctions but also to detect most (60–90 percent) space nuclear shots.25 As Press saw it, “the basis for political decisions concerning the Geneva talks is already available.”26 The Fisk report buoyed the Kennedy administration’s hope for a test ban at Geneva. Kennedy believed that an agreement would be important not only for

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its own sake but also as a step toward solving other Cold War issues such as the confl ict in Berlin and Southeast Asia. At a luncheon meeting with congressional leaders on March 7, 1961, Kennedy also mentioned the role of a test ban in halting the spread of nuclear weapons to other countries such as Israel.27 However, the Geneva talks, when they resumed, soon hit a snag as the two sides disagreed on several issues, including the Soviet insistence on veto power and the West’s demand for twenty annual onsite inspections in each country versus the Soviet allowance of only three. A tense Kennedy–Khrushchev summit in Geneva in early June did not help matters. By the summer of 1961, Kennedy came under pressure to resume nuclear testing from those who suspected that the Soviets were already conducting clandestine tests.28 It was at this critical juncture that Kennedy turned to PSAC again: Were the Soviets cheating? In response, the Panofsky panel, established for this purpose, found no evidence one way or the other whether the Soviets had conducted secret tests. Confirming earlier PSAC studies, the Panofsky report did reiterate that the United States could not afford to observe a moratorium if the Soviets conducted testing, either covertly or openly, in the long run, but, at least at that point, there was no urgency in resuming nuclear testing: [N]one of the specific weapons tests now discussed appear to be of such urgency from the technical and military point of view that a reasonable delay in reaching a formal decision on the resumption of nuclear testing would be critical. Therefore, any decisions in the near future concerning the resumption of nuclear testing can be governed by non-technical considerations.29

Here, as PSAC did so many times during the Eisenhower years, the Panofsky panel did not refrain from making military judgments, on the grounds that it was their obligation to explain the military significance of their technical deliberations. Their critics, however, saw it as overreaching their expertise. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, were vehemently opposed to the report’s conclusions, arguing that the fact that the United States had stopped testing without assurance that the Soviets had done the same since October 1958 “makes the U.S. resumption of testing a matter of great urgency.” The Panofsky report, however, met with general agreement from AEC chairman Glenn Seaborg, a fact Kennedy used to counter the objections of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.30 The report enabled Kennedy not only to resist pressures for resuming tests, but actually to reopen the Geneva conference on test ban in August 1961.31 He clearly valued such science advice: If you aren’t fully briefed in this area, you have vague fears—that a month will make a difference, that testing would give the Soviet Union a major strategic advantage, that testing might give us great new weapons. But in fact the advantages we would gain from a resumption of testing would be relatively marginal and sophisticated.32

Everything changed, however, when the Soviets openly resumed testing, in the atmosphere, on September 1, 1961. After the third Soviet test, Kennedy ordered,

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on September 5, the AEC to resume underground tests.33 In a letter to the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, Kennedy explained that he decided to resume testing to counter the Soviet “threats and terror” and to avoid the “gravest danger” of seeming less determined than Khrushchev.34 Given the Panofsky report’s warning about the risk of allowing unilateral Soviet testing, Wiesner acquiesced to the decision to resume underground tests.35 Wiesner tried, however, to hold the line on atmospheric tests that were demanded by Edward Teller to speed up the test series and to perfect warheads for ABMs. Citing the Panofsky report, Wiesner argued that atmospheric testing would raise the “political problems” of fallout unnecessarily, especially when there was “not any particular technical pressure” for it yet.36 To make sure that Kennedy got a balanced view of both the pros and cons on the issue, he arranged for the president to meet with both Teller and Bethe in late November. Whereas Teller pushed atmospheric tests to offset Soviet gains, Bethe questioned the military need for such tests.37 In his own advice to Kennedy, Wiesner echoed Bethe’s argument: [W]hile these tests would certainly contribute to our military strength, they are not critical or even very important to our overall military posture. . . . I believe, therefore, that you have the flexibility to make whatever decision on this matter best supports your broader foreign policy and national security objectives.38

Reflecting the profound infl uence Eisenhower had on him, Wiesner argued that the key issue was not nuclear supremacy but sufficiency. What mattered was not whether the United States was “equivalent to the Soviet Union in every aspect of nuclear weapon technology,” as he told his colleagues in the Committee of Principals, but whether the United States was “missing any of the things that it should have for its security.”39 To him, true security depended as much on technological restraints as on its exploitation. To a certain extent, Kennedy shared Wiesner’s argument for restraint: whenever pressed by the military to expand the nuclear weapons program, he would ask the question—“How much was the yield of that bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima?”40 However, by late 1961 both knew that they were fighting a losing battle against the pressure to resume atmospheric tests. What mattered was not only the rational calculation of American strength, but also, as Kennedy’s letter to Macmillan indicated, the psychological effects of any strategic move. The news worsened in early 1962. An evaluation of the Soviet tests by an Air Force panel under Hans Bethe led PSAC to conclude that the Soviets might have caught up with or even surpassed the United States in several aspects of thermonuclear weapons designs.41 Disappointed by the Soviet intransigency, Bethe actually signed what Bundy called “a Teller-dominated report” to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that not only favored massive testing, including some atmospheric tests, but also opposed the pursuit of a nuclear test ban for the time being.42 For Bethe, this was, like his decision to join the H-bomb project after the outbreak of the Korean War, a “logical” decision that helped him to maintain his “insider” status and allowed him to influence the future course of action. Yet, as he later

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acknowledged, “sometimes I wish I were more consistent an idealist.”43 In a way, the development also confirmed the prediction by Bethe and other PSAC members in the 1950s that continued testing would result in nuclear parity. As a consolation, Bethe saw some benefits in renewed testing in that both sides, but especially the Soviets, could now make their warheads smaller and less vulnerable, which would help to stabilize the nuclear arms race.44 In fact, by September 1962, he did not even see any point in pursuing a test ban; the focus of arms control should shift to the control of delivery vehicles.45 As a result of this development, the momentum toward the resumption of American atmospheric tests mounted, despite continued opposition from Wiesner and PSAC. By the end of 1961, Bundy, who had earlier sided with Wiesner, reluctantly moved to advocating atmospheric tests “because I think the net military advantage is real.”46 Kennedy held out for several more weeks before giving in to the pressure to resume tests in the air. By the end of February 1962, he wrote Macmillan that his senior advisers “have unanimously recommended” atmospheric testing. Citing the danger of people losing faith in American “will” and “wisdom,” Kennedy publicly announced on March 2 the resumption of atmospheric testing, simultaneously making another push for the test ban.47 Throughout this period, Wiesner and PSAC continued their low-profile work on a test ban, especially on seismic detection, but their efforts proved only peripheral in the final achievement of the limited test ban treaty between the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union in the summer of 1963 that prohibited nuclear testing in the atmosphere, underwater, and in outer space (but not underground).48 Ironically, it was the U.S.–Soviet clash over the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 that brought the world to the brink of a nuclear war before a compromise defused it and served to expedite the test ban process.49 “Perhaps now, as we step back from danger,” Kennedy wrote Khrushchev in regard to disarmament and a test ban, “we can together make real progress in this vital field.”50 Both Kennedy and Khrushchev also hoped that the test ban would help solve their respective China problems. Kennedy saw the ban as the last resort, other than the use of force, in preventing the imminent Chinese nuclear test. He thus sought to convince the Soviets to use their leverage to induce China to sign the treaty and abandon its nuclear dream. However, after several years of tense relations, during which China had denounced Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence with the West as a copout to the capitalists, Khrushchev had little leverage with China. Harriman believed that Khrushchev actually sought to use the international success of the test ban to further isolate China in the world.51 At one point, he instructed U.S. negotiator W. Averell Harriman to “try to elicit Khrushchev’s view of means of limiting or preventing Chinese nuclear development and his willingness either to take Soviet action or to accept U.S. action aimed in this direction.”52 Kennedy apparently was considering a joint military “surgical” strike against the Chinese nuclear test site, but it never materialized.53 To PSAC, the achievement of the limited test ban confirmed its conviction that arms control would follow political solutions, not from any technical breakthrough.54 Although disappointed by the retreat from a comprehensive ban,

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PSAC supported the limited treaty for its promise both to eliminate radioactive fallout and to reduce the danger of nuclear proliferation. Wiesner and PSAC remobilized current and past members of the committee for the expected tough fight to have the treaty ratified in the Senate.55 Edward Teller, the one-man antiPSAC who had opposed just about every piece of PSAC’s advice on national security and arms control in the past, emerged once again as its most formidable opponent. To the media and in Congress, he denounced the treaty as an obstacle to the development of an ABM system.56 The philosophical contrast between PSAC and Teller could not be sharper, observed Meg Greenfield, a veteran reporter in Washington: P-SAC, for example, has a reputation for scientific rashness where the test ban is concerned and for scientific skepticism about proposed military weapons systems. Among Defense Department scientists, quite naturally, it has been the other way around. . . . Teller . . . has been particularly adept at imagining weapons that the United States could not develop under the terms of a test-ban treaty. Bethe, on the other hand, has generally responded to such imaginings with imaginings of his own—“enemy countermeasures which would reduce their military worth to zero.”57

Another observer, Freeman Dyson, a physicist who had earlier opposed the test ban but now actually worked in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) to achieve it, likewise saw technological skepticism as the defining characteristic of PSAC’s advice on test ban and defense policy in general: “The members of PSAC have developed a deep commitment to the policy of military restraint, of deploying new weapons systems only when a military need exists and not just for the sake of technological novelty.” “Their commitment to this goal has served their country well,” he added, “and has borne fruit in many other wise decisions besides the decision to negotiate the test-ban treaty.”58 To counter Teller, who enjoyed considerable infl uence both with the public and in Congress, Kennedy, Wiesner, and PSAC had to marshal all their political and scientific capital. At a press conference on August 20, 1963, Kennedy was asked about Teller’s objection to the test ban that it would weaken American defense. Kennedy responded by citing the views of his own scientists: I recognize Dr. Teller has made it clear that he is opposed to it. He opposed it all last week and this week. Now there are a good many other scientists with comparable experience—we have a Scientific Advisory Committee to the President, we have other scientists who work in nuclear matters, we have Nobel prize winners and others, we have members of the military and others—who think that the test ban is a source of strength to us.59

It was, among other things, a reflection of the reality that in the age of dueling specialists, the expertise and competence of scientists often mattered to a policymaker less for what they could produce technologically, but more for their symbolic effectiveness in helping fend off rival experts.

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To back the president’s claims, the White House released a report by PSAC that gave “strong support” to the treaty. In it PSAC vigorously disputed Teller’s claim that the treaty would hamper the development of an ABM system by pointing out that the bottleneck in missile defense was “non-nuclear in nature.” American nuclear strength made it possible to accept the treaty “with confidence in our continuing security.” The same technological restrictions that Teller complained about applied to other nations as well. “In fact,” PSAC believed, “more extensive limitations under a comprehensive treaty with adequate safeguards could provide even greater confidence in our continuing welfare and security.”60 George Kistiakowsky and Herbert York reinforced PSAC’s argument in their testimony in the Senate before its Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Senator J. William Fulbright. Kennedy regarded Kistiakowsky’s appearance as especially important because the chemist was, as he pointed out to Fulbright, “Eisenhower’s fellow.”61 Meanwhile, I. I. Rabi, who remained a consultant at large to PSAC, organized a campaign of American Nobel prize winners in support of the treaty at the suggestion of Seaborg and Wiesner.62 The unprecedented initiative met with enthusiastic responses and Rabi soon was able to send a statement of endorsement, with a list of thirty-five signers, to Senator Fulbright on the day that Teller testified against the treaty. The laureates endorsed the treaty as “a significant if minimal first step” in arms control, “thereby enhancing the security of the United States—and world peace.” The signature list, which was soon expanded to forty, included, besides Rabi, a number of other past and current PSAC members: John Bardeen, George Beadle, Edward Purcell, and Seaborg, who also testified in favor of the treaty in the Senate in his official position as AEC chairman.63 As Polykarp Kusch, professor of physics at Columbia who helped Rabi organize the campaign, told Tsung-Dao Lee, his Chinese American colleague and winner of the physics prize in 1957, “a number of individuals who ‘never sign anything’ have signed this statement.” Lee, who had just become a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1963, gave his approval.64 The Nobel endorsement received wide publicity: The New York Times headlined “Teller Opposed Test Ban Treaty but 35 Nobel Laureates Ask Senate to Ratify Accord.”65 Kennedy promptly wrote Rabi to thank him for his “hard work,” commenting especially on his good timing.66 Meanwhile, Hans Bethe declared that he was “unequivocally in support” of the treaty.67 The Senate ratified the limited test ban treaty on September 23, 1963, making it the first major nuclear arms control agreement in the Cold War. As one of its most important midwives, PSAC took just pride and solace in the achievement of the test ban.68 As PSAC scientists gradually realized, the test ban was ultimately a political problem and their technical investigations could make only limited contributions to resolving the gaps both within the U.S. government and between the superpowers. Yet, both their advocacy and their technical evaluations did play an important role in countering the arguments from test ban opponents such as Teller with vested interest in continued tests, thus ensuring a balanced debate and lending support to Eisenhower and Kennedy in their pursuit of the test ban. As indicated by Kennedy’s comment on “vague fears,” PSAC studies helped

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counteract the menacing uncertainties that a scientist like Teller could induce in the minds of policymakers, thus playing a stabilizing role in the Cold War in a way similar to that of the reconnaissance satellites. One might even argue that PSAC scientists’ advocacy for restraint in dealing with nuclear weapons indirectly infl uenced Kennedy’s action during the Cuban Missile Crisis and paved the way for the test ban and the general relaxation of superpower relations in its wake. Thus, the test ban marked a step in stemming the tide of the nuclear arms race and demonstrated the possibility to limit, however imperfectly, the nuclear technological momentum. Speaking for many of his former PSAC colleagues, York testified in the Senate that the treaty represented a step in the right direction, because it sought solutions to the nuclear arms race through political negotiations, not scientific or technological fixes. The latter had brought more military power but, paradoxically, less security for either side of the Cold War.69 The treaty not only put a partial brake on the development of nuclear weapons, but also stopped an entire class of nuclear technology: the so-called peaceful nuclear explosions that had been promoted by advocates such as Teller as a way to excavate canals, harbors, or mine minerals. As the American president who first proposed “Atoms for Peace” to the world, Eisenhower, for one, was concerned about this implication of the treaty when first briefed by the Kennedy administration on the matter.70 However, in public Eisenhower supported the treaty as a way to bring about “better relations between the Cold War opponents.”71 Ironically, the treaty represented the last time PSAC, as an institution, was able to exert significant infl uence in arms control. The natural resistance of bureaucracies against interference by outsiders led to increasing isolation of PSAC and the science adviser himself in arms control policy. Perhaps PSAC scientists’ education efforts had been too effective—arms control was primarily a political problem that could not be solved by technological fixes—and worked themselves out of a job. Even if there was need for technical understanding of certain issues, it was felt that expertise in the agencies, including the DOD and ACDA, was adequate in this regard. PSAC was not satisfied with the conservatism of ACDA and believed that an independent, technically competent group at the presidential level was still vital to making sound arms control policy, but its days as almost the only technically competent advocates of arms control at the top of the government faded with the limited test ban treaty.

Science Policy There was another reason that PSAC scientists felt bittersweet about the test ban. They welcomed the relaxation in Cold War relations it helped to bring about, but they were concerned that such a development might weaken their argument of science for national security and prestige. To be sure, the Sputnik shock had ensured that the buildup in federal funding of science would continue and actually accelerate during the early Kennedy years, and the vast expansion of the space program exerted an especially powerful impact on American science policy. Ironically, the specter of aerospace unemployment that had helped convince Kennedy to launch

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the manned lunar project now turned into the opposite problem of technical manpower shortage. The Apollo decision was expected to stimulate competition for talent not only in aerospace, but in other technical fields as well. PSAC capitalized on the problem to push for the implementation of its Seaborg report in terms of increased federal support for basic research and graduate education in universities. During a special meeting with Kennedy on technical manpower in November 1961, Kistiakowsky, who remained a PSAC member, spoke on behalf of the committee on the shrinking share of manpower training in the rocketing federal R&D funds.72 Kennedy was sympathetic to his science advisers’ concern. At the beginning of his term, he took several modest steps to increase graduate fellowships and augment indirect cost allowances for universities in accordance with the Seaborg report.73 These measures dovetailed with his effort to move Congress toward a general policy of federal aid to education and higher education. In early 1962, he seized on an alarming NSF report on Soviet science education to publicize the need for action by Congress. Shortly after his special meeting with PSAC, Kennedy had asked the committee to conduct, together with the FCST and the NAS, studies and recommendations on manpower.74 A PSAC panel under Edwin Gilliland of MIT then reaffirmed the Seaborg report and Kistiakowsky’s plea by recommending an expansion in federal support for academic science, which received the FCST’s endorsement. Declaring that “well-trained minds are among this Nation’s most precious assets,” Kennedy then ordered new legislative and budget proposals to put the report’s recommendations into effect.75 Such evident “lobbying” by PSAC on behalf of university science no doubt contributed to the making of the golden age in science support in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Federal support for basic research at universities leaped from $127 million in 1958 to $564 million in 1964, effecting an annual increase of between 20 percent and 40 percent.76 The American largess even spread overseas, as federal agencies, predominantly the three military services, dispersed large amounts of research funds to scientists in Europe, Japan, and other parts of the world.77 Within the government, in-house scientists and engineers received higher salaries as a result of PSAC and FCST advocacy and the so-called Bell report on government contracting for R&D.78 At PSAC’s instigation, oceanography, atmospheric sciences, materials research, and high-energy physics, the four national programs under FCST coordination, received increased funding.79 In the last field, for example, the expansionist thrust continued not only with the final approval of the $100 million Stanford accelerator in 1961, but also with the plan for a machine several times as expensive, the 200 Bev proton cyclotron.80 The largest share of federal funds for research and development continued to come from the DOD and NASA, followed by the AEC and HEW. By 1963, as Wiesner reported to Kennedy, 320,000 out of the 500,000 (64 percent) American scientists and engineers who engaged in R&D received federal funding. He estimated that about half of the 70,000 new scientists and engineers each year would go to work for NASA. “You asked what the new people would be doing if the NASA

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program did not exist,” Wiesner wrote, “one can only guess.” He then added a warning: “If the Federal programs were to taper off for several years, there would undoubtedly be unemployment in the technical fields.”81 In the newly hospitable political environment, scientists began to reassess their role in politics and society. Some called for scientists to be not only “on tap,” but also “on top” when necessary. Technocracy and “technological fix” were promoted in various guises. C. P. Snow, a prominent British physicist turned science administrator and novelist, became infl uential in the United States with his writings on the widening gap between the “Two Cultures”—the sciences and the humanities. In rhetoric similar to that often deployed by Rabi, Snow urged scientists to participate and perhaps guide public policymaking with their unique forward-looking capacity. In contrast to the New York Times columnist who had questioned, in 1945, scientists’ ability to “map national policy or read the future,” Snow declared in the early 1960s that “naturally they had the future in their bones.”82 Snow and other commentators also constantly reminded the public that they lived in a nuclear age, missile age, space age, scientific age, scientific revolution, or scientific society.83 Yet, behind the appearance of wealth and prestige, serious problems emerged to trouble American science in the early 1960s, especially after the sense of Sputnikinduced urgency passed with the signing of the limited test ban treaty. Congress began to reassert itself in science policy, threatening to politicize American science in the eyes of veteran PSAC members.84 The establishment of the OST in 1962 had met some needs on Capitol Hill, but powerful voices there continued to demand accountability and practical results from science funds. The turning point came in 1963, when the House of Representatives slashed the NSF budget and sharply questioned the value of basic research and the imbalances in the geographical distribution of research funds.85 Shortly thereafter, the House created a Select Committee on Government Research to evaluate federal R&D efforts.86 As historian Paul Forman has pointed out, even as Kennedy touted “the wholehearted understanding today of the importance of pure science” in his 1963 speech at the NAS, “the tide was beginning to turn.”87 Testifying before Congress in late 1963, Wiesner offered his perception of the change of order in American science policy. He pointed out that the relaxation of the Cold War led to a profound shift of national consensus on the rationale of public support of science from national security to national well-being, which included national economy and health. In a sense, the changing public mood toward science also reflected a tendency of American society to meet crises—World War II, the Cold War, and Sputnik—with crash programs of technological fixes, such as the atomic bomb, the H-bomb, and the Apollo projects, and to become complacent in calmer times.88 Compounding the external pressure, disciplinary rivalry also intensified within the scientific community, as the inevitable leveling-off of federal funds for science loomed. PSAC saw undesirable side effects even in those programs that received its initial blessing, such as oceanography and NASA’s massive graduate fellowship programs.89 The disproportionate share of Big Science such as high-energy physics

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in funds and manpower also came under attack, even inside PSAC in the writings of Alvin Weinberg.90 The House–NSF confrontation in 1963 prompted calls for scientists to set priority in science before Congress did it for them.91 PSAC foresaw the storm, but it appeared helpless as the clouds gathered.92 A panel on support of research under Harvey Brooks of Harvard labored diligently for months on the questions of the proper level of funding for basic research, longterm planning in science policy, and mechanism for its accomplishment. The discussions, mostly within PSAC but also with BOB, FCST, and science administrators in federal agencies, did much to clarify the issues, but resulted in no far-reaching reforms. The decentralized congressional committee system presented an especially tough obstacle to fundamental changes. Despite the creation of the OST, the pluralistic structure of American science policy persisted. An effective means for rationalizing and planning public support of science remained elusive.93 Whereas most thoughtful observers recognized the congressional resurgence in science policy as inevitable and vital for the long-term health of American science, many viewed greater governmental control of science with alarm and some blamed it on the ineffective science advisory system. By the end of the Kennedy presidency, it was clear that the golden age of science that PSAC had helped create was under mounting duress.

Conclusion When Wiesner announced, in early November 1963, his decision to leave his White House post to return to MIT in early 1964, a stock-taking of American science and government took place. Like Eisenhower, Kennedy truly appreciated the service of his science advisers, despite their role, often, as the loyal opposition. Many of the policies they advocated indeed reflected the consensus they had formed under the profound infl uence of Eisenhower: On national security, they emphasized the sufficiency, not superiority, of nuclear weapons; they preferred arms control to arms buildup; and they were skeptical of a massive civil defense program. On space, they argued for a scientific, substantive, and unmanned program, and opposed a manned program geared toward political and propaganda advantages. For these stands, they were attacked by their critics, especially in the military, as an “antinuclear wrecking crew” and “technipols.”94 Even Kennedy, as Wiesner himself acknowledged later, “often decided to disregard the PSAC’s favored position . . . if, in his judgment, a stand was not politically viable.”95 This happened in the decisions to resume nuclear testing and to launch the crash Apollo program. Yet, as a testimony of their close relationship and the president’s growing dependence on independent technological evaluations, these incidents, although far-reaching in their long-term impact, did not make either Kennedy or Wiesner question the value of continuing science advising. As Wiesner later recalled, Kennedy actually repeatedly defended his science adviser against the increasing attacks on him and PSAC.96 Kennedy once told a reporter that the most important thing that Wiesner did for him was to keep the government from going all one way.97 In a letter to a friend Kennedy called Wiesner “a good friend and trusted adviser . . .

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one of those rare individuals who can work effectively to relate the complexities and the opportunities of science to the needs of a nation, to its culture, its security, its infl uence and its humanity.”98 The question of possible dual allegiance to science and the government continued to plague the science advisers under Kennedy. Whereas Wiesner’s supporters congratulated him and PSAC for helping achieve the limited test ban, establishing the OST, and broadening science advice into the environment and other new frontiers, his critics expressed dissatisfaction with the centralization in science policy and urged changes in the mode of presidential science advising. In a biting editorial, Philip Abelson, editor of Science, the official journal of the AAAS, lamented Wiesner’s concentration of power and the increased secrecy in PSAC’s operations under his chairmanship. Instead, Abelson suggested the appointment of a separate head for OST to open up the science policymaking process.99 Don K. Price, a political scientist at Harvard and a member of the AAAS board, however, disagreed with Abelson and regarded his idea as harmful to the unity in the Executive Office of the President.100 Wiesner’s defense that his job was not to represent science but to work for the president might have been valid in theory, but in practice, as we have seen in the case of the debates over a DST or the OST, the function of the science advisers as spokesmen for science was often explicitly or implicitly acknowledged.101 Yes, both Wiesner and Kistiakowsky before him had worked to make the NAS the proper representative of science in government. In fact, it was for exactly such a purpose that, in 1963, Kistiakowsky, as vice president of the academy, organized the Committee on Science and Public Policy (COSPUP) in the Academy. Popularly known as “Kisty’s Committee,” COSPUP did become in the 1960s an infl uential venue for raising scientists’ voice in science policy.102 As one of its first projects, in 1963 the committee undertook a study of federal grant policy and its effects on the health of American science; under Kistiakowsky’s personal push, it also produced an infl uential report urging the United States to do more on birth control internationally.103 However, the rising prominence of the NAS did not solve the problem of duality for the science adviser and PSAC as they were drawn time and again into advocating federal support for science within the White House, even though their role in science policy was clearly no longer a dominant one. For his part, Kennedy also learned to appreciate the complexity of science, technology, and public policy. His second address to the NAS, on the occasion of its one hundredth anniversary in October 1963, sounded a much more sober tone about the prospect of “disinterested scientists” solving problems for policymakers than his first one in 1961. Commenting on the divisive debate over the limited test ban, Kennedy now acknowledged that: . . . scientists do not always unite themselves in their recommendations to the makers of policy. This is only partly because of scientific disagreements. It is even more because the big issues so often go beyond the possibilities of exact scientific determination. I know few significant questions of public policy

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which can safely be confided to computers. In the end, the hard decisions inescapably involve imponderables of intuition, prudence, and judgment.104

PSAC veterans could draw satisfaction that their “education” of the president about the limits of technological solutions of complex social and political problems finally reached fruition. Sadly, it came less than a month before the tragedy in Dallas took away a president who proved as receptive to their technological skepticism as did his predecessor, even if he did not always follow their specific advice. Although the entire Kennedy presidency lasted less than three years, it witnessed profound changes in the presidential science advisory system and in the partnership between American science and government. The emergence of other forces contended for PSAC’s central importance in arms control and space policy. In science policy, the establishment of the OST both strengthened and diff used the science advisers’ role as they expanded their limited resources to a widening purview. Most important, the reduction of the Cold War tension and the receding of the Sputnik crisis meant increasing demands, from Congress and elsewhere, for American science to shift its focus from national security to civilian applications. As science became a major instrument of public policy and scientists became part of the establishment, politics increasingly invaded science policymaking and reshaped PSAC and its environment.

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“Scientists for Johnson,” 1964

Like the rest of the country, PSAC scientists were shocked and saddened by Kennedy’s assassination. Despite their disagreements over a number of policies, PSAC members appreciated what Wiesner called Kennedy’s “spirit and charm and intelligence” as well as his support of science, education, and arms control.1 Mixed with a genuine sense of grief was, on the part of PSAC members, a worry over the continuity of science in Johnson’s White House. Feeling “loss and waste and danger,” Richard Garwin, for example, wrote Wiesner both to console him and to express his concern over the transition: Brilliant, hard working, and effective as he [Kennedy] was, it was your tutelage in matters technological, military, and scientific, which made him very outstanding in these fields. . . . Now we have a new President, and the educational process must begin again. Very likely President Johnson is not aware of the matters in which his Special Assistant for Science and Technology can aid him, nor of the recent accomplishments of the President’s Science Advisory Committee.2

Garwin suggested that Wiesner brief Johnson on the activities of PSAC’s panels, especially in civil defense, AICBM, and education, so the president could go to PSAC if he needed help. What Garwin and other PSAC scientists sensed was that with the coming of the Johnson presidency, the transformation in the landscape of American science and technology policy that had started in the Kennedy years would be accelerated. They could not yet quite foresee exactly the directions and shapes of these changes, but they knew that the new ecology of science advising would depend on the interplay of the personalities of the new president and his science advisers as well as the broader developments in American science and society. What place would science and technology occupy in the new president’s conception of what the federal government could, and could not, do? Would he and his science advisers find common understanding on both the potentials and limits of science and technology in solving growing problems facing the nation in the mid-1960s? As the presidential transition took place in the White House, American scientists watched the unfolding events with concern for both science in policy and policy for science.

Hornig, PSAC, and LBJ For scientists, what compounded the problem of the transition was not only that a new occupant abruptly moved into the White House, but also that Wiesner himself was leaving. Kennedy had announced Donald Hornig as Wiesner’s successor, but the paperwork had not been completed.3 Hornig was in a dilemma, as he 236

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Figure 14.1 President Johnson (far right) meeting with science adviser Donald Hornig (center) and his predecessor Jerome Wiesner. Courtesy of the National Archives.

wrote Johnson three days after Dallas: “I cannot tender you my resignation from offices which I do not yet hold, but I want to make clear that I am entirely at your service.”4 He needed to make plans for his leave from Princeton and for his family (his wife Lilli was also a chemist), but days passed without a word from the White House. Wiesner and Bundy, who stayed on as Johnson’s national security adviser, intervened on Hornig’s behalf. Wiesner wrote Johnson that Kennedy had picked Hornig for his background in military technology, competence in space policy, PSAC membership, distinction as a chemist, and reputation as an experienced administrator.5 Bundy affirmed Hornig’s qualifications, but, sensitive to Johnson’s anti-elitist sentiment, he presented them not as prerequisites for the job but as an assurance that “the prima donnas of science will be glad to work with and for him.” Also mindful of past LBJ–PSAC clashes on space, Bundy told Johnson that Hornig “has shown himself sensible and effective” on that subject. Finally, Bundy subtly lowered the status of PSAC when he referred to PSAC’s role as assisting the science adviser, not the president.6 Acting quickly now, LBJ quietly secured congressional support for Hornig before passing the word to Wiesner that he intended to go ahead with the appointment7 (see Figure 14.1). The Wiesner–Hornig turnover, like the Killian–Kistiakowsky transition, brought a different personality to the position of the science adviser. Compared with Wiesner’s passionate political activism, Hornig was soft-spoken and mildmannered, with an easy smile, but rarely one seeking the limelight. Not a tough operative in the Washington political jungle, he nevertheless brought with him a

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quiet strength that would help him carry out what he perceived to be his duties to both the government and to the scientific community. During World War II, he had worked on the trigger mechanism for the plutonium bomb at Los Alamos as a member of Kistiakowsky’s team. On the stormy eve of the Trinity test, Hornig was one of the last people to “sit on” the bomb stoically up in the tower to allay Oppenheimer’s fear about sabotage. “You know, either you do get hit by lightening or you don’t and either way you won’t know what happens.”8 Even though he was picked by Kennedy largely because of his expertise in space, Hornig’s true passion in policy was international scientific exchange and cooperation, especially with East Asia. His interest in space, as he wrote Wiesner in 1962, was “purely accidental and casual.”9 It started in 1951when he chaired a distinguished group of scientists to review the Navy’s infrared research activities, which, among its accomplishments, intervened with the naval leadership to save the Sidewinder missile project from a planned shutdown.10 The Sidewinder turned out to be one of the most prized weapon systems during the Cold War, and the Hornig committee’s hitherto hidden role in its development illustrated the key function of roving science advisers in American military technology policy during the Cold War.11 As a result of this study, Hornig’s reputation as an expert on missiles rose within the circle of military technology. Following Sputnik in 1957, Hornig, now at Princeton, resumed travels to Washington, first as a member of the Space Science Board of the NAS and then as a member of PSAC’s space panel. He became a full member of the committee in 1960. By the time of his appointment with Johnson, Hornig had become a veteran in the science advisory scene, although he remained little known to the public. The mismatch between the populist Johnson and his science advisers from the Ivy League has been much written about and had to do partly with personality and partly with policy. Hornig had met Johnson during the early Kennedy years and was aware of his coolness toward PSAC, especially over its opposition to Apollo.12 Thus, even before taking up his White House post in 1964, Hornig knew that Garwin’s proposed “education” of the new president would not be an easy task. Viewed as a Kennedy holdover, Hornig was also handicapped by a lack of prior personal connections with Johnson that was important in the Johnson White House. He had to learn to adjust to Johnson’s political style. As he later recalled: “I had little feeling for the strong, dominant personality who saw everything in political terms, and President Johnson had little feeling for academicians and scientists, although he always held them in great respect.”13 Also complicating Johnson’s relationship with the scientists was his profound sense of insecurity and resentment of the East Coast elite. “The Kennedy people,” he told his press secretary George Reedy at one point, were “more attractive . . . better dinner partners . . . and they are more exciting than we are socially. . . . Our trouble is, George, we do not have acquaintances [like that]. . . . San Marcos [State Teachers College, Johnson’s alma mater] didn’t produce them.”14 This attitude might partially explain Johnson’s much warmer relationship with Glenn Seaborg, the nuclear chemist who agreed to stay on as AEC chairman, as a self-made man with a humble background from the

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west. Seaborg also appealed to Johnson with his upbeat messages on what science and technology, especially nuclear technology, could do to improve society.15 Secret tapes and documents from the Johnson White House confirmed his unease with Hornig, especially during the early days. For example, on March 13, 1964, in the presence of General Lyman Lemnitzer, Johnson asked an aide to tell Hornig “to quit writing notes” like the one in which he warned that a LBJ decision “involves us in embarrassingly political, ethical, and legal complications.” “[T]ell him that I said that I didn’t want notes and to quit writing notes. When I want his opinion from him, I will ask him for it,” he ordered.16 There is no evidence that Johnson staged the show for the benefit of the visiting military leader, but his harsh tone did not help to shore up the authority of his science adviser or PSAC in the Pentagon. His edict, which implied that Hornig should speak only when spoken to, harkened back to the early days of ODM–SAC under Truman. Even more seriously, Johnson, in appointing Hornig, personally deleted language in the traditional presidential letter that had authorized Hornig’s predecessors to attend meetings of the NSC, to hire staff and consultants, and, perhaps most important, to “have access to all plans, programs, and activities involving science and technology in the Government.”17 Repeatedly his name was omitted, “inadvertently,” in the list of special assistants issued by the White House press secretary.18 Apparently Johnson thought of Hornig more as OST director and less as one of his trusted assistants. To Hornig’s credit he did not follow the example of Oliver Buckley and turn passive. His tenacity helped him persevere during hard times. He carefully navigated the LBJ court and worked behind the scenes, often through Johnson’s other, more infl uential assistants, such as Bundy, Horace Busby, and Joe Califano, and agency heads to get science advice incorporated into government policy. He became, as he later put it, an adviser less to the president than to the presidency, reinforcing a trend that had already been set in place with the establishment of the OST in 1962.

“A Good Augury” Outwardly, however, all seemed well in the beginning between Johnson and the scientists. Moving into the Oval Office, one of the first items on Johnson’s agenda had to do with scientists: would he personally present the AEC’s Fermi Award to J. Robert Oppenheimer in a White House ceremony on December 2, 1963, as Kennedy had apparently planned to do? The award was controversial among conservative members of Congress when it was first announced in April 1963; a public ceremony in the White House, a tradition that Kennedy had started with the 1961 award to Hans Bethe, carried further political risk. Indeed, the Kennedy staff had apparently planned to create an excuse—“there is still a vague possibility that a certain political matter might come up which will call him out of town,” as Bundy told Seaborg—so Kennedy would not have to preside at the ceremony. We will probably never know what Kennedy would have done with that ceremony had he survived Dallas.19 Johnson, however, apparently unaware of these prior political calculations,

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decided to proceed with the award at the White House. Few, of course, were going to question the propriety of him honoring a commitment that the fallen president had made. In his remarks in front of a small crowd that included PSAC members as well as Edward Teller, Johnson praised Oppenheimer’s work on the atomic bomb and his scientific contributions, but made no mention of the H-bomb debate or the security clearance controversy. In his acceptance speech, Oppenheimer did implicitly refer to them when he said that scientists had not always exhibited a “brotherly spirit” of science that Thomas Jefferson had written about. This was partly because, he continued, “we are engaged in this great enterprise of our time, testing whether men can both preserve and enlarge life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and live without war as the great arbiter of history.” Then Oppenheimer added, “I think it just possible, Mr. President, that it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today. That would seem to me a good augury for all our futures.”20 The Fermi ceremony clearly elated PSAC scientists, who had long called for a rehabilitation of Oppenheimer. It also gave them hope that the science–state partnership they helped to build would continue in the Johnson years. Indeed, as an heir of New Deal liberalism, Johnson sought to expand the role of the federal government, including its support of science and education, even beyond those measures Kennedy had taken.21 He did personally rule against the low-rated MURA accelerator, which angered Midwestern politicians and science administrators, but the action pleased many who believed that he made the right choice.22 Shortly afterward, he gave implicit approval to the recommendations of another joint PSAC–GAC panel, this time chaired by Norman Ramsey of Harvard, for the 200 Bev accelerator that would cost $280 million, and an even bigger one with 800 to 1,000 Bev, estimated at $800 million, further down the road. Citing “past experience in applying the results of basic research in other areas,” Hornig had endorsed the Ramsey proposal as being “in national interest.”23 Notably, the rhetoric of a post-Sputnik race for national prestige that was key to his predecessors’ justification for SLAC was missing in Hornig’s and his allies’ case for the new accelerators. The easing in superpower relations and the lack of sensational Soviet progress in this field combined to make Cold War competition a less compelling argument. In contrast, utility began to take on growing importance. Bundy, for example, told Johnson that “High-energy physics is in national interest as fundamental field of science with major long-run practical value.” Neither Hornig nor Bundy, however, elaborated on what practical value they had in mind or how it would come out of the field.24 Of course, international prestige did not disappear from the scene, as Western Europeans increasingly replaced the Soviets as a threat to American dominance. Leon Lederman of Columbia, for example, wrote fellow physicist Gerald Tape, an AEC commissioner, that “[w]e would all enjoy the sight of a strong European science but it is more clearly seen from a vantage point—a bit higher and in front.”25 Finally, after a contentious national site competition in 1966, the 200 Bev accelerator, named the Fermilab, was constructed under the able

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leadership of Robert Wilson.26 Even though there began to be growing disquiet about the domination of Big Science, the approval of the 200 Bev was viewed as a positive sign of LBJ’s commitment to federal support of science.

Scientists and Engineers for Johnson The Fermi Award to Oppenheimer and his continued support of science not only won Johnson goodwill from many scientists, but also benefited him in the presidential campaign of 1964. Under the name Scientists and Engineers for Johnson (SEJ), several scientists associated with PSAC, especially Kistiakowsky and Wiesner, spearheaded an unprecedented large-scale operation to draw American scientists into election politics. To preserve the nonpartisan posture of the science advisory system, current PSAC members in general kept a low profile in the organization.27 With headquarters in Washington staffed by Donald MacArthur, an industrial scientist, and his wife Diane, a former official of the Peace Corps who happened to be a niece of Mrs. Lady Bird Johnson, the operation enjoyed a close coordination with the White House.28 Two famous physicians helped expand the group’s infl uence beyond the scientific community: Benjamin Spock had guided the parenting of the baby boomers and fought against nuclear testing, and Paul Dudley White had served as Eisenhower’s heart doctor in the 1950s.29 The scientists made use of their vast network of professional associations to recruit new members. Soon dozens of local chapters were organized all over the country, attracting more than 100,000 members.30 In contrast, the campaign of LBJ’s Republican rival, Barry Goldwater, struggled to come up with its own Advisory Task Force on Space, Science, and the Atom, which featured Lewis Strauss as chairman and Edward Teller, Willard Libby, and James Doolittle among its members.31 The Johnson camp took full advantage of the scientists’ support. On October 6, Johnson met in the White House with thirty-eight leaders of the SEJ, including several PSAC alumni and members.32 He called the scientists’ endorsement “worth more to me than all the gold in Fort Knox.” Echoing his two predecessors, he paid tribute to the importance of the science advising system: In this age, no President can make the vital decisions facing him without utilizing the best of the nation’s scientific and technical advice. Each day, I rely more and more on your colleague, Dr. Donald Hornig—not only as my Science Adviser but as counselor on many other subjects.33

Speaking of the international nature of science, LBJ did not forget to praise the large number of immigrant scientists both in the room and in the country at large: “We owe a special debt to those who have chosen the United States in search of freedom from persecution for their beliefs.”34 Other high-profile events soon followed, including a well-publicized rally in Washington, DC, featuring a speech by LBJ’s running mate Senator Hubert Humphrey.35 Thirty-three Nobel laureates (including several PSAC members or alumni) reactivated their pro-test-ban network and publicly endorsed the Johnson–Humphrey ticket.36

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In joining the political fray, the scientists were motivated less by any deep devotion to Johnson than by a fear of Goldwater’s ultraconservative positions, especially his fl ippant attitude toward the use of nuclear weapons. Three days before the election, the SEJ, now renamed Scientists and Engineers for Johnson and Humphrey (SEJH) sponsored a thirty-minute television program entitled Sorry, Senator Goldwater . . . The Country Just Can’t Risk It. With Herbert York as moderator, a panel of Kistiakowsky, Wiesner, retired admiral William F. Rayborn, and the Nobel laureate-chemist Harold Urey of University of California at San Diego, lashed out at Goldwater’s education, defense, and nuclear proposals. Spock called on parents to reject Goldwater for his attack on federal support of education. Kistiakowsky denounced the senator’s aggressive foreign policy as “rash and primitive,” deeming him “clearly unqualified” to exercise the power of the presidency. Rayborn refuted Goldwater’s charge of American lag in preparedness, and Urey called the Republican candidate “a blustery, threatening man, who talks often without thinking, shoots from the hip.”37 Above all, panel members focused their firepower on Goldwater’s nuclear policy. Rayborn declared that Goldwater’s advocacy of giving NATO commanders authority to use nuclear weapons would lead to escalating nuclear wars. Wiesner and Spock reminded the viewers that Goldwater had opposed the popular nuclear test ban treaty. “My former boss, President Eisenhower, supported the treaty,” Kistiakowsky added.38 In one of the few explicit evocations of their professional expertise, York and Wiesner criticized Goldwater for talking casually about “small conventional nuclear weapons.” Even the “small” nuclear weapons, they pointed out, had explosive power of 100,000 tons of TNT, “five times as big” as the Hiroshima bomb. Finally, referring to the recent downfall of Khrushchev in the Soviet Union and the first atomic bomb test in China, Kistiakowsky told viewers that it was important to maintain the continuity of American policy in the nuclear age. The program concluded with York’s plea that “if you care about peace, if you care about responsible government, we urge you to vote for President Johnson and Senator Humphrey.”39 Johnson was “impressed and flattered” by the scientists’ support.40 The Johnson advisers knew that “it was the nuclear issue that was killing Goldwater” and that “the best way to hit Barry on the bomb was with the scientists who made the bomb.”41 President and Lady Bird Johnson telegraphed Kistiakowsky and others on the TV panel: We watched your show yesterday and were proud of its impact and your performance. We have heard many favorable comments and both of us feel the program will do much for our cause. Thank you for doing such a good job.42

Johnson personally phoned Spock, promising him that “I hope I prove worthy of your trust.”43 In Albuquerque he called the scientists and engineers “about the best supporters I have . . . they know the facts of life.”44 Why the intensity of the Scientists for Johnson campaign? For many participants, the election represented their initial foray into electoral politics. As

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Urey told an audience in Madison, Wisconsin, it was the first time he “ever wore a campaign button and ever had a bumper sticker on my car.”45 Few doubted that Johnson would win. What was needed, as a statement of the Harvard chemistry faculty put it, was a “resounding” defeat of Goldwater.46 Albert B. Sabin, of the Sabin polio vaccine fame, called on scientists to support Johnson “not because he’s likely to lose without us, but because it is important that we win by the largest possible majority.”47 Ultimately it was the extremism of Goldwater’s nuclear policy that motivated not just the usual cast of characters who had associated with the Oppenheimer–PSAC school of arms control, but even some of their former opponents in the H-bomb debate of 1949–1950, such as Urey, Luis Alvarez, and Kenneth Pitzer to campaign for Johnson. The Scientists for Johnson campaign also gave scientists an opportunity to publicize their views on the limits of technological solutions to the Cold War. Against Teller’s defense of Goldwater’s advocacy for increased military R&D to strengthen national security, York and Wiesner argued, in an October 1964 article in Scientific American, that such reliance on science and technology would be futile and even counterproductive: Both sides in the arms race are thus confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security. It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution. If the great powers continue to look for solutions in the areas of science and technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation. The clearly predictable course of the arms race is a steady open spiral downward into oblivion.48

The limited test ban treaty, they believed, pointed to negotiations as a way out of the dilemma. The logical next step was a comprehensive ban, which would lead the nuclear rivals to build mutual confidence and to move toward eventual disarmament. Even Urey, who had opposed the GAC and pushed for the H-bomb in 1950, now joined York and Wiesner in arguing for political negotiations. “There is no other way. . . . A technical or military solution is not possible,” he now concluded.49 As Marquis Childs, the infl uential columnist, put it, the York–Wiesner analysis meant that “Goldwater’s demand for new weapons systems can only increase the risk of nuclear annihilation.”50 On Election Day, arguments like this helped to give Johnson one of the most decisive election victories in American history. Remarkably, the deepening American involvement in Vietnam received only minimum attention from the Scientists for Johnson operation, even after the Tonkin Gulf resolution in August 1964 foreshadowed a dark future of American involvement. The scientists seemed to have believed Johnson’s promise of pursuing peace.51 The group’s brochure, “The Alternative Is Frightening,” cited Goldwater’s threat to “drop a low-yield atomic bomb on the Chinese supply line in North Viet Nam” as evidence that Goldwater lacked presidential maturity, but there appeared to be little concern over Johnson’s stand.52 In a debate with Edward Teller in Science, Kistiakowsky praised what he called “a bi-partisan foreign policy” that Johnson supported but Goldwater opposed: “maintain a strong military, with complete

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civilian control; resist firmly aggressive acts but avoid escalation into general nuclear war,” citing specifically the successful “resistance against attacks on South Korea, Taiwan, and South Vietnam.”53 Thus, scientists not only largely ignored Vietnam, but in general supported Johnson’s foreign policy, which, in comparison with Goldwater’s casual nuke talks, appeared moderate and mainstream. Indeed, despite their passion for arms control, PSAC scientists, at least in 1964, were still very much part of the liberal consensus on the need to contain Communist expansion in the world.

The Great Society and Beyond Johnson’s landslide victory in November spelled relief among scientists and promised the continuation of the science–government partnership. The prominent, although probably not crucial, role of the Scientists for Johnson movement in the election also materially improved the standing of Hornig and PSAC in the Johnson White House. In the afterglow of the election victory, for example, Busby reported to Hornig this Johnsonian statement at a White House gathering that Hornig had missed: That Dr. Hornig is just a good man. I feel good when I talk with him. I like for him to come in my office because I know I’m going to feel good as soon as we start talking. He is just like a good drink of whisky to me—he makes you feel good all over in a hurry.54

Yet, such eff usive praise could not mask the reality that Hornig and PSAC now had a recipient of advice very different from either of his two immediate predecessors. Unlike Eisenhower, Johnson was a protégé of Franklin D. Roosevelt when a young congressman in the 1930s and a firm believer in the beneficial role of the government. In sharp contrast to Kennedy and most other postwar presidents, Johnson liked to focus on domestic, not international, affairs. Johnson’s heart lay in the ambitious Great Society program, which epitomized his commitment to solving the myriad social woes, such as racism, poverty, and illness, through government intervention and often through science and technology. With such a bend toward the practical, Johnson expected much from science and the scientists. Johnson made clear his wish for a utilitarian and populist turn in science policy during his first meeting with PSAC on July 20, 1964. Thanking members for their service and recalling the Sputnik crisis, Johnson concluded that “the country has made progress in bringing science and national security together, but it could do more to utilize the products of science.” He asked his science advisers to advise him on “how to put science to work on social problems, including urban problems, air pollution, poverty, etc.”55 “Don’t you worry about how to get it done,” he boasted confidently, according to York, who reentered PSAC as its vice chairman at the time. “That’s my job and I’ll take care of it.” He wanted the scientists to help him make life better for “grandma.”56 Speaking of priorities in PSAC’s own work, Johnson mentioned two things that were “foremost” in his mind: education and health. If he had his way, the former school teacher said he would “write a full employ-

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ment act for education” so that every child would have all of the education he could take. Education was a key part of his Great Society, and he asked the committee to help ensure that no person with a scientific capability would be denied education because of race, religion, or economic circumstances. He also wanted the group to take the criticism of geographical imbalance in science funding seriously and to help build up academic strength beyond the East and West Coasts.57 Most PSAC members reacted to Johnson’s vision of science serving a Great Society with sympathy and enthusiasm. Partly as a result of Johnson’s push for diversity and partly due to its own initiative, PSAC membership continued the trend to diversify beyond Cambridge, physical sciences, and national security. As a New York caucus of Bronk, Garwin, and Rabi on November 5, 1964 indicated, PSAC recognized the increasing importance of civilian technology: Characteristics desirable in new members seem to be activism, social conscience, a broad view, and unquestioned prominence in science and in judgments involving science. Consideration was also given to the need for engineering representation both regarding military affairs and on the civilian and governmental side.58

In 1966, PSAC decided to add “behavioral scientist” as a new category of membership to its three traditional ones (scientific generalists, industry, and life sciences and medicine), and a year later, filled it with the economist and cognitive psychologist Herbert Simon.59 Meanwhile a generational shift in membership brought in new blood, from the Jason and from some of the young scientists active in the Scientists for Johnson campaign in 1964.60 The glaring lack of women and minority scientists in PSAC, however, continued during the Johnson years. It was puzzling because Johnson had made a strong commitment to bring both women and African Americans into prominent positions in the government as part of his civil rights agenda. As a result and in contrast to the all-male cast of PSAC, the AEC under Seaborg recruited a woman, Mary “Polly” Bunting, biologist and president of Radcliff College, and an African American, Samuel Nabrit, president of Texas Southern University, as commissioners.61 By 1966, the AEC’s GAC also welcomed its first female member, Jane Hall, from Los Alamos.62 The National Science Board, which had from its beginning in 1950 at least one woman member, boasted three in the mid-1960s.63 The only other major laggard in this regard under Johnson was the Defense Science Board, which did not admit either a woman or minority scientist until 1976.64 Why was it so hard for women to crack into the old-boy network of PSAC? The usual explanation was that PSAC scientists served as advisers to the president, which required natural cohesion, technical elitism, and camaraderie, and not as representatives of the scientific community artificially selected by outsiders. In practice, however, many people, both inside and outside the committee, including the BOB, recognized that PSAC had acquired the symbolic value as scientific spokesmen. Even if one concedes the primacy of PSAC members serving the president’s needs, was not a better representation of women and minorities in sci-

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ence policy one of Johnson’s desires? The absence of women in the PSAC world was likely the result of a combination of institutional inertia and weakness of push from the outside, including, curiously, President Johnson himself. Despite its growing diversification, the committee was still dominated by physical scientists, where the percentage of prominent women was fewer than in other fields. Some individuals infl uential in PSAC might have held prejudice against women scientists—the otherwise progressive I. I. Rabi, for example, was known to feel that women were not temperamentally suited for creative work in physics—but many others had actively promoted the cause of women in science. In fact, Hornig was married to a fellow chemist and Kistiakowsky passed his passion for science to his daughter Vera, who later became a professional physicist in her own right and started the national organization Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) in the 1960s.65 Although not making much progress in—or even recognizing the need for— the promotion of women and minorities in science advising and policymaking, most PSAC scientists did welcome the new marching orders to make science serve social and economic goals. Under Hornig, PSAC and the OST did launch numerous investigations into ways to improve education, health, earthquake prediction, housing, water research and management, desalting seawater, transportation, and energy supplies.66 Gradually these tasks took on the characters of operational programs and led to a growth of the OST’s role in coordinating them. As a result, the OST staff gained increased infl uence and importance, whereas that of PSAC and the FCST declined by comparison.67 In all these new endeavors, PSAC scientists and the OST staff recognized that their hard-won lessons about the limits of technological solutions applied not only to military programs, but to the expanding area of civilian technology as well. In other words, although they identified with Johnson’s goal of using technology to achieve the Great Society, they were skeptical about the widespread optimism in technological solutions, even among many of their fellow scientists. After the Alaskan earthquake of 1964, for example, a PSAC panel recommended a $137 million research program on earthquake prediction. The full PSAC committee, however, believed that the panel “oversells” the feasibility of prediction at that point. One member, geophysicist Gordon MacDonald, told his colleagues that “[t]he program is predicated on an extraordinarily limited understanding of earthquakes,” and that the chance of setting up a prediction system in ten years was “nil.”68 In the end, PSAC recommended instead the more realistic goal of research on construction techniques that would make buildings earthquake safe.69 PSAC’s involvement in oceanography policy was another example of its measured evaluation of a major scientific and technological initiative of the Great Society. In 1966, against the background of a public and congressional push for marine development—“the poor man’s space program”—a PSAC panel produced a comprehensive report on Effective Use of the Sea.70 A landmark in the utilization and the protection of the ocean environment, it led, in part, to the eventual establishment of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.71 The practical gains from oceanography, it argued, could be equal to, if not greater

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than, that from space. In view of “man’s ability to modify and alter marine environments,” the PSAC panel also made far-reaching recommendations on the protection of the ocean, including the establishment of “a system of marine wilderness reserves.” With its message of marine conservation, the report would have warmed the heart of Rachel Carson, author of both Silent Spring and The Sea around Us. The board of directors of the Sierra Club immediately endorsed the report. Compared with other marine advocates, however, the PSAC report sought to reach a balance between enthusiasm and restraint. PSAC recommended, for example, against the construction of “deep-ocean airplanes” as not technically feasible in the near future.72 PSAC was also skeptical of the mushrooming proposals of using nuclear energy technologies for civilian purposes that were coming from the AEC. They often evaluated them negatively not for lack of technical feasibility, but for undesirable economic or policy implications. Hornig, for example, tried to curb enthusiasm on an overly ambitious U.S. program to use nuclear power to desalt sea water both at home and as a technological solution—“water for peace”—to the confl ict in the Middle East.73 In January 1965, Herbert York questioned the digging of a new canal across Panama using nuclear explosives that had been promoted by Edward Teller as part of the AEC’s Plowshare program to turn the nuclear sword to peaceful uses. Although technically possible, York believed that the project was “politically unwise” because it might encourage the proliferation of nuclear weapons and would not be cost-effective.74 The statement, made on NBC’s Sunday Show, however, cost York a position on the Panama Canal Commission.75 Technological dissent, however mild, had its price. By contrast, a speech by Seaborg on the future technological wonders for housewives, including robots and living-in ape assistants, delivered to the Women’s National Democratic Club, won widespread publicity and admiration from both President and Lady Bird Johnson. “Why can’t you make a speech like that,” she complained to her husband. The next day, at a budget meeting, LBJ not only granted Seaborg all three projects that BOB wanted to cut, but also asked him to prepare speeches “like that” for him to deliver.76 In strategic military technology policy, Hornig and PSAC remained infl uential at least during the early Johnson years, largely through their infl uence with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had, by now, clearly changed his initial skepticism toward PSAC. “If it did not exist,” he reportedly said in January 1965, “we would have to invent it.”77 Among other services, PSAC provided McNamara with valuable independent technical evaluations, especially through efforts by Richard Garwin, who soon became a legend of technological rationality. Even the Johnson White House recognized him as, in the words of a staff member, “by all accounts a genius or near-genius” with “superb analytical ability.”78 Garwin turned down the position of the deputy director of defense research and engineering in the Pentagon, but spent about half of his time with PSAC and other governmentrelated work, often with devastating effectiveness.79 A critical PSAC investigation of the Navy’s Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) program in 1965–1966 under his direction, for example, found the $3 billion-a-year program to be organizationally

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diff use and technically ineffective. As a result, the Garwin panel recommended a major reorganization toward enhanced integration of the ASW program, with the linking of procurement with R&D, and with a reorientation from production to research. The Navy and the DOD started to respond to it both technically and organizationally even before the report was finalized, although the whole affair also “aroused great controversy” within the Pentagon.80 In arms control, Hornig and PSAC pushed for an agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union to cut back the production of fissionable materials.81 They also worked for the achievement of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the most significant achievement in arms control in the Johnson years. When the negotiations hit an impasse over Soviet reluctance to agree to certain safeguard measures to ensure that civilian nuclear activities not be diverted to military purposes, PSAC urged Johnson to persevere and be flexible: “We agree that it would be very desirable to have a strong safeguards provision in the Treaty. At the same time, we believe that a Non-Proliferation Treaty without any safeguards provision would still be a very significant agreement.”82 Once again, as in the Kennedy years, due to the presence of relevant technical expertise elsewhere in the government, Hornig and PSAC were no longer the main force behind these arms control measures.83 However, one unique staff arrangement that had started under Kennedy continued during the Johnson administration to help keep Hornig and PSAC in the field of arms control: Spurgeon Keeny, a member of Killian’s original post-Sputnik staff, worked as an assistant to both Hornig and the national security adviser. Bundy called him “a really extraordinary public servant” with good judgment and broad experience who was often more knowledgeable on weaponry and technical intelligence than McNamara and the CIA director. “If he did not look like an undergraduate, I think he would already be emerging into the level of Presidential appointments.”84 Indeed, a strong and resourceful advocate for arms control, Keeny was often entrusted by members of PSAC’s Strategic Military Panel, which dealt with nuclear weapons issues within the committee, to draft their reports. Sometimes his unique access to the national security adviser allowed him to get PSAC scientists’ input into presidential policy much more effectively than otherwise possible.

Converts to Space In space policy, Hornig and PSAC adapted to a reality defined by the Apollo program. On the one hand, several factors—Johnson’s paternal feeling toward the space program, especially the Apollo project, his exceptional bond with NASA administrator James Webb, and the latter’s resistance to outside interference—kept Hornig and PSAC even further out of the space policymaking loop than they had been under Kennedy. For example, in the wake of the tragedy of the 1967 Apollo fire that killed three astronauts, Webb successfully staved off calls for an independent investigation by Hornig and PSAC.85 Later, when Hornig accused Webb of exaggerating Soviet space achievements for budget purposes, Johnson intervened decisively on Webb’s side and, in a memo that Webb helped to draft, asked Hornig

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to drop the matter so as not to impair the usefulness of “your group.”86 Clearly, the days when presidents saw PSAC as “my scientists” were over. On the other hand, the lingering tension between the science advisers and NASA did not preclude effective collaboration at the working level. In 1965–1966 PSAC carried out, for example, a major study on the reliability of Apollo through its Space Technology Panel, under Franklin Long of Cornell, with cooperation from NASA. After numerous briefings and visits to major NASA labs and contractors, the Long panel concluded that Apollo was well run both technically and organizationally. NASA’s quantitative goals for the probability of success—0.90 for the mission and 0.999 for crew survival—were especially striking to the panel. These requirements meant that thousands of parts of the system had to reach a reliability of 0.9999999!87 By now PSAC scientists not only accepted the political necessity of Apollo, but also began to appreciate its significance as a symbol of both human exploration and technological challenge. That spirit of adventure, as the physicist Marvin Goldberger, PSAC member in this period, later suggested, was what eventually won over the committee: Much of what we learned about the moon by sending men there we could have done by sending instruments. But I think going to the moon was the most fantastic thing that has happened in my lifetime, and it was something that we had to do.88

Although praising NASA for its overall operation, PSAC scientists, as ever, tempered their optimism with vigilance. It cautioned NASA, for example, against relying solely on statistical analysis and recommended that it consider supplementing it with experimental testing of materials. Concerned about uncertainties of operating in the lunar environment, the panel advised NASA to plan only minimal crew activity while on the surface of the moon. This meant, the Long panel argued, “that both the development engineers’ and crew members’ enthusiasm and self-confidence must be explicitly guarded against.” The panel tried to infuse as much science as possible into the primarily engineering project. Edward Purcell, a panel member, helped design a special camera for the Apollo crew to bring with them to take color pictures of the lunar surface. Finally, the panel recommended that NASA conduct independent evaluations of computer programs and software used in the project to ensure their reliability. As an independent corroboration of NASA’s own studies, the PSAC report must have given Johnson and the space agency added confidence in the Apollo project while offering constructive advice on improving its operations.89 Underlining their growing enthusiasm for the space program and their niche as a planning body within the presidency, PSAC scientists soon followed its report on Apollo with an even more extensive investigation on the post-Apollo space program.90 In 1966–1967, the committee’s Space Technology Panel and Space Science Panel joined force to produce a significant report on The Space Program in the Post-Apollo Period. This report, like the one on Apollo, represented a remarkable transformation of thinking on the part of leading American scientists who had

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opposed the Apollo decision in 1961. They now not only embraced manned space programs, but tried to use the public enthusiasm for space as a way to defend basic research. Both the space program and basic research, they argued, derived from the human urge to explore the unknown and could not be subject to strict cost–benefit analysis: How can we attach a dollar value to the attainment of a position of leadership in space? What of space exploration—what value can one attach to the excitement and the general stimulation of the national spirit that results from a manned lunar landing? And what of space science? How can one put a quantitative value to the development of an absolutely new astronomy or to the discovery of life on another planet?91

Reflecting an unprecedented level of technological enthusiasm, the PSAC post-Apollo report credited the space program for boosting American national self-confidence and renewing faith in American power. The public was now convinced that “the United States can mobilize its scientific and technical resources to attack virtually any national problems amenable to technical solutions.” Such pronouncements contributed to the technocratic thinking—“If we can go to the moon,” we sure can solve this or that social problem on earth—that was popular in the post-Apollo days. As noted in the report, many of PSAC’s recommendations on space now paralleled those of the Space Science Board of the NAS, a booster of the American space program that had clashed with PSAC over the Apollo decision in 1961. In further contrast to PSAC’s views in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the PSAC panels now set the human exploration of Mars and other planets as the long-term goal of the American space program, partly because they believed that “the question of extra-terrestrial life to be of great significance to scientists and laymen alike” and that human presence in space was necessary to answer it. They advocated continued manned scientific lunar exploration after Apollo, a strengthening of unmanned planetary probes, and, to the later regret of Purcell and some other panel members, the building of a manned space station. NASA, which had feared that post-Apollo planning might distract attention and resources from Apollo, now reluctantly moved in that direction under the pressure of a budget squeeze and the PSAC report.92 Why this turnaround for PSAC on space? The question was not specifically addressed in the post-Apollo report, but it might well have been a case of political pragmatism prevailing over technical rationality. Like Wiesner, Hornig and other PSAC members recognized that for them to continue to be effective science advisers, they needed to be part of a team and support a project already decided on. It could also be a strategy of turning a loss in science in policy into a gain in policy for science: members of PSAC and its panels might have come around to Hans Bethe’s shrewd argument in the post-Sputnik days that instead of fighting the public’s “undisciplined enthusiasm” for space, scientists should and could take advantage of it to advance the cause of science. In addition, new members in PSAC and its

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panels might well have been more enthusiastic about the space programs, including manned ones, than were PSAC members in the Eisenhower and Kennedy days. Physicist Charles Townes of MIT, who served as both an infl uential member of PSAC and chairman of an advisory committee to NASA in this period, for example, broke ranks with several people at his institution—Killian, Wiesner, and board chairman Bush—in his support of the lunar landing program as a worthwhile effort. He helped to bring NASA grants to MIT to establish a space research laboratory.93 To be sure, the science advisers did not support all space endeavors. Continuing their skepticism toward nuclear energy, Hornig and PSAC, for example, helped Johnson kill NERVA II, a nuclear-powered rocket project.94 However, the positive tone of the report on post-Apollo planning reflected both the political reality of space policy in the 1960s and the scientists’ growing fascination with, and even an admiration for, the Apollo project as a technological endeavor.95

Science Policy In science policy, even as the Apollo buildup helped push federal support of academic science to its peak during the Johnson years, countervailing trends threatened to end the post-Sputnik golden era of science funding that PSAC had worked so hard to achieve. There was pressure from both Johnson and Congress for shifting emphasis from basic research to practical applications. Starting in late 1964, there was a leveling off in the Pentagon’s funds for university research. NASA faced a cutback in its post-Apollo budget. In response, PSAC launched a drive, under Brooks, to justify a 15 percent annual increase in federal funds for academic science or basic research. Brooks’s reasoning was based on an annual increase of about 10 percent in university enrollment plus about 5 percent in “increased sophistication” (e.g., more costly computers) and inflation. The BOB bought the formulae in late 1964, which helped to increase the NSF budget for fiscal year 1966.96 Rhetorically, however, even this victory represented a reversal of the fortunes of basic research: whereas the Seaborg report, produced amidst the post-Sputnik concern for American science, justified federal support of graduate education on its importance to basic research, the Brooks formulation explicitly justified federal support of basic research on its benefits to higher education, which had been established as a national objective in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. For his part, Johnson did not abandon basic research per se, as many felt, but he did push for a reorientation of science policy favoring those programs that could lead to practical applications, contribute to education, or promote a more even geographic distribution of federal funds. In 1965, for example, he endorsed a massive campaign to get the entire federal establishment to aid academic science because of its central importance, as the Seaborg report had argued, to both basic research and higher education. Originated in the NSF, the initiative eventually evolved into a promotion of “New Centers of Excellence.”97 Although some wags dubbed it a “spread the wealth” ploy to “get more schools into the top twenty,” most PSAC members supported the program as a way to expand the base of American science, even though most of their own elite universities did not qualify

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for it.98 “It became a big joke in that it became an honor to be ineligible,” recalled Brooks, who endorsed the program.99 In the same vein, Johnson welcomed and approved another NSF proposal to make federally funded and operated large research facilities available to the whole scientific community.100 Thus, PSAC’s advocacy and LBJ’s sympathy toward science education helped sustain federal support of academic science, at least before the Vietnam War forced a retrenchment.

To Restore the Environment The new emphasis on making science relevant to social and practical concerns also led to an extensive and infl uential PSAC investigation in 1964–1965 of environmental pollution. The resultant report contributed to the crucial transition from the traditional conservationism that emphasized natural resources management to a modern environmental policy that took a more holistic and ecological view of the relationship between humans and their environment.101 Like its 1963 report on pesticides, the new PSAC study marked a milestone in the modern environmental movement by bringing official and scientific authority to bear on this emergent public policy issue. It was apparently the first comprehensive government examination on the subject. The initiative for such a study first came from Hornig in response to a request from presidential assistant Bill Moyers for legislative proposals that would form part of Johnson’s Great Society program during the 1964 election campaign. Pollution of the environment, Hornig predicted, constituted “one of the ‘big problems’ of our times.” The quality of air, water, food, and human health increasingly suffered from domestic and industrial wastes, pesticides, smog, radiation, and other problems. PSAC, Hornig reported, already organized a panel to look at “the entire problem” following its successful pesticides study in 1963. He suggested making this panel into one of the task forces that were preparing the legislative agenda for the Johnson administration following the 1964 election.102 The idea struck a cord in both Moyers and Johnson and PSAC’s panel on environmental pollution, under John W. Tukey of Princeton and Bell Labs, was transformed into a Great Society task force. Delivered to Johnson on November 9, 1964, the task force’s report delineated the frightening extent of environmental pollution and urged the federal government to take major responsibility for its control. Specifically, it recommended that the government reduce pollution in its own operations, devise economic incentives for others to do so, and strengthen environmental research and manpower training.103 President Johnson received the report with enthusiasm, putting some of its more salient recommendations in his famous Special Message to Congress on Natural Beauty on February 8, 1965.104 The success of the Tukey task force encouraged Hornig and his colleagues to continue their efforts in environmental policy. Strong presidential interests ensured that their endeavors received attention from federal bureaucracies. Thus in early 1965, the Tukey panel embarked on a larger scale examination of environmental problems. As was PSAC’s tradition, the Tukey panel probed into both the technical and policy realms. Altogether it established eleven subpanels to explore such

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issues as environmental manpower, the effects of pollution on man, on other living organisms, the “greenhouse” effect of CO2, soil contamination, pest control, and various wastes. Dozens of prominent scientists from all over the country participated in the project. The final report, Restoring the Quality of Our Environment, was a landmark in the evolution of environmental study and policy. It took on the whole range of pollutants and treated pollution as a national issue. An environment without pollution, it declared, should rank with education as a basic human right. The affl uent society should not become the “effl uent” society. The report reasserted the responsibility of the federal government to take leadership in the field, and backed its call for action with more than one hundred recommendations that covered all facets of the environmental problem, many of which eventually found their way into federal legislation and policy. Most emphatically, the report urged the government to sponsor both basic and applied research on the environment and to help train environmental scientists and engineers. In his endorsement of the report, President Johnson made special mention of these last two recommendations and asked federal agencies to try to implement the report.105 Other suggestions included the imposition of taxes on polluters and a government program to help make pollution-free cars. Perhaps the most striking part of the report, in retrospect, was its warning about global warming from CO2, produced by a subpanel under Roger Revelle, then at Harvard. “By the year 2000 there will be about 25% more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere than at present,” the report predicted. “This will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an extent that marked changes in climate, not controllable through local or even national efforts, could occur.” The report advocated both continued research to understand the problem and “means of preventing or counteracting the changes,” including shifting to energy sources that produced less carbon dioxide.106 Informed by this PSAC investigation, President Johnson had sounded the alarm in his “natural beauty” message to Congress in February that “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”107 The PSAC report and the LBJ message represented the earliest attempts by the United States government to recognize and address the problem of global warming. Unfortunately, despite these efforts, the matter received little public attention or federal action; the problem appeared vague and insignificant compared with other pollutions identified by the panel. In the media coverage of both the LBJ speech and the PSAC report, the issue of global change received barely any media coverage and global warming was not recognized as a serious worldwide problem until the late twentieth century.108 The lack of action on global climate change, however, should not obscure the significance and the many real accomplishments of the Tukey report. Although some critics faulted the Tukey report for containing too many recommendations to be effective, Tukey and his supporters argued that they achieved their goal of infl uencing federal actions. Half of the job was already done even before the report

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was written, Tukey pointed out, because during the many briefing sessions by federal agencies, policies were already being modified based on suggestions from the panel members.109 In addition, the report had an impact on the numerous pieces of environmental legislation in the Johnson administration, such as the Air Quality Act of 1967. The studies reinforced Hornig’s position as the point man in the White House on environment.110 PSAC later also delved into related problems of world population and food supply at the request of Johnson.111 Partly as a result of the PSAC report, the NAS established an Environmental Studies Board in 1967.112 In view of the general ineffectiveness of the Great Society programs, PSAC’s work on the environment stood out as a notable success story.113 In all these studies, PSAC made measured advocacy for the use of science and technology in solving environmental problems, which stood in clear contrast to the approaches of technological enthusiasts such as Edward Teller, who typically proposed to turn his favorite technology—the hydrogen bomb—to fighting pollution by, for example, boosting the production of clean-burning natural gas through underground nuclear explosions.114 Even its mixed success with the warning on global warming served to raise presidential and public consciousness about the problem in the long run. Stewart Udall, Secretary of Interior, remained a strong ally with PSAC on environmental issues. He shared with PSAC a strong sense of technological skepticism. In an interview shortly after the end of the Johnson presidency in 1969, Udall said: I think we’re seeing the first questioning of the whole basic American attitude toward growth. . . . I think we just have to think as a nation in terms of limits on population, on mechanization, on urbanization, on growth. If we don’t we’re going to find ourselves, increasingly, as we find ourselves today, confronted with major environmental problems.115

This agreement on environmental and technological philosophy led to close cooperation in the policy process. “They became allies on many issues,” Udall said, referring to Hornig and PSAC. “They gave considerable help to this whole movement and the evolution that took place.”116 The partnership between PSAC and Udall’s Interior Department that had first emerged out of the pesticide debate spread to other fields of environmental concern. They became mutually dependent: PSAC provided Interior with critical support in terms of scientific expertise, presidential imprimatur, and independent corroboration, and the department fought the bureaucratic battles to have many of PSAC specific environmental proposals implemented.

Scientists and Diplomacy Despite Johnson’s preference for focusing on domestic reforms, he could not, of course, ignore foreign policy, as witnessed by his increasing obsession with the Vietnam War. In this regard, the same appreciation for science and technology’s potentials in bringing practical benefits at home motivated Johnson to use them as a tool in improving American foreign relations. “We mean to show that this

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Nation’s dream of a Great Society does not stop at the water’s edge,” Johnson declared in September 1965.117 There was an implicit hope that the benevolent images of science and technology would also help soften the growing criticism of U.S. policy in Vietnam. For their part, Hornig and PSAC, continuing a long tradition of the scientific community, advocated international scientific and technological exchange as beneficial for both American national interests and international science. Thus, as a result of LBJ’s interest and of his own longtime passion, Hornig became much more involved in American scientific diplomacy than any of his three predecessors. Hornig undertook his first diplomatic mission when he led a delegation to the Soviet Union in November 1964 to study its chemical and computer industries and promote scientific and technological exchanges with the Cold War rival. Two former PSAC members, James Fisk of Bell Labs and Emmanuel Piore of IBM, were among the six-man group. What Hornig found during his trip indicated how far the United States had emerged out of the dark shadow of Sputnik as a symbol of Soviet technological threat just seven years before. Although the Soviets enjoyed a large and generally competent scientific and technological infrastructure, its centralized organization was “cumbersome, rigid, and therefore sluggish” in translating innovations into economic growth, Hornig reported to Johnson on his return. Western export control also hampered Soviet technological development.118 Despite strengths in some fields, such as analog computers, the Soviets lagged behind the West in digital computers and technology in general.119 Not surprisingly, the Soviets were anxious to engage in technical exchanges with the United States, including the purchase of American technological products. Hornig urged that the United States respond favorably on a “selective and step-by-step” basis so as to learn more about the Soviet economic and technological strengths, gain access to heretofore forbidden parts of the country, profit from the growing Soviet imports, and reap political benefits of winning Soviet goodwill.120 Johnson agreed and eventually set up the East–West Trade Commission to deal with these issues.121 The Soviets also reacted favorably to the Hornig mission, which led LBJ to decide to bring science and technology further into other bilateral relations. When Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato came to visit in January 1965, Johnson called Hornig at home asking for innovative projects that he could propose to the visitors the next day. What he had gotten from the State Department, Johnson complained, was “a bunch of crap.” After numerous phone calls overnight, Hornig came up with the idea of a U.S.–Japan joint medical program to study the diseases of the Pacific Rim countries. Johnson liked it and the Japanese embraced it enthusiastically. Administered by the National Institutes of Health on the American side, it turned out to be a very successful program.122 Pleased, Johnson called on Hornig for an encore when Korean president Park Chung Hee visited Washington four months later. After consulting with PSAC members, Hornig came up with the idea of the United States helping the Koreans establish an Institute for Industrial Technology and Applied Science to serve developing Korean industry. To Hornig’s and PSAC’s credit, they did not push for an

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institution for basic research, as might be expected from their longtime advocacy for it in the United States and as often desired by scientists in developing countries themselves. Instead, they insisted on both a focus on applied work to meet the needs of Korean industry and research at a high level to attract the large number of Korean scientists and engineers then in the United States. Only “if properly equipped,” they argued, could the institute help to stem the “brain drain” problem. At the time, Hornig had found, to his shock, that “their entire college output in engineering goes to the United States.”123 Both LBJ and Park liked the proposal, and the good will generated by it helped the negotiation over the American request for increased Korean support for the Vietnam War in the form of ground troops.124 Consequently, Hornig led a group of American scientists and industrial executives, including his wife, Fisk, and Bertram Thomas of Battelle Memorial Institute, to Korea to investigate the feasibility of the project. On its return, the group unanimously supported the proposal, convinced that “the Institute will contribute to a more effective transfer of the fruits of modern technology to Korea” and that “it will serve as a model for other countries in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere.” Hornig persuaded Johnson to commit to the project about $10 million through the Agency for International Development, which had resisted the initiative because it was not consulted beforehand and because it felt that what Korea needed was low-level technical assistance. Hornig also convinced Park to appoint Choi Hyung Sup, a U.S.-trained metallurgist and director of Korea’s Atomic Energy Research Institute who had impressed him during his tour, to be the founding director of what became known as the Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST).125 Designed with input from the Koreans and carefully calibrated to meet their practical needs, KIST turned out to be one of the most successful American technology transfer projects in Korea. Due to Choi’s able leadership, the institute did attract many Korean scientists home from abroad and contributed to the remarkably rapid industrialization of the country in the following decades.126 These successes boosted the position of both science and the science advisers in the Johnson White House. It was now convinced, as Busby told Hornig, that science and technology were the “most persuasive language in establishing rapport and understanding between the United States and other countries.”127 Thus in 1967 Johnson sent Hornig on yet another tour abroad, this time to Taiwan to advise the Chinese Nationalist government on its industrialization plan. As a result of his investigation, Hornig persuaded the Taiwanese leadership to increase its R&D funding to 1 percent of its gross national product (about $30 million), a move that was later credited with contributing to the island’s remarkable technological and economic transformation in the 1970s and 1980s.128 On his own initiative, Hornig also attempted to establish scientific contact with mainland China, but his overture to Chinese scientists at the centenary celebration of the Romanian Academy of Sciences in 1966, like Wiesner’s at the 1960 Moscow Pugwash, bore little fruit, given the growing hostilities between the two countries over the Vietnam War and the start of the chaotic Cultural Revolution

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in China.129 In that same year, the U.S. NAS established a Committee on Scholarly Exchange with Mainland China in cooperation with the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. Recognizing that the exchange of personal visits was only a remote possibility at the time, the committee, which included several PSAC members, focused on monitoring Chinese development and facilitating scientific publications. Although the effort would bear fruits only later in the Nixon years, it, like many other Hornig and PSAC-inspired initiatives, demonstrated both the potentials and the limits of state-sponsored scientific internationalism during the Cold War.130

Conclusion Thus, during the early years of the Johnson presidency before the Vietnam War overshadowed everything, Hornig and PSAC played a prominent role in meeting LBJ’s concerns related to science and technology in both international and domestic arenas, despite a sense of unease in their relationship. The scientists did so with both positive proposals and critical evaluations. In particular, PSAC’s study of the environment and Hornig’s deployment of science and technology in the conduct of foreign affairs drew Johnson’s personal interest and were considerably effective. Publicly, at least, the good show of science in the White House that had received a boost from the Scientists for Johnson campaign went on. In January 1966, Science carried a report: “LBJ and Hornig: Close Ties Exist as Science Adviser Starts Third Year.”131 Beneath the surface, however, the relationship between Hornig, PSAC, and the Johnson White House, and that between American science and the federal government began to shift radically. As the Sputnik crisis receded amid a fragile détente in the Cold War, PSAC’s linkage of national security and basic research gave way to new demands for civilian applications of science. Although PSAC scientists continued to exercise a moderating infl uence in both military and civilian technologies, their sense of technological skepticism appeared increasingly out of touch with a society enthralled with the unlimited benefits of technological progress, especially when it came to space and nuclear energy. Above all, it was the Vietnam War that, as another manifestation of American technological enthusiasm, came to threaten the political and moral consensus on which PSAC scientists had participated in national policymaking.

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PSAC, the Vietnam War, and the ABM Debate, 1964–1968

The polite but largely productive relationship between Johnson and his science advisers took a turn for the worse as the Vietnam War polarized the nation in the late 1960s. The “poison of Vietnam” introduced questions of loyalty and trust as each side felt betrayal by the other—scientists criticized Johnson for breaking his peace promise and the president resented their protest against a war he regarded as a fight for freedom.1 The tension then further deepened with the debate over ABMs. Both the war and the ABM controversy sharpened a dilemma that had always faced PSAC and other moderate scientists in terms of their beliefs in the potentials and limits of technology. Few PSAC scientists approved the conduct of the war, but, at least initially, some of them sought technological measures that would help to win, or at least to moderate, the war. Gradually, however, they recognized that the question was not what science and technology could do to contribute to the war effort, but whether there was a technological solution to the war and, finally, whether the war was morally justified at all. That message also came out clearly in the fight over the ABM. Yet, to an unprecedented degree, these debates also threatened to divide not only scientists and the government but the heretofore consensus-driven scientific circle associated with PSAC, with profound implications for the future of American science and society.

The Electronic Barrier Caution and ambiguity characterized PSAC scientists’ early involvement in the Vietnam War. Although not enthusiastic about the war, the committee initially kept a low profile because, as Hornig put it, “we had no business, no charter on Vietnam.”2 Neither did PSAC participate in the early antiwar movement. Thus no PSAC members took part in the massive national teach-in movement organized by academics over the war in the spring of 1965.3 Former PSAC members were under fewer constraints but even they tried to work within the system to moderate the war.4 Kistiakowsky wrote Johnson on January 13, 1966, for example, to support his refusal to withdraw from Vietnam—“the broader consequences to our foreign policy of such a withdrawal would be harmful”—even as he argued for alternatives to an expected resumption of American bombing there: I fear that renewed bombing of North and South Vietnam and ground sweeps by our and South Vietnamese troops at increasing intensity will not be successful in achieving our objectives. . . . I think that we should pursue an essentially defensive strategy that would rest on the establishment and securing of 258

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suitable enclaves along the coast and around Saigon including perhaps parts of the Delta region. . . . Our overwhelming military technology could be put to better use making attacks on such enclaves totally unprofitable.5

Aware of the limits of any technological solution, Kistiakowsky hastened to add that he hoped that “we could concentrate our economic and social assistance, as well as our political efforts, on the creation of a civilian government for the several million Vietnamese who would live in the enclaves.”6 When such direct appeals to the White House proved ineffective, Kistiakowsky, Wiesner, and several colleagues at Harvard and MIT sought to infl uence policy through the formation of a Cambridge Discussion Group on Vietnam. Although marginalized politically, the group hoped to capitalize on its technical credibility to moderate the war from the inside. In 1966, it proposed to the DOD a summer study on alternatives to the massive American bombing of North Vietnam, which, they argued, had failed to stop the infiltration of materials and personnel from the North to the South in Vietnam. Were there, in Wiesner’s words, “any technical means that we could see that might do a better job and be much less destructive”? Building on Kistiakowsky’s enclave proposal, the Cambridge group came up with the idea of an infiltration barrier to cut off the supply line.7 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was himself becoming disillusioned by the bombing, found the idea appealing and approved the proposal.8 PSAC was asked to sponsor the study, but Hornig cautiously declined the job, believing that DOD patronage could expedite the implementation of whatever would come out of it.9 Eventually the Jason group of the IDA managed the study for the DOD. Jason, in turn, brought in its own members to join forces with the Cambridge group. Logistically the project was separated into Jason East, mainly the Cambridge group in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and Jason West, the Jasons proper at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Thus, even though PSAC itself was not officially involved in the study, many of the active participants had strong ties with the committee. Interestingly enough, a split soon developed in the project over the limits and potentials of technological solutions. Whereas the Cambridge group wanted to use the barrier only as a means to end the bombing and eventually the war itself, the younger Jasons tended to be less adamant in their opposition to the war and more willing to take the project as primarily a technological challenge and therefore an end on its own.10 They elaborated the barrier concept with many new technological components and made it into a high-tech “electronic barrier.”11 As a result, the Cambridge scientists “were very uncertain of the feasibility of this scheme,” according to Kistiakowsky, and doubted “whether we should even present the plan to Mr. McNamara.”12 Finally, under Zacharias’s leadership, both factions overcame their disagreements to conclude that, first, the bombing campaign had “no measurable direct effect” and, second, that the electronic barrier should be pursued as a better alternative.13 These analyses from the nation’s top scientists exerted, according to the Pentagon Papers, “a powerful and perhaps decisive” impact on McNamara, confirming for him the futility of the bombing and

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possibly the war itself.14 A follow-up Jason study the next year presented, according to the Pentagon Papers, “probably the most categorical rejection of bombing as a tool of our policy in Southeast Asia to be made before or since by an official or semi-official group.”15 The military, however, fiercely opposed the barrier project as a substitute for the bombing campaign. General William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, called the air war “our only trump card” and resisted any attempt to stop it.16 The Jason study itself drew attacks from its critics. A staff member of the NSC called the 1967 Jason study an “intellectually dishonest” exercise, with a “loaded” membership and improper criteria, in a “deliberate attempt to infer that the objective of the air campaign was unachievable ‘victory through airpower.’”17 Ironically, when the barrier was later partially constructed, the military actually used its new detection capabilities to justify increased, not decreased, bombing.18 This turn of events dismayed the Cambridge group of former PSAC scientists. Although they continued to advise the Pentagon on the project as members of the so-called Defense Communications Planning Group, doubts grew about the war and their role in it. As Fredrik Zachariasen of Cal Tech, a participant in the project, later wrote Kistiakowsky: I recall telling you . . . that I was not interested in helping with a project that would be used merely as an additional escalatory step, and that I felt that the administration had no interest in using the DCPG effort in the way all of us had originally hoped it would be used, as a part of a general de-escalation of the war. You said you felt the same way.19

Sadly for Kistiakowsky and his fellow PSAC veterans, their technology of moderation was indeed turned into a technology of escalation and was out of their control. In a way, they were committing the same mistake of seeking a technological fix to an essentially political problem that they themselves had criticized others for in the past. To them, any alternative was better than the massive bombing the United States was pursuing and any technical scheme they could devise to shorten the war was worthwhile. Yet, in this process they seemed to have ignored a key thesis they themselves had expounded from the test ban process: the issue at stake was political, not technical.

“His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition” The “electronic barrier” experiment indicated that many alumni and possibly current members of PSAC harbored increasing misgivings toward the war, but they could not yet bring themselves to break with their traditional role as confidential technical advisers to the government. Even though critics in the military-industrial complex had often accused PSAC scientists of being dangerous saboteurs of technological progress, they were not quite ready to take their technological dissent out into the public arena. As Kistiakowsky later put it, “You have to be aware that we thought of ourselves as what might be referred to as His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. We were working through the channels, within the organization, as yet.”20

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Thus both current and former members of PSAC felt restrained in expressing their opposition to administration policy. They wanted to stay, as long as they could, as insiders—both Kistiakowsky and Wiesner remained consultants at large to PSAC— with access to secret information and policymakers and avoid public, organized dissent. When Spock tried to reorganize the 1964 anti-Goldwater TV panel to send a collective protest to Johnson against his Vietnam War policy, Wiesner told him that it was fine to approach the White House individually but not as a group.21 Even by early 1967, Kistiakowsky still enjoyed his work with the military.22 Furthermore, in a society and political structure that continued to believe that experts should be on tap, not on top, the scientists felt that whatever effects they hoped to have on the conduct of the war could best be achieved through their technical contributions, not their moral and political arguments. Finally, leading scientific insiders, as public scientists, probably also worried that an open break with the Johnson administration over Vietnam would hurt federal support of science as well. The public silence of both current and former PSAC members on Vietnam was in sharp contrast with the vocal opposition to the war by much of the scientific community. In January 1966, amidst growing signs that the war was putting a squeeze on the federal budget for science, the AAAS Council, for example, passed one of the first antiwar resolutions by any scientific society: Prolongation of the Vietnamese War, with its increasing danger of universal catastrophe, threatens not only the lives of millions, but the humanitarian values and goals which we are striving to maintain. Besides this concern which we share with all citizens, we bear a special responsibility as scientists to point out the large costs of war for the continued vigor of scientific research.23

Biologists were especially vocal in their protest against the war. Albert Szent-Györgyi of Woods Hole, who had been active in the Scientists for Johnson campaign in 1964, for example, quickly became disillusioned by the president’s escalation of the war in early 1965. He wrote in the New York Times in March that year: In the last election we scientists stood as one man behind President Johnson, being afraid of what Mr. Goldwater, as President, might do. Now President Johnson does in Vietnam what we feared. . . . I feel disappointed, alienated, if not betrayed. I am sure many of my fellow scientists feel as I do. . . . [I]t is time for scientists to get together once more, this time to sound a warning.24

In January 1966, a group of twenty-nine scientists, mainly biologists, issued, under the leadership of Matthew Meselson, John Edsall, and Paul Doty of Harvard (former PSAC member), a public condemnation of the U.S. use of defoliant and crop-destroying chemicals in Vietnam.25 By the end of the year, a petition to Johnson for an end of the use of chemical and biological weapons (CBW) in Vietnam had attracted the signatures of about 5,000 scientists. Comparing their potential destructiveness to that of nuclear weapons, the scientists urged Johnson to declare an American policy “to refrain from initiating the use of chemical and biological weapons.”26 Szent-Györgyi once again took an active part in the anti-CBW

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campaign, denouncing, with Salvador Luria of MIT, the Vietnam War as “both a national catastrophe and a moral blight for our country.” They called on their fellow scientists to consider “carefully . . . whether cooperation with the Johnson administration in waging the Vietnam War is consistent with service to the true interests of our country and of mankind.”27 The Johnson administration not only refused to heed the scientists’ protest but actually acted to provoke further polarization. In October 1967, for example, Secretary of State Dean Rusk likened antiwar intellectuals to Albert Einstein who was, in his words, “a genius in mathematical physics, an amateur in music, and a baby in politics.” “[T]he fact that a man knows everything there is to know about enzymes doesn’t mean that he knows very much about Vietnam or how to organize a peace or the life and death of nations.”28 One British scientist who applied for an American visa to attend a conference was told that “it was now the policy of the U.S. Embassy to regard all biochemists as likely to have left-wing tendencies.”29 In 1967, the White House, if not Johnson himself, began to impose, for the first time in PSAC’s history, an explicit political test in the selection of its panel members based on their attitudes toward the Vietnam War.30 There is no evidence of LBJ’s personal intervention against having more “Harvards” in PSAC, but the Johnson White House did try to control the selection of new PSAC members, including disapproving of some of its nominations.31 For his part, President Johnson was not unaware of the Vietnam War’s damage to his Great Society programs and his relations with the intellectuals. “Think what wonders I could perform with that [defense] money if I could put it into agriculture and health and education,” Johnson wistfully told the NSC staff in May 1966.32 On another occasion, in an address at Princeton University, he lamented the opposition to his policy by “men of learning.” Not long ago, he had placed so many of them on his Great Society task forces that “[a]t any given moment a third of the faculties of the United States are on a plane somewhere to advise if not always to consent.” Nevertheless, LBJ refused to budge from his firm stand on Vietnam.33 “[H]aving decided on this course,” he was, as he told the NSC staff, “absolutely determined to see it through. No one should be under any illusion that we will be pulling out.”34 Thus, it was not surprising that when he agreed to meet with a group of Harvard scientists and scholars, including Purcell, he was more interested in “improvement [of] relations [with] Harvard University” than in hearing their “deep foreboding about the present drift of the United States policy in Vietnam.”35 Caught in the middle of this widening schism, Hornig found himself ignored and removed farther away from the president. Such treatment was at times painfully humiliating. In May 1967, for example, Harry C. McPherson, Jr., a White House aide who believed that intellectuals were “too dangerous to be in opposition,” arranged a pep talk between Johnson and “in-house” intellectuals to showcase Johnson’s use of natural and social scientists and to improve his communication with the war-protesting intellectual community.36 The highly publicized event, however, excluded Hornig, who learned of the meeting from the New York Times. The incident so provoked the science adviser’s usually stoic sensitivity that

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he fired off an acutely plaintive memorandum to LBJ. The neglect was not only a personal affront, Hornig wrote, but also a potential blow to the administration’s relationship with the scientific community: I was struck, as other people were, by the absence of any scientist of distinction from the group—and there are a number, such as Glenn Seaborg, who serve you. It would be a serious error to discount the interest and infl uence of the scientific community, either in Viet Nam problems or in social progress. They are among the most worried and hard to deal with in connection with Viet Nam and we continue to need their support.37

As another indication of the decline of the science adviser’s infl uence, Hornig was dropped, after 1966, from the all-important Christmas budgetary sessions at the LBJ ranch near Austin, Texas.38 All these tensions must have worn on Hornig. In March 1967, he thought of resigning but was dissuaded by his PSAC colleagues and by Johnson himself, who threatened to put the OST into the BOB if Hornig left.39 As bad as their connections with the White House became, the scientific mandarins did not want to lose its beachhead in the government completely. Thus, despite setbacks, Hornig and PSAC persisted in their efforts to mediate the growing chasm between the academic and scientific community and the Johnson White House. When conservative politicians threatened to end student deferment from the draft in 1967, Hornig privately expressed concern to Joseph Califano, Johnson’s aide on domestic affairs.40 His effort at rapprochement suffered a setback when it became known that he himself had decided not to appoint William R. Taylor, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to an OST panel on education after learning of Taylor’s vehement antiwar position. Among others, Killian persuaded Hornig that he and PSAC “should actively encourage contact with dissidents in order to decrease the division in the country.” In early 1968, when the same issue came up with the appointments of three other antiwar scholars as OST consultants, Hornig personally brought the matter to LBJ and won the president’s approval to proceed with their appointments.41 In the same spirit PSAC tried, at the height of the scientists’ protest against chemical and biological warfare, to work within the system to commit the United States to a “no first use” policy on these weapons. On behalf of the committee, Hornig wrote Johnson in early December 1966 to inform him that PSAC had conducted extensive reviews of biological weapons and concluded that “the problems associated with these agents appear to outweigh any military advantages that might be attained by their use.” The dangers included the unpredictable risk of endemic infection, new disease, and ecological harms. Such weapons, PSAC contended, might well be a technological solution in search of a problem: “we have been presented with no scenarios, nor have we thought of any ourselves, in which the military value [of these agents] seems significant.”42 On February 14, 1967, when Doty, Edsall, Meselson, and Irwin Gunsalus of the University of Illinois delivered the scientists’ anti-CBW petition to the White House, Hornig and Adrian Fisher, deputy director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency,

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accepted it on Johnson’s behalf.43 Once again, Hornig urged Johnson to announce a “no first use policy” on CBW. The State Department and even the president himself seemed to be sympathetic.44 However, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ’s insistence on keeping the option of using incapacitating agents—to sicken but not kill the enemy—eventually derailed the effort for the duration of the Johnson administration.45 Neither was Hornig successful in stopping the use of defoliants in Vietnam under Johnson, although MacLeod, his deputy, did work ardently on this and other biomedical issues related to the war. In a way, PSAC, in either its philosophy or its makeup, was simply not set up to deal with the problems of the Vietnam War. Dominated by physical scientists, it had long seen its main mission in science in policy to be the pursuit of nuclear arms control and the rationalization of American technology policy. Thus there was a sense that as abhorrent as the Vietnam War was, the danger to the world from a nuclear war was far greater and deserved more of their attention. The relative weak presence of biologists and the total absence of ecologists among its membership—the Ecological Society of America apparently tried, in vain, to place a member in PSAC in 1968—further diminished both the motivation and available expertise within the committee in dealing with the issue of defoliants, despite its successful investigation into the use of pesticides in 1962–1963. Thus the initiative and drive for the investigation and resultant policy change regarding the use of defoliants, including Agent Orange, came mainly from outside scientists, especially Meselson at Harvard and E. W. Pfeiffer of the University of Montana.46 Hornig also tried to bring LBJ into direct contact with scientists in hope of improving the president’s image among the scientific community. In early 1967, he and Charles Townes, a PSAC member and president of the American Physical Society, persuaded Johnson to give a speech at the society’s annual meeting as an effort to “strengthen your ties to this infl uential community.” Linking science in policy with policy for science, Hornig assured Johnson that his recent approval of the 200 Bev accelerator would ensure “a sympathetic audience” at the meeting.47 In his speech, Johnson went to great lengths to praise the contributions of the physicists—“no group of Americans is more important”—and pledged to negotiate with the North Vietnamese when they were ready “to sit down at the table and talk instead of kill.”48 This appeal for peace made headlines and the speech was viewed as a great success in the White House, but it could not hide the reality of an escalating bombing campaign and deepening American involvement in the Vietnam quagmire.49 The scientists did get a keen sense of the personal pain that the confl ict had caused for Johnson but few changed their views on the war.50 Indeed, the polarization over Vietnam intensified. During LBJ’s speech, one attendee tried to raise a plaque that said “Vietnam,” but he was stopped by others around him.51 Charles Schwartz of the University of California, Berkeley, proposed an amendment to the American Physical Society’s by-laws to allow members to vote on resolutions not only on matters related to physics, but also on political and social issues. It was rejected by members by a two to one margin.52 Likewise the American Society for Microbiology was split over a decision by its governing council

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to disband the society’s advisory committee to the army’s Biological Laboratories at Fort Detrick in Maryland.53 Scientists might not be happy with the war, but not many of them were ready to join the radical antiwar movement yet. Meanwhile, Science carried polemic letters from both those who saw the war as a fight against North Vietnamese terrorism, and those who regarded American military actions as acts of terrorism themselves and felt that “American scientists are already far too closely identified with that military adventure.”54 Inevitably, such tension would be reflected inside PSAC as its members contemplated their own role and more broadly the role of technology in the Vietnam War.

PSAC and Technological Solutions to the War During the early stages of the national debate over Vietnam, Hornig and PSAC thought that, despite the growing opposition to the war by their colleagues and students outside the White House, it was still in American national interest and the interest of the scientific community for them to provide technical advice to the government on Vietnam. For example, Herbert York, vice chairman of PSAC in this period, believed that “the war was a bad mistake,” but he also blamed the North Vietnamese for their aggression against the south.55 Thus initially, PSAC members, like the Cambridge group, sought to contribute to the war effort to shorten it. In March 1965, less than a month following the first U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, PSAC’s military aircraft panel under Garwin started a discussion on “the use of tactical aircraft in Vietnam,” especially on “the potential of Vietnam as a source of operational data” for the improvement of the design of these aircraft.56 As the major venue through which PSAC got involved in the Vietnam War, the panel conducted studies that led to certain technical improvements in the Air Force’s operations and in “electronic warfare” in Vietnam. Soon, as the war widened, PSAC began to devote a quarter of its discussions to the subject, with briefings by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others directly involved in the war. One of its recommendations led General William C. Westmoreland to appoint William G. McMillan, a chemist at UCLA and Rand, as his science adviser.57 As the war dragged on, even Johnson became dissatisfied with the militarytechnological strategy. At one point he reportedly castigated the Joint Chiefs of Staff with the shout: “Bomb, bomb, bomb, that’s all you know.”58 In a May 1967 meeting with PSAC, he gave the green light to the committee to get involved more deeply in the Vietnam War. Hornig established an ad hoc panel on Vietnam to coordinate the committee’s various activities related to the war. Chaired by Townes, it consisted of chairmen of all the military panels of PSAC and Garwin, who was rotated out of PSAC in 1966 but remained heavily involved in its activities as a consultant.59 Several PSAC members and consultants, including Garwin, Charles Slichter of the University of Illinois, and John Baldeschwieler of Stanford, made trips to Vietnam to investigate technical-military problems. As a result of its studies, PSAC came up with a number of suggestions on how to get military technologies, such as night vision equipment, quickly through the R&D process and onto the front line. A ground warfare panel was also established under the

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chairmanship of Sidney Drell of SLAC, a PSAC member since 1966, to assist the Army with its various technological programs and needs.60 Even as PSAC members undertook these technical evaluations of the Vietnam War efforts, a profound ambivalence continued to haunt them. On the one hand they recognized that social, political, and economic measures were more important than technical solutions in ending the war. For example, in summer 1967, PSAC’s ground warfare panel concluded that “technology played only a peripheral role in pacification as compared to the social, administrative, and policy problems that existed within the South Vietnamese government” and between it and the United States.61 Thus, in December 1967, Drell asked whether it was possible to beef up the AID programs in South Vietnam to improve the lives of the farmers so that “they will want to commit themselves to the Saigon government.”62 PSAC’s military aircraft panel also found that “technology can contribute to political and economic growth of the country,” but it could not “substitute for effective government organization and honest political programs.” Its conclusion that “a nation cannot be built with gadgets” echoed that of the GAC in the H-bomb debate as well as earlier PSAC statements during the battle for the nuclear test ban.63 Yet, at the same time, PSAC scientists felt that their most pertinent contribution to the war efforts had to be in the areas of science and technology. Sometimes, even as they cast doubt on one set of military-technological operations, they advocated another of their own as a better alternative. In late 1967, Drell proposed that “technology be given a chance” to show what it could do to improve border security without “hot pursuits” into Laos and Cambodia. He also urged PSAC to examine and advocate an increase in technological aid programs, such as economic-agricultural projects, vocational education, refugee retraining, and a national TV communication network, to help stabilize South Vietnam.64 In this period, it seemed that at least some of the younger members of PSAC were caught in a wave of technological optimism of their own. The PSAC ad hoc panel on Vietnam was convinced, for example, that “science and technology can make a far more significant contribution to success” in Vietnam. Thus it focused “on the problem of how to take full advantage of existing and new technologies, together with associated tactical innovations, in order to improve the effectiveness of U.S. forces in prosecuting the war and exploiting their superiority in fire power and mobility over the enemy.” Technological rationality, they appeared to argue, was a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition for winning the war. The panel recognized that policymakers needed to consider broader political and social factors, but it felt that there had not been adequate considerations of science and technology in either the implementation or the formulation of policy in the war. This was in sharp contrast with the situation in World War II, it argued, when science and technology, coordinated by a powerful OSRD, played a prominent role in policy.65 What the panel ignored was the sharp difference in the political contexts as well as scientists’ morale and motivation in the two confl icts. The panel pushed for a streamlined military R&D structure to reduce damaging lags from the conception of a weapon system to its deployment in the field.

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For example, when an order for 75 “personnel detectors” or “human sniffers” came in January 1968, the Pentagon estimated that it would take six to eight months to fulfill it. Baldeschwieler boasted that he “could make a chamber for the improved sniffer in the Stanford shops in an afternoon.” “[A] group of trained machinists,” he went on, “could easily make 75 of them in a week.” The panel listed about a dozen other items “badly needed in the field which are immediately available”: retroreflectors, smoke grenades, tunnel denial devices, microwave mine detectors, tank-mounted mine detonators, traps, barbed tape obstacles, fragmentation cords (“works very well as an ambush device”), tunnel periscopes, leech repellants, and wire detectors. To expedite the delivery of these and other military technologies for the Vietnam War, the panel recommended a number of measures to strengthen military R&D. It even saw their benefit beyond that confl ict. Vietnam, it believed, could serve as a “real testing ground for development of new ideas and technology applicable to military problems which are likely to be facing us many times in the future.”66 The panel wanted to develop science and technology to fight guerilla wars. In late 1967, Hornig conveyed to McNamara his concern over both the decline in budget for tactical weapons R&D and “an inadequate rate of application of new technology to Vietnam.”67 In arguing for a stronger link between American science and technology and the military, Hornig and the PSAC ad hoc panel on Vietnam echoed the views of the science advisers in the 1950s. Just as Killian and Fisk called for the military to “strike deep roots in our civilian scientific community,” the Vietnam panel wanted “close coupling between the actual military problems in Vietnam and the nation’s scientific and technological effort.” In both cases, the science advisers labored in the shadow of science–government tension—it was McCarthyism and the Oppenheimer case in the 1950s, on the one hand, and the rising antiwar movement and campus unrest in the late 1960s on the other. Clearly not every member of PSAC, or of its panels, supported the Vietnam War, just as few approved of all the Cold War measures in the 1950s. Like PSAC members in the 1950s who questioned the military’s faith in nuclear technological superiority, their successors were skeptical of the Pentagon’s claims to winning the Vietnam War via air bombing. Yet, in both cases PSAC scientists advocated a strong science–military partnership as a necessity in terms of both science in policy—informed scientists needed to infl uence the course of the war—and policy for science to show the military utility of science and technology. Baldeschwieler, although not a full PSAC member yet, was one of the most active PSAC panel members on Vietnam in this period, and his experiences typified those of the younger scientists who saw the Vietnam War primarily as a technological challenge and paid little attention to the political dimensions of the confl ict, at least initially. Baldeschwieler was, like Hornig, a physical chemist by training and received tutoring in advising the military from Kistiakowsky when he was a young instructor in Harvard in the early 1960s. With an ROTC background and experience working in the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds, he soon rose to be a member of the Army Scientific Advisory Panel. In 1967, Hornig brought him into PSAC

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as a member of the ground warfare panel under Drell to work on several projects related to the Vietnam War. Aware of the strong antiwar sentiment at Stanford, where he had moved in 1965, Baldeschwieler kept “a low profile” and kept much of his work on Vietnam secret from all but a few students and colleagues. He was at the time, as he later recalled, “extraordinarily patriotic” and “extremely interested in the technology of unconventional warfare” in Southeast Asia. “My motivation was to make things work and I felt a bond with those poor guys in the mud.” Although he enjoyed the technical investigations—“flying back to Washington at least once a week”—he later recognized that “I was an utter neophyte in political and organizational area.”68 In other words, he shared with many other science advisers—Kistiakowsky, Wiesner, and York, for example—in placing their trust with the government and in maintaining a faith in technological solutions during their initial forays in Washington. The lure of technological solutions proved nearly irresistible. The danger, however, was not a fascination with the “technically sweet,” but a failure to question the ultimate objective of the technology, losing the “big picture” that mattered in the end.

Technological Dissent Even as Hornig, Baldeschwieler, and other PSAC scientists continued to focus most of their effort on finding technological solutions to the war, some veterans of PSAC began to question both the effectiveness and appropriateness of the approach. In February 1968, Wolfgang Panofsky, for example, wrote Hornig after attending a special PSAC meeting to express his concern over the direction taken by PSAC: I think it is essential that PSAC continue to steer a balanced course between being part of the “establishment” and advising the President and government on technical issues and being an independent voice of experienced, primarily academic scientists in matters affecting national policy. . . . To be blunt I feel that there is at least as great a need for PSAC to communicate technical facts which appear not to be known to the highest level so that they can infl uence policy as there is need to improve technical knowledge and competence in the military establishment as it relates to Viet Nam.69

What especially worried Panofsky was that PSAC seemed to be condoning or even itself pursuing the kind of technological fixes that the committee had fought against during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years: “I feel that PSAC will have to become even more than in the past the watchdog to limit the natural urge by a particular federal activity to exploit technology to its maximum in the interest of preserving greater values.”70 Clearly Panofsky discerned a shift in the ethos of PSAC from the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. Significant changes had taken place in the committee’s membership and its political context. Largely gone with the transition were veterans of the World War II generation who had participated in the debates over the use of the atomic bomb and the making of the H-bomb. Gone with them was also the

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large number of immigrant scientists who, according to Panofsky, had been more sensitive to the political dimensions of science and technology than their nativeborn colleagues.71 To I. I. Rabi, another PSAC veteran who had voiced skepticism about the electronic barrier, the younger generation had unduly limited their vision to the technical issues at hand, as he later recalled: I was sitting there and said this may stop the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but only push the war into Cambodia. . . . You’re extending the war. You are not going to stop it. I think that marked a difference. The younger group that came in did not have the views and objectives as the original group.72

Indeed, by the end of the Johnson administration, all PSAC members were LBJ’s own appointees and most of them belonged to the younger generation that grew up professionally in the post-World War II period. Several of the PSAC members under Johnson, such as Garwin, Drell, Marvin Goldberger, Gordon MacDonald, and Murray Gell-Mann, were also active in the Jason group and thus were experienced in dealing with controversies involving military R&D. Many of them, especially Goldberger in his capacity as president of the Federation of American Scientists, had campaigned alongside PSAC for the nuclear test ban in 1963. Few, however, had been tested in a national public controversy like the use of the atomic bomb or the making of the H-bomb. For them, the transformation from the technical to the political would take place during and after the Vietnam War in general and the electronic barrier experiment in particular. Another PSAC veteran went even further than Panofsky and Rabi in renouncing the effort of finding technological solutions to the Vietnam War. In late 1967, increasingly frustrated with Johnson’s policy, Kistiakowsky decided to sever all ties with the Pentagon as a protest against the continuation of the war. The news was first reported in Science in February 1968 and soon received nationwide publicity after it was picked up in the New York Times.73 Kistiakowsky took this unusual step after having worked on the barrier project full time for several months in 1967 in the hope of using it to deescalate the war, especially the bombing, in Vietnam. He was disgusted not only by the continuation of the bombing and the war, but also the apparent purge of those, such as McNamara, who came to question the war policy. As Kistiakowsky later recalled: [A]t the end of ’67, particularly after seeing that Mr. McNamara was essentially fired from his job, I reached the conclusion that it was completely futile to continue. At that point, I resigned, and resigned in what might be called a tactless way. In other words, I didn’t claim illness or family business or fatigue. I just wrote that I vehemently opposed the present Vietnam policy and could not be even a minor party to it anymore.74

It was the closest to a public moral stand against the Vietnam War that any scientist associated with PSAC took in this period. In a way, the situation resembled that following Oppenheimer’s security case in the 1950s. Even though there was no mass exodus of scientists from the government—Kistiakowsky himself advised his

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fellow advisers to stay on—his action sharpened their dilemma in dealing with an administration with whose policy many of them disagreed. Not a radical himself, Kistiakowsky’s action nevertheless helped pave the way for the emergence of such groups as the Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Action (SESPA, later renamed Science for the People), which, under the leadership of Charles Schwartz, criticized Jason and PSAC members for serving, wittingly or unwittingly, the military during the Vietnam War.75 For his part, Kistiakowsky decided, a few months after his break with the Pentagon, to seek a direct political solution to the Vietnam War. He helped organize the Scientific Advisory Board to Senator Eugene McCarthy, who was the first Democratic candidate to run against President Johnson for the party’s nomination on an antiwar platform. In this endeavor Kistiakowsky was joined by York, Purcell, and Zacharias, all fellow PSAC alumni and comrades from the Scientists for Johnson campaign four years earlier.76 Finally, as they had done in the debate over nuclear testing, they moved decisively beyond the technical and into the political in their effort to end the Vietnam War. Indeed, the two issues were not completely separated. To Kistiakowsky and fellow dissidents on Vietnam, no technological solution to the war appeared more menacing than an attempt to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. To their shock in early 1968, a senior U.S. general in Vietnam appeared to advocate exactly that. He reportedly threatened to deploy tactical nuclear weapons to relieve the U.S. forces in Khe Sanh, then under siege by North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive. The irony must have flashed through Kistiakowsky’s mind that four years earlier it was the fear of Goldwater’s use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam that had driven him to support Johnson. Greatly alarmed but lacking direct access to the Johnson White House, Kistiakowsky asked Rabi and Killian to join him in sending a telegram to Eisenhower asking him to intervene with Johnson against the deployment of nuclear weapons. Any such use would be disadvantageous to the United States, and “could lead to general nuclear war,” they warned the general. LBJ happened to be visiting with Eisenhower in Palm Desert, California, at the time and as a result of their discussion, Johnson asked McNamara to call the three scientists individually to assure them that there was no plan to use nuclear weapons.77 Gradually, Hornig and PSAC members, half of whom, according to York, were opposed to the war in private, also began to sound the alarm about the conduct of the war more loudly within the administration. Hornig often conveyed his and PSAC’s views to Johnson via memos and to McNamara during their biweekly luncheon meetings.78 In late 1966 and early 1967, for example, Hornig repeatedly voiced his concern over the Pentagon’s artificial rainmaking in Laos and Vietnam as a way to block the Ho Chi Minh trail. Although agreeing that the program was “technically sound” and thus acquiescing reluctantly to its going ahead, Hornig nevertheless saw serious political problems if it leaked to the public: the United States would be accused of initiating “a new type of warfare—meteorological warfare”—and thus opening a “‘Pandora’s box’ of threats to future civilization”; it would create a “revulsion” in the international meteorological community, inflame

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“our highly disaffected general scientific community,” and disrupt international cooperation in that field. The induced floods would, contrary to the Pentagon’s claim, “provide a hazard to life, health and sanitation” for civilians in Laos and Vietnam. He further doubted that the program, even if technically successful, would materially reduce the North–South transport of supplies. Finally, he worried about the “potential damage to our world position” as the country added another dubious “first” to its list of technological warfare that included “the atomic bomb, riot gases, defoliation, napalm.” It would make the United States look like “a nation flailing out with every tool at its disposal.”79 If Hornig felt so strongly about weather warfare, why did he acquiesce in it and not resign in protest? He probably recognized the futility of an open break with administration policy. Perhaps even more important, by then the science advisory system had become such a captive of the postwar science–state partnership, which it had helped to establish, that what was at stake was not only scientists’ position in the White House, but also the federal funding of science. In the end, Hornig’s misgivings barely dampened the technological enthusiasm in the Vietnam War machinery. His warnings only led to a tightening of secrecy in the weather warfare, which continued, even though it ultimately failed, as Hornig predicted, to make much of a difference in the war.80 A separate, smaller project to render the trail impassable by making soil sticky proved equally ineffective but it did not prevent William Sullivan, U.S. ambassador to Laos, from exclaiming that “chelation may prove better than escalation. Make mud, not war!”81 When Hornig opposed the Pentagon’s introduction of a powerful “fuel-air-explosive” because it might become, in the eyes of antiwar protesters, another “indiscriminate terror weapon” or example of “expanded chemical warfare,” John Foster, the DDRE, brushed aside the charge with the comment that “none of our weapons discriminate between friends and foe, unfortunately.”82 Clearly the days when the ODDRE worked together with PSAC and the science adviser to moderate the military technological momentum were over. Instead of applying checks to demands from the individual services, the ODDRE became the chief defender of the Pentagon’s technological turf. Like the Cambridge group, PSAC’s road toward dissent started with the question of the effectiveness of the bombing of North Vietnam. In July 1966, for example, its military aircraft panel reached a conclusion about the bombing campaign that was similar to that of the Jason group: [T]he Panel reviewed the most recent assessment of the effectiveness of air power in Vietnam. We were concerned that so many of the criteria by which progress is being measured relate to the magnitude of effort and reflect little consideration of the actual effect achieved.83

In other words, the bombing, although causing much destruction in the North, had not achieved its main objective of stopping the infiltration of supplies and personnel to the South. Following yet another meeting with Johnson on February 19, 1968, PSAC delved further into the question of the effectiveness of the bombing.84

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Its studies reinforced the committee’s strong skepticism toward the bombing campaign, and contributed to Johnson’s decision to halt the operation on March 31 (he also announced on that day that he would not run for reelection).85 PSAC tried to prolong the bombing pause. Its investigation found, for example, that bombing North Vietnam reduced only about 10 percent of the supplies that went to the South, because the North could rely on China to import much of its strategic materiel. The American interception rate was higher in Laos, reaching 25 percent, due to the absence of anti-air weapons by the North Vietnamese forces there. Conversely, the panel found that the cutback in bombing during the pause “did not measurably increase the enemy’s ability to move supplies.” Thus PSAC recommended against the resumption of bombing because it would not “significantly cut down” North Vietnam’s buildup. When Hornig presented the PSAC report to Johnson, the president’s first reaction was: “Are you saying that the Air Force has been lying to me” about its effectiveness in stopping the supplies?86 In the end, it was unclear how much PSAC contributed to Johnson’s decision to continue the bombing pause; it was at most one among several voices in that direction. Nevertheless, this PSAC study and those from the Jason group and others within the Pentagon made it increasingly clear that strategic bombing and other technological “trump cards” faced severe limitations in the Vietnam War.87 Even though Panofsky and other PSAC veterans must have welcomed PSAC’s return to its “watchdog” role in Vietnam War policy, its activist turn met with alarm from not only the Pentagon but also President Johnson’s pro-war advisers within the White House. Walter Rostow, for example, asked Johnson to limit PSAC’s policy role: I doubt the wisdom of launching PSAC further into the bombing business. For what it is worth, my own judgment is that they should be told to help the Department of Defense in rapidly applying science and technology to this field rather than continuing to try to operate as bombing analysts and policy makers.88

In other words, the prevailing view of scientists’ role in the Johnson White House returned to the pre-Sputnik days when Robert Cutler wanted them to be “on tap, but not on top” or to Gordon Gray’s admonition in 1958 that they restrict themselves to making technical contributions to security. The “electronic barrier” and other experiences during the Vietnam War, however, taught the younger generation of science advisers inside and outside PSAC that if they restricted themselves to technical solutions to military problems, they would likely be doing someone else’s bidding and serving the interest of neither science nor the country. How President Johnson felt about PSAC’s renewed desire to play a policy role is not clear, but there were indications that he was no more receptive to it than Rostow. According to Frederick Seitz, president of the NAS and a member of PSAC who had supported Johnson on the war, LBJ planned sweeping changes in his science advising setup had he run and won a second term.89 In the national trauma that marked American involvement in Vietnam under Johnson, PSAC and other scientists played only a small part. Yet, the confl ict cast

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a shadow on American science and society that surpassed even that of Sputnik. The war caused unprecedented division not only between the scientists and government officials, but also among the scientists. Even within the community of moderate scientists represented by PSAC, there were those, like Baldeschwieler, who tended to identify with the war and who found it imperative to work within the system and try to help win the war with their technological ingenuity, on the one hand, and those who, admittedly belatedly, questioned the conduct or the aim of the war, on the other. As the barrier and other projects demonstrated, PSAC scientists still hoped to infl uence policy through the use of their technical expertise and reputation, not, at least initially, moral or political appeals. Only a very few scientists associated with PSAC eventually opposed the war by joining their radical colleagues in denouncing it and withdrawing their technical assistance. As in the struggle for arms control, even though PSAC scientists were generally skeptical of technological solutions to political and social problems, they were not averse to using and even inventing technological fixes when they believed that such measures would help to moderate, instead of escalate, the war. In a way, they, like Oppenheimer in the early 1950s, succumbed to the allure of the “technically sweet.” Unfortunately for them, however, there seldom was an inherent distinction between these two kinds of military technologies, just as there was no clear-cut differentiation between offensive and defensive nuclear weapons. Once a technological scheme left their hands, the scientists could not always control the direction of its application.

The ABM Debate In contrast to their sometimes contradictory stands on military technology during the Vietnam War, PSAC scientists felt that they stood on firmer ground in the concurrent debate over the ABM, which they regarded as another example of a misguided technological fix to an international political problem. What drove them to oppose the ABM were not only the technical problems associated with a particular system, but a concern over the military and strategic implications of missile defense in general. Any ABM deployment would, they believed, destabilize the arms race with the Soviet Union, “[n]o matter how much we advertise the fact that the defense is directed at the Chinese,” as the PSAC’s strategic military panel, chaired by Goldberger, concluded in its October 1965 report on a proposal by the army to install an anti-Chinese “thin” ABM. The vicious cycle would accelerate as the Soviets and Americans tried to expand their missile forces to counter each other’s ABMs. In addition, because of the dynamics of the arms race and the military technological momentum, an ostensibly “thin” ABM system would likely escalate into “the single most complex military systems ever undertaken” in American history, involving huge expenditures, enormous organizations, and possibly renewed demand for a massive civil defense program.90 In any case, the proposed ABM, dubbed Nike X and under construction by Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL), was not appropriate in handling the perceived Chinese threat: it was overkill for the current, primitive Chinese nuclear force but inadequate in dealing with future

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Chinese improvements. The panel thus urged the Pentagon to explore alternatives, such as a simpler system with off-the-shelf components as a response to the Chinese threat, but, above all, to rely on its strategic offensive force as a deterrent. Finally, as a hedge against any Soviet ABMs, the panel advocated continuing R&D on ABMs, and “vigorously” increasing efforts on penetration aids. 91 Following PSAC’s traditional practice, the Goldberger panel ventured beyond the technical to comment on the international political dimensions of the ABM decision. It believed that an American anti-Chinese ABM might enhance, instead of diminish, China’s strategic status in the Asia-Pacific region. Allies might doubt the U.S. resolve to protect them if the United States appeared to retreat to its “Fortress America.” Again, as in the test ban debate, the Goldberger panel justified its consideration of both technical and political factors as integral parts of policymaking.92 Hornig forwarded the report to McNamara, noting that both he and the full PSAC endorsed it.93 The recommendation also received public support at a White House Conference on International Cooperation a few weeks later, when a committee on arms control and disarmament chaired by Wiesner publicly proposed a three-year moratorium on ABM deployment.94 As with the test ban, the ABM debate was not just over the merits of a particular technology, but over the potentials and limits of technological solutions to the Cold War and who got to decide on these issues. The Joint Chiefs of Staff vehemently disagreed with PSAC not only over its specific recommendations, but also over its attitude toward the role of technology in national security and the scientists’ role in defense policymaking. A simpler ABM system as suggested by PSAC would lead to an “inferior and inadequate system” without taking advantage of available technology, the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued, implicitly equating technological progress with national security. It also believed that PSAC underestimated the Chinese threat and overlooked “military and political considerations that go beyond the scope of scientific appraisal of the Nike X system.”95 Senator Henry Jackson, in his defense of the ABM, viewed the Cold War as a technological race where “the superior industrial and agricultural power of the West might yet be a trump card,” echoing the justification of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for massive bombing in North Vietnam.96 McNamara, however, was more sympathetic to PSAC’s position.97 In his memorandum to President Johnson on the FY 1967 DOD budget he recommended against the deployment of Nike X, even as he approved the continuation of a considerable R&D program.98

A White House Showdown The PSAC–McNamara technical-strategic argument prevailed in 1965–1966, but they knew that the pendulum could easily swing the other way under the pressure of domestic and international developments. Indeed, scientists were drawn back into the debate when McNamara disclosed, in early November 1966, that the Soviets had apparently deployed a missile defense system of its own.99 Like the Soviet announcement of nuclear test resumption in 1961, the news of the Soviet ABM quickly changed the dynamics of the debate. It galvanized the pro-ABM forces.

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George Romney, Republican governor of Michigan and potential presidential candidate, charged the Democratic administration of an ABM gap.100 The Joint Chiefs pressed their case during a crucial pre-Christmas meeting at the LBJ Ranch in Austin, Texas, despite McNamara’s continued opposition.101 Meanwhile Eisenhower advised Johnson to get advice from, among others, former presidential science advisers.102 All of these developments paved the way for a dramatic showdown between the science advisers and military leaders in the White House on January 4, 1967. Organized by McNamara, the meeting brought together the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all the former and current science advisers—James Killian, Kistiakowsky, Wiesner, and Hornig—and successive directors of defense research and engineering to debate the ABM in front of LBJ. The White House meeting revealed the depth of the disagreement between the scientific and the military leaders. At the outset of the meeting, McNamara presented three options, according to notes taken by Rostow: “do nothing;” “set up a limited so-called ‘thin’ system” to protect against Chinese missiles, accidentally launched missiles, nuclear blackmail, and to furnish additional protection for the Minuteman missiles; and “install a system capable of protecting our population against heavy sophisticated Soviet attack.” After the chiefs made their case for the third option to protect about twenty-five American cities, the scientists spoke strongly and unanimously against the “heavy” ABM and, to a lesser extent, against the “thin” system.103 The first two science advisers set the tone. Regarding an ABM race as “extremely dangerous,” Killian was “not persuaded about the need” for a thin system, although he recognized its political advantage in negotiating with the Soviets. Kistiakowsky went further by opposing any ABM deployment: a thin system would inevitably be expanded into a heavy one and radically accelerate the arms race. In addition, he doubted that the thin ABM would be effective even against the Chinese: “They would prove ingenious and could turn, for example, to submarine-launched delivery systems, or to a dirty bomb exploded, say, 50 miles off shore.” What the United States should undertake instead, he urged, was “a major diplomatic effort to persuade the Soviet Union to stand down” while continuing some ABM research for the purpose of bargaining with the Soviets. Confirming his reputation as a passionate advocate for arms control, Wiesner renounced the ABM completely. Missile defense, he asserted strikingly, would lead to “greater casualties in a nuclear war, not less,” because of the tendency of both sides to overbuild offensive forces to offset their opponents’ defense. Elaborating on the Goldberger panel report that he helped to draft, Wiesner argued that the United States could rely on “normal deterrence” in dealing with the Chinese threat. Noting that he had studied nuclear defense much of his mature life, he was now convinced that “in the game of nuclear deterrence, defense doesn’t work. The offense will always overcome.” Alone among all the scientists Wiesner opposed any form of ABM, even, apparently, R&D efforts. Opposition to the ABM continued with the last two scientists who spoke. Hornig, as the sitting science adviser, concurred with his predecessors on the anti-Soviet ABM, citing three PSAC studies that had recommended against it. As

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to the thin system, he did not see a need for it in countering Chinese nuclear force either, but he allowed that it might be useful for the other reasons McNamara mentioned or as a bargaining chip with the Soviets.104 York, then at the end of his second term on PSAC, joined Wiesner in categorically opposing both the heavy and thin ABM—“Let’s do nothing now.” Like Wiesner, York believed that an ABM would put more American lives at risk because it would intensify the arms race. He also warned against what he would later call “the fallacy of the last move”: “If the installation of our defensive system were the last move in the arms race, then, of course, less lives would be at risk. But that would not be the last move, and in the end, more U.S. lives would be in jeopardy.”105 York supported, however, “a very vigorous R&D effort” to create “a better potential ABM system” for the future when, presumably, arms control negotiations would have changed the dynamics of the arms race. For his part, McNamara demonstrated a profound ambivalence. On the antiSoviet ABM, he sided with the scientists by arguing that any protection would be offset by increased Soviet offense. He saw “marginal” ground for the deployment of an anti-Chinese thin ABM, to deter China from launching any ICBM attack on the United States in retaliation for American bombing in North Vietnam, or as a bargaining chip with the Soviets. However, he knew the danger of escalation: “once you start you are pregnant. It will be virtually impossible to stop.” By the end of the meeting, he joined Wiesner in arguing that “No defensive system could be effective.” On becoming the secretary of defense, he had been surprised to find that 85 to 95 percent of U.S. bombers could have penetrated Soviet defenses. He dismissed the Soviet ABM as making no military sense, representing only an “irrational bias towards defensive systems.” His equivocation did not help Johnson, who was baffled: “The Chiefs wish to go all the way; the scientists say No; but if we go we should go with a thin system because it might help our negotiations with the Soviet Union.” He thanked everyone and promised to take their views into consideration in making a decision. Somewhat reassured by McNamara’s opposition to the ABM, the scientists left the meeting feeling that their technological skepticism had carried the day.106 Outside of the White House, PSAC scientists’ opposition to the ABM aroused a backlash from the military establishment that echoed those from the debates over the nuclear-powered bomber, the nuclear test ban, and the bombing in Vietnam. Shortly after the January 4 meeting, General Nathan F. Twining, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly blasted what he called an “antinuclear clique of moralists, pacifists and academic dreamers,” naming, specifically, Wiesner. That coalition, he argued, had prevented technological advances, slowed weapons development, and weakened American nuclear deterrent. “These people may be sincere, concerned, and patriotic,” he allowed, “but they have never been able to acclimate themselves to the nuclear age.”107 Apparently even former weaponeers were not immune to accusations of being Luddites. Once again, as in the space debate, PSAC scientists were painted as a force of technological dissent out of touch with the age of technological enthusiasm.

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“Mad Momentum” Even more shocking to the science advisers than the attack from the military establishment was what came out of McNamara, their perceived ally in the ABM fight. Despite his forceful argument against missile defense at the White House meeting, McNamara’s agony continued as the pressure for at least a thin ABM mounted. He felt the stress not only for himself, but also for Johnson, who was still expected to run for reelection in 1968—“I didn’t like to face him with such a difficult choice.”108 The White House meeting with the scientists seemed to have bolstered McNamara’s resolve against ABM, but he knew that politically it was nearly impossible to stem the tide. As one of the largest and most complex weapons systems in American history, the Nike X ABM had behind it a huge military-industrial complex all of its own, involving, according to one report, about 3,000 companies that were putting pressure on the administration, especially through their congressional representatives, for its deployment.109 As McNamara explained to Johnson in a phone call following the meeting with the scientists: I still favor doing nothing as we initially recommended three or four weeks ago, but it would be a helluva political crisis if you did nothing. The forces pushing you to do something are very, very strong indeed. But I myself agree fully with Killian and the science advisers. I don’t think we’ll buy anything worth going ahead. But if we’re to go ahead, then I think the best thing to do is the “thin” system.110

Before giving in, however, McNamara tried a last-ditch effort to convince Johnson to fight the ABM momentum: LBJ: So what it adds up to is you’re against contingencies and really if you were in my position, you’d do nothing. McNamara: I guess, Mr. President, what I mean to say is that I’d go down fighting, and I’m damn sure I’d go down. [He laughs.] A lot easier for me to say. LBJ: Do you think that’s wiser for us to do? McNamara: Well, I don’t know, I don’t know.

McNamara, of course, did know that a fight over the ABM would be politically damaging to Johnson; it would upset the military and allow the Republicans to campaign on the ABM gap. It would disappoint powerful conservative Democrats as well. Senator Richard Russell, McNamara warned LBJ, “is just going to tear us apart this year,” demanding the ABM and “just a lot of other things.” McNamara urged Johnson to wage “a tremendous publicity campaign” with editors, scientists, and opinion leaders to win public support for a decision to do nothing on ABM, but he knew that he was probably engaged in wishful thinking. He could count on Hornig, PSAC, and much of the civilian leadership in the Pentagon to back him up but they could hardly hope to prevail.111 A final blow to McNamara came in June 1967 at a U.S.–Soviet summit in Glassboro, New Jersey, when he failed to convince

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the Soviet leadership about the urgency or even rationality of putting limits on defensive nuclear systems.112 Meanwhile, watching a Chinese propaganda film in March 1967 added a visceral dimension to McNamara’s perception of the Chinese nuclear threat. The film, recently captured by American intelligence agents, showed ecstatic Chinese reactions to nuclear tests in the country’s remote northwest, including scenes of cavalry rushing into the test site in the shadow of the mushroom cloud.113 McNamara was horrified that China treated the bomb as a “usable weapon”—“it just scared me to death,” he later recalled. When he brought the matter up at Glassboro, the Soviets responded: “If you’re worried about the Chinese reaction, how do you think we feel?” Ironically, the perceived Chinese threat had a paradoxical effect on the ABM negotiation: it might have made the Soviets more reluctant to give up their ABM but, in the long run, might have also contributed to a Soviet–American mutual understanding and common interest that aided their arms control efforts.114 Equally important, the Chinese film reinforced the image of Chinese leaders as irrational players in the use of nuclear weapons.115 Under these circumstances and facing renewed pressure from the military following Glassboro, McNamara decided, apparently on his own, in the summer of 1967, to announce a decision to go ahead with a thin ABM in a forthcoming speech in San Francisco.116 On August 2, Rostow conveyed the news to Johnson, “assuming you approve his recommended decision.”117 A week later, Rostow wrote Johnson again about a new intelligence estimate that indicated higher Soviet and Chinese nuclear capabilities. “The situation it describes is not alarming,” he told Johnson, “but I suspect it will be exploited as a political issue in 1968.” The president’s critics would charge that the Soviets were “closing our nuclear superiority gap,” and so Rostow recommended that “you may wish to begin to work out with Bob McNamara how we deal with the political problem which may arise.” LBJ wrote on the memo: “Ask him [McNamara] to do this,” meaning, presumably, the ABM deployment. Two days later, Rostow added “8/10/67 done by WWR.”118 Rostow’s intervention on Johnson’s behalf no doubt helped McNamara’s position amidst opposition within the administration.119 This examination of the ABM decision making demonstrated the marginal position of PSAC in strategic policy by the late Johnson administration. It confirms the long-held belief that the Johnson administration decided to deploy the thin ABM mainly on domestic political grounds, even though it also indicates that McNamara’s part was more complicated than that of an innocent victim of LBJ maneuvers. Johnson did infl uence McNamara’s decision, first implicitly by declining to take up his challenge to “go down fighting,” and then apparently explicitly through Rostow, but it is also clear that the secretary of defense harbored profound ambivalence on the issue on his own and was not nearly as sanguine over the Chinese nuclear threat as the scientists thought. For their part, PSAC scientists were left out of the final process of the ABM decision because the decision was viewed largely as a political, not a technical, issue. Keeny did make a last-minute effort

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behind the scenes to stem the tide on ABM, but the most he could do was to help moderate the draft of the McNamara speech.120 Despite their lack of input in the final decision, the science advisers and DDREs nevertheless figured prominently in McNamara’s San Francisco speech. Speaking eloquently about the folly of the arms race, including missile defense, McNamara named the seven scientists and disclosed that they had “unanimously” recommended against a heavy, anti-Soviet ABM, with which he agreed. Yet, “[h]aving said that,” McNamara declared that a thin system could protect the American ICBMs and fend off a possible Chinese attack on American cities. Echoing Wiesner, he acknowledged that “China has been cautious to avoid any action that might end in a nuclear clash with the United States,” and that the United States, if provoked, could destroy “completely” the Chinese nuclear forces and “devastate her society.” But he evoked the “crazy Chinese” argument—“China might miscalculate” and might resort to “irrational behavior”—to support his decision.121 As he went ahead with the $5 billion thin ABM, McNamara also tried to forestall the $40 billion heavy, anti-Soviet ABM that he knew would be pushed by the military-industrial complex. “There is a kind of mad momentum intrinsic to the development of all new nuclear weaponry,” McNamara warned in his speech. “The danger in deploying this relatively light and reliable Chinese-oriented A.B.M. system is going to be that pressures will develop to expand it into a heavy Sovietoriented A.B.M. system.”122 That was, of course, the intention of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from the beginning and it seemed to be getting its way. On November 14, McNamara officially announced the renaming of the anti-Chinese ABM as Sentinel, retaining the name Nike X for an R&D program on a heavy ABM.123 The pregnancy that McNamara had warned about in the White House meeting was indeed underway. As expected, McNamara’s ABM announcement triggered a national controversy. Many recognized it as a transparently politically motivated decision. The New York Times editorialized that “Mr. Johnson has thrown a $5 billion fish to the cats,” but “will it quiet the country’s military-industrial complex and its Congressional spokesmen?”124 Remarkably and unusually, the frail Eisenhower, now increasingly celebrated by antiwar protesters for his warning against the military-industrial complex, spoke out against the anti-Chinese ABM. In an interview published in Vista, magazine of the United Nations Association of the United States, the former president questioned the value of the thin ABM in protecting the United States and warned about the inevitable escalation of its cost.125 For their part, some of the science advisers felt betrayed by McNamara: he cited in his speech only their argument against the heavy but not those against the thin ABM, giving the impression that they had all supported the latter. Judging from the Rostow notes of the meeting, it is clear that only Killian and Hornig had grudgingly allowed for some form of a thin ABM deployment, whereas Kistiakowsky, Wiesner, and York were against any ABM deployment. Even the former had supported a thin ABM not as a defense against a Chinese attack, but as a bargaining chip with

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the Soviets, which McNamara did not mention in his speech. According to Killian, McNamara had called all the scientists from the White House meeting individually in advance of his speech to assure them that “he was not seeking to give an indication that we were supporting his changed position.”126 But Wiesner, at least, recalled being “greatly surprised” by McNamara’s speech and its “extremely misleading” representation of the scientists’ views.127 Kistiakowsky publicly denied that he supported the decision to deploy the Sentinel system. Likewise, Hans Bethe, who had worked on the ABM problem as a member of the PSAC military strategic panel for many years, was “profoundly shocked” by McNamara’s speech and disappointed that PSAC was not consulted on the decision.128 Once again, as in the case of the electronic barrier for the Vietnam War, scientists felt that their technological advice and input were abused by the administration. A desire to work within the system and stay in the channels had led them to collaborate with McNamara on both the Vietnam War and the ABM, but now they felt that they needed to speak out as citizens, not remain silent as privileged insiders.

“No Technical Escape” The national debate over the Sentinel ABM that followed McNamara’s speech marked the first time in the post-Sputnik era when leading American science advisers to the government began to voice their dissent on a major military-technological project in public. Bethe had criticized, mildly in 1960, what he perceived as the Eisenhower administration’s lack of courage in the pursuit of a nuclear test ban, and then, more directly in 1962, the military’s push for nuclear weapons development in general.129 The scientists were engaged in organized lobbying on nuclear weapon issues during the 1963 debate over the ratification of the limited test ban, but in this case most of the insider scientists were speaking out for an administration policy. The Sentinel debate in 1967–1968 led several prominent scientists who were still part of the PSAC circle of science advising to break with the administration openly on a major, specific weapons system on which they had offered advice. Wiesner hesitated before speaking out on the ABM. Having always worked within the system through his involvement in PSAC and as the science adviser, he was concerned both about his own continuing infl uence as an adviser to the government and about possible negative impact on PSAC (if not MIT) if he voiced criticism of administration policy. Yet, convinced that the ABM decision would trigger a new round in a vicious arms race, Wiesner decided to articulate his reasons for opposing Sentinel’s deployment in an article for Look magazine in November 1967. In it, Wiesner called the logic of the ABM decision “mighty tortured,” and predicted that the system would be regarded as ineffective even before it was installed. He discounted the fear of the “irrational or unstable” Chinese, arguing, once again, that “[a]lthough the words of China’s leaders have been inflammatory in the extreme, in action, they have been exceedingly cautious.” He further noted that China had renounced first-use of nuclear weapons and had shown “signs of a growing sophistication in nuclear matters,” probably as a result of learning more

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about the destructive power of these weapons. Thus he urged that the United States do with China what it had done with the Soviet Union: accept and rely on deterrence while seeking a political solution through arms control and disarmament. “There is no magical or technical escape from the dilemma of the nuclear age through defense,” he concluded.130 Once again, as in the debates over the H-bomb, civil defense, and the test ban, PSAC scientists clashed not only with the military-industrial complex, but also politically conservative fellow scientists in the ABM debate. At a gathering in New York in November 1967, for example, Alvin Weinberg, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a former PSAC member whose views on nuclear weapons were often closer to that of Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner than his colleagues on the committee, clashed with I. I. Rabi over the ABM. Whereas Weinberg extolled the benefits of an ABM in reducing the nuclear threat and ending the arms race, Rabi called it “political madness and technically unsound.”131 Similar scenes were played out in numerous scientific meetings and conferences across the country. Many American scientists associated with PSAC saw misguided technological enthusiasm as the driving force behind both the ABM and the Vietnam decisions. Wiesner, for example, believed that “this [ABM] decision could be as wrong and have as serious domestic and international consequences as the disastrous conclusion six years ago that a few military advisers and some weapons would lead to an early victory for South Vietnam’s forces.”132 Likewise, Richard Garwin and Hans Bethe, two other members of the PSAC strategic military panel that had recommended against the ABM in 1965, warned that the anti-Chinese ABM “will nourish the illusion that an effective defense against ballistic missiles is possible.” To prevent such illusion, they saw a need for open discussion and careful evaluations of both the potentials and limits of military technology, in this case ABM technology, in the making of a sound policy.133 Thus they justified their speaking out on the ABM—in the form of an article on “Antiballistic Missile Systems” in the March 1968 issue of Scientific American—as a necessity for the workings of the democratic process: “In the area of strategic weapons, a common understanding of the major elements and technical possibilities is essential to an informed and reasoned choice by the people, through their government, of a proper course of action.” Compared with Wiesner’s, their article presented a much more technically detailed and sophisticated, and therefore more infl uential, argument against the ABM, although they were careful to note that they were using only “nonsecret information.”134 Once again, as Kistiakowsky did in the debate over the Vietnam War, Wiesner, Garwin, Bethe, and their supporters, frustrated over the distortion and suppression of their input, decided to voice their skepticism publicly in hope of infl uencing the nuclear arms race from the outside. In July 1968, Bethe, Kistiakowsky, Wiesner, and York took another unprecedented step for former PSAC members when they sent a telegram to sympathetic senators urging the delay of Sentinel deployment “for a year or more.”135 It, among other things, stirred a bitter debate in the Senate between the liberal Senator

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William Fulbright, who opposed the ABM, and his conservative colleague Senator Russell, who openly advocated an anti-Soviet heavy ABM. Fulbright was especially incensed over the fact that no outside scientist critics testified in Russell’s Armed Services Committee hearings on ABM. When Russell responded that “they did not request to come before the committee,” a floodgate was opened: The FAS quickly wrote Russell to request “the opportunity to provide witnesses to testify at any further hearings” on ABM.136 By the end of 1968, Congress was on the verge of calling in, for the first time in the nuclear age, scientists from outside of the government to testify on a specific, major nuclear weapons system. Open dissent by these former PSAC members would soon help turn the ABM controversy into a second scientists’ movement and a national debate over nuclear weapons.137

The End of the Golden Era By the end of the Johnson administration, the debates over the Vietnam War and the ABM not only created tension in the science–government relationship, but accompanied a closing of the golden era of the post-Sputnik boom in federal funding of science. The squeeze on science funding would probably have come without the Vietnam War. The rate of the post-Sputnik boom (15 percent annual increase in R&D funds) was simply not sustainable. As Hornig himself acknowledged, had the trend continued, eventually “every man, woman, and child in the United States [will be] doing research.”138 But there was no doubt that the war did hasten the leveling off of science funding, and the rancorous debates over both the war and the ABM compounded the fiscal pain for everybody involved. In 1966, for example, congressional actions reduced Johnson’s FY 1967 request of a 10 percent increase in funds for academic research to 6 percent. The picture got only worse in the next two years: Congress reduced the FY 1968 request of an 11 percent increase to less than 2 percent and threatened to turn a 13 percent boost to a net loss for FY 1969.139 The crisis in federal funds for science meant that the science advisers had to fight battles not only over science in policy but also policy for science. As federal money tightened, the NAS finally entered national science policy to suggest priorities within various scientific fields.140 Its efforts were helpful but still could not prepare the scientific community for the first cutbacks in federal funds in a decade. Beginning in 1967, federal R&D expenditure leveled off at about $16 billion, and decreased in the next several years. Funds for basic research followed a similar curve and remained static at about $2 billion in current dollars and less in constant dollars.141 Compared with the R&D cut in the mid-1950s, this retrenchment hit universities all the harder because it followed on the heels of a spectacular boom. The fl uctuations threatened national security, McNamara testified in Congress. He asked for an increase in defense funding for research from $371 million in 1967–1968 to $450 million for 1968–1969. His argument confirmed PSAC’s longtime conviction that the military needed to support academic scientists not for their particular research findings, but for their expertise, the building of which required continuity of effort. “In fact, without such continuity, we cannot expect to retain their interest in our problems.”142 Once again, the DuBridge–Rabi–Killian

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doctrine on the necessity of the military keeping in touch with scientists came back to prominence when arguments of national prestige and even utility receded in importance. Not everyone in the Pentagon, however, was as sympathetic to the scientists as McNamara. Even as McNamara appealed to Congress for increased support for academic science, some of his managers of research contracts decided to confront those scientists who publicly opposed the war. In 1967 and 1968, 345 mathematicians signed a paid advertisement in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society advising job seekers to “regard yourself as responsible for the uses to which your talents are put.” “We believe this responsibility forbids putting mathematics in the service of this cruel war,” it concluded. As a result, the Army Research Office and the Office of Naval Research sent letters to several of the signers of the statement that they might find their funding from these agencies terminated, as a mutually acceptable solution “consistent with both our positions.”143 Uproar ensued from many scientists and their congressional supporters. Although a memorandum from John Foster, the DDRE, softened the threatening tone of these warnings—he asked program managers to try to “preserve our mutually beneficial relationships with the academic research community” in their review of contracts—this incident clearly illustrated that the military–science partnership that PSAC had long labored to maintain was strained in terms of both science in policy and policy for science.144 It also indicated that not just PSAC but rank-and-file scientists found that they were, in a way, trapped politically by their dependence on military funding. The Pentagon–scientists clashes also fueled the long-brewing congressional debate over military funding of science. In early October 1968, Senator Mike Mansfield proposed and the Senate passed his amendment to the 1969 Defense Appropriations Act to limit indirect costs (“overhead”) that recipients of defense research grants and contracts could charge to 25 percent of the direct costs, which came as a shock to universities used to rates ranging from 30.5 percent for Columbia to an astounding 80 percent for Princeton. Mansfield’s move was in part a response to criticism that high overheads favored elite, private universities on the coasts, at the expenses of smaller, land-grant institutions in the South and Midwest. More significantly, Mansfield and his supporters regarded it as a way to demilitarize American science. He would rather see academic science draw funding from civilian agencies like the NSF, whose “primary purpose [was] the improvement and furtherance of higher education” and “educational freedom.” Although some university administrators might be sympathetic toward Mansfield’s intention, most of them feared, like DuBridge in the 1950s, that the measure would push them over the brink of bankruptcy.145 In a letter to Mansfield, Hornig argued that the existing system, first implemented in the mid-1960s, had worked well and the new policy would be “contrary to the best interests of the government and the country as a whole.”146 Partly due to such lobbying, the amendment was deleted during the House–Senate conference. However, conferees did pass a resolution asking for studies on the matter of

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overheads not only in Defense but in the “entire Government.” Mansfield was not done with the matter of military funding of science.147 Ironically, in view of Mansfield’s hope to shift federal science funding from the Pentagon to the NSF, the latter also suffered reduction in its FY 1969 budget, which threatened to interrupt many of its multiyear grants already made to universities. Hornig, on the eve of his departure from the White House, found himself in the same position as Kistiakowsky in 1959—trying desperately to raise the budget of the NSF. Pleading directly to President Johnson, Hornig argued that the “good faith” of the U.S. government was at stake and that he would be happy “to nominate candidates for a $40 million cut from other agencies” to fill the NSF’s gap. To persuade LBJ, Hornig tried both honey and vinegar: “Mr. President, so much has been accomplished during your administration that I think it would be a mistake to allow your successor to take the role of ‘rescuer of science’ for what is peanuts in the total budget.” PSAC added its own separate appeal to Johnson to stem “a deepening crisis.”148 Johnson thought Hornig “grossly overstated” his case, but agreed to grant an increase to the NSF budget when the BOB, at Hornig’s urging, also pitched in.149 Once again, the incident demonstrated that if PSAC had any parochial interest in the federal government, it was the NSF. However, the special relationship was maintained at a cost to the science advisers because it reinforced the growing perception around the White House that they were more spokesmen for science than dedicated servants to the president. The problem of dual allegiance intensified. The partnership between American science and government, as PSAC best symbolized, clearly weakened during the late Johnson years. As Don K. Price pointed out in his presidential address at the AAAS meeting in Dallas in December 1968, American scientists faced challenges from both conservative critics and young romantic rebels.150 Hornig, in his own address at the meeting, deplored the failure of the scientific community to communicate the significance of scientific research to the public. He called for measures, such as the establishment of a Department of Science, to represent the voice of science and manage those science programs not directly related to the missions of agencies, and the strengthening of the presidential science advisory system.151 However, the DST drew little support either among the scientists or in the government. As the Vietnam War continued to polarize the country and drove a countercultural challenge to the establishment, and even to science and rationality, American public scientists who took on the job of defending science found that the post-Sputnik golden era had gone and an uncertain new age began to take shape.

The 1968 Election The dismal prospect of science funding weighed on scientists’ minds during the 1968 presidential election, even though the debates over the Vietnam War and the ABM dominated their public discussion. As in the 1964 campaign, liberal PSAC alumni helped organize active political groups, this time to defeat President Johnson. In December 1967, a group of prominent academic scientists and scholars,

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including former PSAC members Purcell and Zacharias, announced their opposition to LBJ by supporting the candidacy of Eugene McCarthy. The Scientists and Engineers for McCarthy’s ad urged a redirection of national efforts away from the Vietnam War and toward solving domestic problems, including the shortage of funding for science. The name of the group was deliberately chosen to send a message to Johnson, according to Purcell: “We were all for you then. We’re not now. It isn’t we that have changed.”152 The scientists’ opposition probably played only a very minor role in Johnson’s decision to withdraw from the race, but his memory of their voracious campaign against Goldwater in 1964 certainly did not make running against them appealing. Scientists for McCarthy continued to gather momentum even after LBJ’s withdrawal. By May 1968, it reached a membership of 5,000, with an elite science advisory board that featured several of the leaders of the 1964 Scientists for Johnson campaign, including Kistiakowsky and York.153 Wiesner did not formally endorse McCarthy but worked to help the senator’s campaign behind the scenes on arms control issues.154 Remarkably, few prominent scientists endorsed Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s candidacy during the primary, chiefly due to his refusal to disavow Johnson’s Vietnam War policy. An early supporter, Philip Handler, chairman of the National Science Board and a former member of PSAC, withdrew his name shortly before the Democratic convention. He did so on the grounds that he now regarded group endorsements of candidates by scientists “ill advised” and divisive in the scientific community, and that as chairman of board for the nonpartisan NSF it was inappropriate for him to engage in partisan politics.155 However, his stand proved more the exception than the rule as scientists actively participated in election politics. When the chaotic Democratic convention in Chicago resulted in the selection of Humphrey as the party’s nominee, his ambiguity on the Vietnam War once again kept away many prominent scientists, such as Kistiakowsky and York, who were otherwise attracted to his candidacy. Others were more appreciative of his strengths and understanding of his dilemma. His interest in science and his record on arms control, including support for a comprehensive nuclear test ban, won him several key scientific backers. These included Hornig, who predicted that Humphrey’s election would give the “government scientific machinery the lift that a good coach does a football team,” and Bethe and Wiesner, who believed that Humphrey would try to end the Vietnam War once he was elected president.156 By the time of the election, both Humphrey and his Republican rival Richard Nixon formed their own scientist groups. Humphrey’s grew to be a formidable who’s who of American scientific leadership, including no fewer than eleven Nobel winners, seventy-six members of the NAS, and about a dozen former PSAC members. Even those who declined to join the Humphrey group formally (e.g., Kistiakowsky and Purcell) declared publicly that they would vote for him, largely on his arms control credentials.157 On the GOP side, Strauss and Teller organized a far smaller group of scientists, engineers, and executives for Nixon, mostly associated with the military-industrial complex.158 Not surprisingly, in contrast to the Humphrey

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group’s emphasis on arms control, the Nixon camp vowed to build up American defense R&D, citing a “research gap” with the Soviet Union.159 In return, Wiesner characterized the Strauss committee as the “dinosaur wing of the scientific community” intent on fanning the nuclear arms race.160 Once again, it was doubtful that scientists made any major difference in the outcome of the election, but their involvement did further politicize and polarize the scientific community.

Conclusion As 1968, the most tumultuous year in recent American history, and the Johnson administration, drew to a close, with the election of Nixon, the relationship between American science and the government came near a breaking point. The twin pillars that had formed the foundation of PSAC scientists’ participation in public policy—federal support of basic research and nuclear arms control—came under attack from many fronts. The former was weakened by both a growing demand in the Johnson White House and in Congress for practical applications as well as the inevitable budgetary cutback in federal science funding that accompanied the escalating Vietnam War, whereas the latter was threatened by the prospect of a new, more deadly round of the nuclear arms race fueled by the pursuits of ABM. Ironically the relaxation of the Cold War tension that followed the signing of the Limited Test Ban treaty also threatened to undermine PSAC scientists’ strategy of linking basic research with national security or national prestige. Their criticism of the ABM and eventually of the Vietnam War was based on their long-held beliefs about the limits of technological solution to international politics, but it not only failed to stop these Cold War ventures; it also caused a backlash that threatened to further marginalize their role in national security policymaking. Even though Hornig and currently serving PSAC members tried to voice their views within the system and tried to infuse a certain technological rationality into the management of the war, the outspoken opposition to the administration policy by former members of PSAC—in essence, Eisenhower’s PSAC—inevitably began to taint the committee itself with a color of dissent, particularly in the eyes of the White House and the national security establishment. Thus, PSAC, together with the rest of the scientific community, entered the Nixon years, once again, as in the pre-Sputnik days, with grave concern over both the health of American science and the course of the Cold War.161

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The Politics of Technological Dissent under Nixon, 1969–1973

Surprisingly, when Richard M. Nixon won the presidential election in 1968, the troubled relationship between American science and the government seemed to take a turn for the better. To the delight of many scientists who had opposed him during the election, Nixon not only called for increased and stable support of basic research, but also selected Lee A. DuBridge, retiring president of Cal Tech and former chairman of the ODM-SAC, as his science adviser. Nixon took other wellpublicized steps to improve his image within the scientific community: he restored $10 million to the NSF’s budget ceiling and met with the National Science Board during his first month in office.1 Yet, no sooner did the honeymoon begin than it was over. Before long, DuBridge left the White House in a less than happy mood; his successor, Edward David, Jr., scarcely fared better. In 1973, Nixon summarily abolished both the OST and PSAC, thus ending an era in the history of the relationship between American science and the government. What led to this turn of events? The open clashes between PSAC (and other American scientists) and the Nixon administration over the war in Vietnam and controversies over technological policies, such as the ABM and the Supersonic Transport (SST), in this period certainly aggravated a fragile relationship, but was there more behind the force that drove scientists out of the White House? To what extent, for example, was PSAC scientists’ technological skepticism viewed as a form of dissent by the Nixon administration in its search for technological solutions for myriad social problems? This chapter charts the deterioration of the science–state relationship that eventually led to the demise of PSAC and explores the changes in the broader social and political environment—in terms of both science in policy and policy for science—that underlay this process.

The Honeymoon The hostility between Nixon and the liberal scientific leadership can be traced at least to the McCarthy era in the early 1950s when Nixon thrived on anti-communism. In 1954, for example, he publicly boasted of getting the secretary of the Navy to suspend the security clearance of Edward U. Condon, a prominent physicist.2 In the 1960 election, as we have seen, no current or former members of Eisenhower’s PSAC publicly endorsed his vice president but several joined the Kennedy camp. Glenn T. Seaborg, the one PSAC member who was listed by Newsweek as one of “Nixon’s idea men,” actually was a lifelong Democrat and voted for Kennedy.3 Teller was among a very few prominent scientists who supported Nixon in both 1960 and 1968.4 287

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Following the 1968 election, Nixon tried to improve his image by wooing the scientific and academic community. His early announcement of the DuBridge appointment brought a collective sigh of relief among scientists who had feared that he would pick, as rumored, Willard F. Libby, the politically conservative chemist then at UCLA.5 Nixon also publicly endorsed DuBridge’s statement that he would make the strengthening of American science his “first interest,” adding that he wanted DuBridge to bridge the gap between the scientists and the politicians.6 He even promised to meet with DuBridge once a week for half an hour and authorized him to attend cabinet and Urban Affairs Council meetings.7 For another key science appointment, Nixon retained Glenn Seaborg as AEC chairman.8 By the end of his first one hundred days in office, Nixon had not only supported the NSF with a boost in its budget ceiling and a meeting with the National Science Board, but also planned a meeting with the Council of the NAS.9 Nixon won further approval from the scientific community early in his presidency when he established the EPA, renounced the first use of chemical warfare, and announced a complete ban of biological warfare in response to a campaign by Matthew Meselson of Harvard and other scientists with close ties to PSAC. In a public statement on chemical and biological weapons, Nixon acknowledged the contributions “from the scientific community through the President’s Science Advisory Committee” and claimed, in language strikingly similar to that of Oppenheimer’s GAC in its advice against the H-bomb, that “By the example we set today, we hope to contribute to an atmosphere of peace and understanding between nations and men.” Ironically, it took a Cold Warrior to set a precedent of unilateral disarmament. Scientists applauded these moves as wise decisions to curb the harmful effects of technological excesses.10 To many scientists, there appeared indeed to be a “new Nixon,” reasonable, not overtly partisan, and presidential. Nixon’s honeymoon with science in turn boosted the status of the science adviser’s office as it continued to take on important new responsibilities, especially in the area of the environment. During his confirmation hearings as director of the OST, DuBridge told the senators that he had three priorities: analysis of weapons systems, the environment, and the utilization of science and technology in the government.11 The Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969, a major milestone in modern environmental history, soon gave special meaning to the environmental role of the science adviser. The disaster started on January 29, when a Union Oil Company platform six miles from shore in the Santa Barbara Channel experienced a blowout. Natural gas and oil shot out from a drill hole. As workers tried to cap the hole, pressure built up under the ocean floor and eventually several breaks in a fault burst out with oil and tar from deep beneath the earth. In eleven days, it blanketed 800 square miles of the channel and thirty-five miles of the scenic Santa Barbara coastline, devastating fish and wildlife in the area.12 Stewart Udall, secretary of the interior under Kennedy and Johnson who blamed himself for authorizing the drilling project, called it the “conservation Bay of Pigs.”13 The Santa Barbara oil spill had a profound impact not only on American environmental policy but also on the broader discourse on science, technology, and

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the environment. By attracting national and international attention, the oil spill, like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, raised the American public’s environmental consciousness; on its first anniversary in 1970 Earth Day was born. It also made the environment a prominent political issue. In the White House, President Nixon put DuBridge in charge of an investigation of the oil spill and later made him executive secretary of a new, cabinet-level Environmental Quality Council, chaired by Nixon himself. “We have become victims of our own technological genius,” Nixon announced. Interestingly, the Nixon statement, which DuBridge probably helped to draft, blamed “technological development” for creating some of the problems but put his faith in “scientific developments which will help us protect our resources.”14 Such expressions were close to PSAC’s own articulation of how basic research could help alleviate technological deficiencies and excesses. Although these gestures by Nixon were calculated as much for political gains as for real improvements, they raised hope, within PSAC and elsewhere, for reducing the gap between government and science. In early 1969, Science reported that the president seemed to have accorded “uncommon respect and access” to his science adviser.15 At a press conference on February 13, 1969 in the White House, DuBridge, encouraged by all the positive developments, declared his desire to heal the “breaches” between the Pentagon and the academic and scientific communities. Despite the protest of 182 graduate students and faculty members from MIT, who urged him to bring science closer to the civilian, not military, federal agencies, DuBridge obviously had not wavered from his beliefs, last expressed in his capacity as ODM-SAC chairman in the 1950s, that a close science–military partnership was mutually beneficial.16

“This is War” The reignited ABM controversy, however, soon dashed any such hope for a harmonious science–government partnership. On March 14, 1969, three days before a scheduled meeting with PSAC, Nixon announced that he would replace Lyndon Johnson’s Sentinel ABM system with the so-called Safeguard system, shifting the objective from the protection of the population to the security of retaliatory forces on land, and moving ABM sites from cities to places near ICBM silos.17 The modifications mollified community opposition around Sentinel sites in several major cities, but they failed to address scientists’ concerns, both inside and outside of PSAC, about the technical feasibility of Safeguard, which used essentially the Sentinel hardware, and its destabilizing effects on the nuclear arms race. What further irritated Nixon’s critics was the fact that few scientists outside of the Pentagon, including PSAC members, were consulted during the monthlong review leading up to the decision. Several PSAC alumni began to speak out publicly against Nixon’s Safeguard proposal. The debate once again brought the relationship between scientists and the government back to a tense standoff, with grave implications for the fate of PSAC.18 Even before Nixon made his ABM announcement Killian, Kistiakowsky, and York had appear before Senator Albert Gore’s Subcommittee on Disarmament

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of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to make their case against Sentinel, and after the Safeguard decision, they continued to oppose the new version. It marked the first time that scientists who were former insiders at the highest level in government spoke out publicly against a major weapons system in testimony in Congress.19 Later, Wiesner and Hornig also testified before the Gore subcommittee against Safeguard, making the former science advisers’ opposition to ABM unanimous. Fighting these PSAC alumni on the witness stand were Teller and Wigner, who argued that the United States needed the ABM to counter Soviet buildup in ICBM.20 The ABM became a prominent national issue in early 1969, second only to the Vietnam War. This was especially true for scientists, whose conferences featured debates on ABM, anti-ABM petitions, and in the case of the American Physical Society’s 1969 meeting, a protest march to the White House.21 On March 4, universities throughout the country organized a daylong research stoppage, initiated by faculty and graduate students at MIT, to debate science’s ties with the military, scientists’ social responsibilities, and the nuclear arms race, in particular the ABM issue.22 At a rally at MIT, Bethe told the audience, half-jokingly, that “You’re here because you’re against the ABM. I’m here to tell you why you are.”23 In Washington, the Council for a Livable World, an arms control political action committee founded by Leo Szilard, organized educational seminars for senators on ABM.24 The FAS remobilized itself to a degree not seen since the Scientists’ Movement for civilian control of atomic energy in the mid-1940s and its drive for the ratification of the limited test ban in 1963. It orchestrated, for example, the appearance before the Gore Subcommittee of the several former PSAC members, including York, chairman of the FAS at the time. Star-studded with many prominent former PSAC members, the FAS became the PSAC in exile.25 The ABM debate in Congress turned out to be as much about the decision-making process as about the decision itself. Anti-ABM senators, especially Fulbright, sharply criticized the Nixon administration for failing to consult non-Pentagon scientists. At one point, David Packard, deputy secretary of defense, mentioned Wolfgang Panofsky as an outside scientist to whom he had talked about the ABM decision. A few days later, however, Panofsky testified that Packard’s supposed consultation with him was in fact no more than a chance encounter at an airport. After such a devastating refutation of the Packard story, Panofsky went on to give what became widely acknowledged as the most convincing argument against the deployment of Safeguard at the time: he endorsed the objective of defending the U.S. deterrent but questioned Safeguard’s technical maturity, effectively reinforcing an argument made earlier by Bethe.26 Later, Detlev Bronk, another scientist supposedly consulted by the Pentagon, wrote Gore that he heard reports on the ABM only as a consultant at large of PSAC and felt “dangerously unqualified” to testify on it.27 As the hearings went on, Fulbright and several of his colleagues in Congress became convinced more than ever that the military-scientific complex was working against the nation’s best interest. Ironically, the linkage between science and

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national security that Killian and several PSAC members had advocated in the 1950s might have worked too well. Yes, military funding of science ensured a ready supply of science advice and science advisers to the Pentagon, but where could Congress find independent scientists to give an unbiased evaluation of the DOD’s proposals for new weapons systems? To Fulbright and other critics, military support of basic research served to corrupt science instead of providing the leverage point from which an alert citizenry could counterbalance the military-technological momentum, as Eisenhower and PSAC had originally hoped. In addition, the secrecy requirements for military-sponsored projects meant that sometimes even university presidents could not be privy to the nature of faculty contracts they were approving. Such an incident actually happened, ironically, to Malcolm Moos, who had helped draft Eisenhower’s farewell speech warning about the military-industrial complex. In 1967, as newly appointed president of the University of Minnesota, he was asked to approve “on faith” a project without being given details of it; only from a newspaper report did he learn that it dealt with methods of interrogating prisoners of war. Moos objected to it as a secret project but the regents overruled him. When the news reached Eisenhower, he saw in it an ominous confirmation of his fear about the government control of universities that he had so often voiced to ODM-SAC and PSAC scientists in the 1950s.28 Both the ABM debate and the death of the former president in late March 1969 helped rekindle discussion of the military-industrial complex. Senator Fulbright proposed to cut off all DOD funds for basic research unrelated to its mission.29 When the amendment, which eventually assumed the name of its other champion, Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield, passed in late 1969, the science in policy was once again linked to policy for science.30 Intended to avert the militarization of American science and society, the Mansfield Amendment, however, ironically, compounded the plights of science. Nixon, by now soured by scientists’ opposition to his ABM decision, ordered other agencies, including the NSF, not to pick up what the DOD dropped.31 The ABM battle drove a deep wedge between the Nixon administration and his science advisers. Although previous studies and memoirs by participants all indicated the damaging effects of the ABM debate on the science advising process, the full extent of Nixon’s personal disaffection with the scientists due to their opposition to his ABM decision became apparent only with the recent opening of the records of the Nixon White House, especially those handwritten notes of meetings with Nixon by H. R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, and John Ehrlichman, his domestic adviser. These files make it clear, for example, that, contrary to the beliefs by DuBridge and others, it was Nixon, not his staff, who cut the science adviser off from the White House and sought to oust him and PSAC.32 The turning point came on March 11, 1969, when DuBridge reported PSAC’s opposition against ABM deployment to Nixon in a meeting in the Oval Office. He argued that Safeguard “can’t really do the job” and would lead inevitably to “great waste.” He suggested that ABM deployment be postponed for one year to allow for a thorough study of the issue, while R&D continued. Nixon interrupted

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DuBridge, questioning sharply, “What more will [we] know in a year—scientifically?”33 Clearly Nixon had made up his mind about the ABM on political grounds; he saw little value in further R&D. For him, the issue was less one of substance than symbolism: it was a test of his political infl uence with the public and in Congress as well as, equally important, a test of the political loyalty of his staff, including the science advisers. In a way, Nixon’s disregard for technical argument on the ABM furnished a good example of what political scientist Yaron Ezrahi has called the transition from the politics of “instrumental meliorism,” which relied on scientific and technological rationality in the making of public policy and solving of problems and reached its height in the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, to that of “symbolic equilibrium,” which gave up such hope. In the new, “postmodern condition” that became evident especially in the Nixon years, public policymaking was perceived, according to Ezrahi, “more as a form of ‘pluralistic accommodation’ than of rationally directed and managed process, [and] scientific research lost much of its earlier aura and policy relevance.”34 In part, one can attribute the change to the striking difference in personalities of the presidents: whereas Eisenhower was fascinated by explanations of scientific aspects of space and elementary particles, Nixon rarely had such interest or patience. In this context, it is worth noting that even a special message from the dying Eisenhower—the former president “totally disapproved of ABM and urged no deployment,” no doubt on both technical and strategic grounds—could not change Nixon’s mind.35 Stung by scientists’ and congressional criticism of his deployment decision, Nixon declared to his staff that “this is war—[we] have to get it organized.”36 On March 17, as part of the White House’s strategy to sell the ABM, DuBridge signed—with arms twisted, in view of the earlier meeting—a public letter endorsing Nixon’s decision as “reasonable, feasible and necessary.” An unprecedented move by the science adviser, it met with strong criticism within and outside of PSAC. The committee, as a group, refused to make a public statement for the ABM.37 This was not the first time that PSAC took a stand against a White House policy supported by the science adviser—witness, for example, the Apollo decision under Kennedy—but it took on a new significance under Nixon: instead of a straightforward policy disagreement within the liberal consensus, it turned into a matter of partisan political loyalty and fatally eroded the already fragile trust between the two sides. Meanwhile, the scientists’ own disaffection toward Nixon dramatically deepened in early April when Nixon vetoed the nomination of Franklin A. Long as NSF director on the grounds that he had earlier opposed Sentinel.38 Even though Long had refrained from commenting on Safeguard once he was approached for the NSF position, the White House felt that nominating a known critic of the ABM would weaken its case for Safeguard in Congress. Vocal opposition to Long from Congressman James G. Fulton (R-PA), who had his own candidate for the NSF position, and from Everett Dirksen (R-IL), Republican majority leader in the senate, further complicated the matter. The White House at first tried, via DuBridge,

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to get Long to issue a public endorsement of Safeguard, but Long refused. The White House therefore withdrew its offer to him. The incident, when reported in Science in early April 1969, enraged scientists who had viewed the NSF directorship as traditionally nonpolitical.39 Nixon tried to defend his position at a press conference on April 19 by citing Long’s “very sincere beliefs opposing the ABM” and the administration’s concern that his nomination “would be misunderstood.”40 It failed to quiet the growing controversy. The Federation of the American Societies for Experimental Biology called the Long incident “unfortunate and an error,” with “potentially serious” long term effects on American science. All four former science advisers found it a troubling sign that the Nixon administration attempt to politicize the NSF and exclude any dissident voice. I. I. Rabi, for one, discerned a weakening of DuBridge’s infl uence with Nixon: “Is he serving as ‘yes man’ or can he express himself ?” Rabi asked.41 The FAS warned against the prospect that the Nixon administration would accept only scientific advisers “who are trained seals rather than intelligent men of independent scientific judgment.”42 Most unusually, the National Science Board, which had originally nominated Long, issued a formal statement that it “deeply regrets” the “break” with the nonpartisan tradition of NSF directorship.43 Two weeks later, however, to everyone’s surprise, Nixon, under pressure of the controversy, publicly admitted, in a meeting with DuBridge and the National Science Board, that the White House was wrong to apply political tests in the selection of the NSF director. DuBridge, who had reportedly told Long that he was “really sick” about the whole incident, apparently was able to see Nixon shortly after his April 19 press conference and convince him to change his mind.44 As a result, Nixon formally reoffered the position to Long. Long expressed appreciation for the gesture but, citing the possible detrimental effects of the controversy on the foundation, declined the job. The National Science Board then nominated and Nixon approved the appointment of biologist William McElroy of Johns Hopkins University, another former PSAC member who had actually supported Nixon’s Democratic rivals during the 1968 election, as NSF director. It was the first time that the nonpartisan nature of the NSF directorship was tested and reaffirmed.45 In the short run, Nixon’s quick reversal won him some accolades from within and outside of the scientific community, but in the long run, as Eugene Rabinowich, editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, pointed out, “it could not quite undo the damage.”46 As the first clear sign, to the scientists at least, that the new Nixon might not have departed that far from the old Nixon of intense partisanship, it exacerbated his already sour relations with the scientific community. The Long affair left in its wake a bitter aftertaste not only with the scientists, but with Nixon, too. Despite his well-received gesture of reversing the Long decision, Nixon privately was angry about having to make the move. He vowed to bar scientists from playing a role in public policy. There should be a “new understanding,” Nixon declared, that “political people stay out of science and science people stay out of politics.”47 At least one leader of the scientific community, President Frederick Seitz of the NAS, agreed with Nixon that scientists should not,

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as professional groups, venture out of science and into politics.48 For DuBridge, however, the “new understanding” spelled the end of ready access to the president. According to Haldeman’s notes on April 21, Nixon discussed with him the matter of “Long + duB.—now have the problem. P. feels must move now.”49 Thus, even though DuBridge succeeded at persuading Nixon to reverse his decision on Long, it came at a great cost to his, and PSAC’s, political standing in the White House. The ABM debate also triggered Nixon’s intensely personal battle with Jerome Wiesner, who came to represent the liberal scientific and academic community. The direct clash between the two over the ABM took place at a White House meeting on space shortly after the Safeguard announcement. When Nixon intimated to Wiesner that “I need the system as a bargaining chip with the Russians,” the latter responded that “That’s an awfully expensive bargaining chip.” “A look of anger came to his eyes,” Wiesner later recalled. “He stared at me a moment, then turned abruptly and moved away.” Wiesner believed that this incident contributed as much to Nixon’s animosity toward him and MIT as his continued opposition to the ABM.50 The Safeguard ABM eventually won Senate approval in August 1969, but only with a tie-breaking vote by Vice President Spiro Agnew. The slimmest margin of victory left Nixon with little choice but to proceed cautiously with only limited deployment in South Dakota. As a bargaining chip, it probably did help the United States negotiate with the Soviets the ABM treaty, signed in 1972, that limited ABM deployment to two sites in each country. In 1976, after its value as a bargaining chip was achieved, the United States abandoned its only ABM site when Congress refused to provide funds for its operations, thus ending one of the most significant national debates in recent American history.51 In the end, both sides of the ABM debate could claim some measure of achievement: the Nixon administration pointed to the ABM treaty as evidence that its bargaining chip theory had worked, and its critics, who believed that a better alterative could have achieved the same results, drew satisfaction from the nondeployment of any ABM.52 The ABM debate was rich in meanings and implications for both American science and the Cold War. It was perhaps the most prominent public policy that energized and polarized American scientists since the first Scientists’ Movement in the 1940s. Although the debate was not directly linked with the Vietnam War, many scientists clearly used the ABM debate as an opportunity to voice their dissatisfaction with American foreign policy and the militarization of American science. The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), which had been established shortly after Sputnik in 1957, launched an ad campaign in 1969 against the ABM. One of its posters featured military generals setting off a nuclear missile, under the caption “From the People Who Brought You Vietnam.”53 The ABM debate also marked the first time that scientists worked against a major nuclear weapons system both from within the system and outside of it. The active participation of former science advisers and former PSAC members in the public debate resulted from failure of their insiders’ approach. The ABM debate allowed them to recapture a prominent role for scientists in national security and

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public policy that so far had been overshadowed by the Vietnam War. It also provided a chance for scientists to reassert, as they did in the post-Sputnik test ban struggle, the image of science for peace, not just weaponry, and of its role in easing the Cold War, not escalating it. They did this at the price, obviously, of worsening the relationship with the Nixon White House, where PSAC scientists were increasingly seen as “disloyals.”

“Cut DuBridge’s Wings” Despite his public support for Safeguard, Lee DuBridge lost much of his infl uence in the White House. Nixon and staff came to regard him as a single-minded advocate of funding for science who did not display total loyalty and could not rally strong support in the scientific community for Nixon’s programs. The battles over the ABM and the Vietnam War led the president, as Haldeman noted, to “slip back to the old ways” of intense partisanship.54 Several months into his term, Nixon, as his biographer Stephen Ambrose noted, began to show that he “preferred his own vengeful and vindictive side to his reasonable, intelligent, let’s-take-every-thinginto-account side.”55 He began to take out his growing anger toward his scientific and academic critics on DuBridge. On April 21, 1969, Nixon instructed his aide Peter Flanigan to keep a virtual surveillance on DuBridge, screening his requests for meetings with the president and accompanying him “always” at such meetings.56 Declaring that he needed a “loyalist in every key place,” Nixon on July 21 told his “hard core group,” which consisted of Haldeman, national security adviser Henry Kissinger, and Ehrlichman, that “DuBridge has to go soon.” In addition to the question of loyalty, Nixon felt that “none of the research types is broad enough or tough enough” to help carry out his programs.57 “Lee doesn’t understand the process,” Nixon said on another occasion. “Once a decision is made—he must be behind it.”58 Nixon wanted his staff to “work out [a] plan for getting him out [by the] end of year.”59 The White House devised various ways to force DuBridge out. First, Kissinger and his NSC staff cut the science adviser and PSAC off from arms control policymaking; Kissinger simply started his own informal scientific advisory group on technical nuclear issues. Ironically, it consisted of former PSAC members—Paul Doty, Panofsky, Drell, and Garwin. As another indication of PSAC scientists’ lingering preference for working inside the system, these veterans were willing to serve Kissinger under the circumstances in hopes of infusing whatever little technical rationality they could into the arms control process.60 Then, Nixon asked to have environmental policy taken away from DuBridge. “Cut DuBridge’s wings,” Nixon instructed, “[we] can’t have good grey men doing exciting things.”61 DuBridge, however, refused to take the cue and bow out, believing that it was Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Kissinger, not Nixon, who created his hostile environment.62 Why didn’t Nixon fire DuBridge outright if he was so unsatisfied with his science adviser’s performance? Even his critics in and out of PSAC would have to agree that the position of the science adviser, in contrast to that of the NSF director, was a political appointment and the president had every right to

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choose an aide to serve his political purposes. Partly, Nixon’s reluctance to confront DuBridge publicly derived from his personality. As Ambrose noted, Nixon “hated—and always resisted—firing people. . . . He could say the most awful things about people behind their backs, but he found it difficult to make even the slightest criticism to their faces.”63 Nixon certainly was saying awful things behind DuBridge’s back, but because he never communicated his dissatisfaction directly to his science adviser—he actually maintained an outwardly cordial relationship with him—DuBridge remained ignorant of the extent to which Nixon tried to force him out.64 Another consideration that prevented Nixon from reaching for the axe at this point was probably the White House’s concern over reactions from the scientific community and their impact on Nixon’s reelection in 1972. Nixon’s drive to oust his own science adviser intensified, nevertheless, in early 1970.65 When indirect pressure failed, Nixon chose a more radical approach. At the time, the President’s Advisory Council on Executive Organization, headed by Roy Ash, had just completed an investigation of the Executive Office of the President. Citing the diminished usefulness of the science adviser and PSAC to the president, the Ash council recommended reorienting them away from presidential policymaking and into long-term planning, which, in the lexicon of the Nixon administration, equaled banishment.66 When Nixon read the Ash report, he told Haldeman and Ehrlichman to use it to “reorganize and abolish” the position of science adviser and OST. “[We shall] also see if there aren’t others to get rid of.”67 However, a sweeping reorganization of science advising necessarily took time to implement. “[H]ow do we get rid of DuBridge?” he asked Haldeman and Ehrlichman impatiently in March 1970.68 At one point, he suggested moving up DuBridge’s deputy, Hubert Heffner, an electrical engineer from Stanford, to replace DuBridge, but that was never carried out.69 Although DuBridge publicly denied loss of infl uence, citing the president’s inviting PSAC members to a garden party, Nixon privately called it a “therapy session” for DuBridge and ordered Haldeman to tell his science adviser: “Don’t raise q[uestions] of campus research grants.”70 At another point, Nixon thought of getting himself “out of having to advise with scientists” by abolishing the president’s science adviser and changing PSAC into a National Science Advisory Committee, to advise all parts of the government, but it did not go anywhere.71 Like Johnson, Nixon was never comfortable in the presence of these elite scientists whose advocacy of both arms control and academic basic research he found irritating. As he tried to clean house by eliminating dissident science advisers, Nixon also attempted to discredit his scientific critics in the ABM debate in general. In a speech at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs on June 4, 1969, he called those who questioned his Vietnam War and ABM policies “skeptics” and “isolationists,” and their views as antidefense and even unpatriotic. Twisting Eisenhower’s farewell address, Nixon called his academic critics the “scientific-technological elite”—he probably had PSAC and its alumni in mind specifically—who created a rising fear of the “military-industrial complex” and caused great upheavals in American society.72 To drive the point home, Nixon ordered the White House to “have the military give [the speech] widest distribution possible”—disseminate it to the “whole

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mil[itary]-ind[ustrial] complex.”73 PSAC veterans would probably have accepted Nixon’s new definition of the “scientific-technological elite” as a fairly accurate label and with pride, but Eisenhower must have turned in his grave. The contrast between the views of the two former running mates on these matters could not have been more striking.

The SST Controversy and Its Fallout As if the ABM debate was not divisive enough, Nixon soon acquired fresh evidence of the “scientific-technological elite” damaging the military-industrial complex in the controversy over SST. Almost concurrent with the ABM debate, the longsmoldering controversy over SST policy burst onto the national scene in 1969 over the question: Should the federal government continue a massive program, with the nation’s aerospace industry, to build a passenger aircraft that would travel at speeds exceeding that of sound? From the beginning of the program in the early 1960s, PSAC-OST had advocated its slowdown, citing unbearable supersonic booms as a major objection.74 By the time Nixon became president, the SST was due to enter the expensive prototype-building phase. Nixon had to decide whether to go ahead with the program. He requested advice from DuBridge in March 1969, and DuBridge in turn formed an ad hoc SST review committee of the OST, headed by Richard Garwin, now a returning PSAC member and former chairman of PSAC’s military aircraft panel who had studied SST for President Johnson, to assess the technical and economic factors involved.75 The Garwin committee conducted an intensive investigation and completed its report on March 30, 1969. The conclusion, which received endorsement from PSAC and DuBridge, was unmistakable: unsolved sonic boom problems, possible environmental damage to the ozone layer from SST emission, and poor cost-effectiveness led the panel to recommend termination of the development contracts and the withdrawal of government support from the SST prototype program.76 President Nixon, however, ignored this and several other studies when he announced his support for the SST in September 1969.77 The decision was based on political considerations and did not, as he later told his aides, “depend on noise or cost.”78 With the SST, as with his “War on Cancer,” Nixon hoped to rally the country around an exciting new technological initiative in the fashion Kennedy did with the Apollo Project. He wanted to create and capitalize on a new wave of technological optimism.79 Although he accepted Nixon’s decision, Garwin, who had voted for Nixon in 1968 for his promise to end the Vietnam War, believed that the administration distorted the science advice in its communications to Congress and to the public.80 As a most unusual step for a current PSAC member, he decided to testify in Congress in the spring and summer of 1970 against the SST, using, as he claimed, information in the public domain.81 However, his insider status and the fact that he did have access to government information bolstered whatever assertions Garwin made. Partly due to his opposition, Congress voted to terminate the SST program in March 1971.82 The episode, of course, worsened PSAC’s relations with the White

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House.83 Categorizing SST opponents as “environmental fanatics [who] want to destroy the system,” Nixon was now more than ever determined to get rid of his dissident science advisers.84 Garwin’s open opposition to Nixon’s SST policy also polarized PSAC. Several committee members disagreed strongly with Garwin’s action as inappropriate for a sitting PSAC member. They felt that he should have resigned his membership before speaking out against the administration position. Garwin, however, did not think resigning “would do any good.” He likened his situation to that of a lawyer who worked with two different clients—in this case the president and Congress—and he believed that he kept confidentiality in his work for them. He knew that Wiesner had asked DuBridge before testifying against ABM and was told by DuBridge, who apparently checked with Nixon, that Wiesner should not resign as consultant at large to PSAC. So Garwin took that as a precedent. It was not an easy decision, Garwin acknowledged years later. He went ahead with his testimony knowing that his act would probably doom PSAC: I don’t say that was a good thing to do. I thought carefully about whether doing this testimony would injure PSAC. You tend to feel, well, if the system is so bad that the committee has been corrupted, then it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if the committee were dis-established.85

In other words, to Garwin and probably some other members, the value of PSAC itself as a “beachhead of science” had diminished to the point that it no longer was the dominant consideration in regulating their public political behaviors. So, did Garwin’s public dissent on the SST bring down PSAC, as it has been commonly believed? It certainly intensified the tension with the Nixon White House and, perhaps more important, struck fear in future presidents about the risk of confidential advisers contradicting them in public. However, Nixon’s own drive to get rid of the science advisers, as mentioned earlier, had started during the ABM debate, long before Garwin’s testimony on SST. The Vietnam War, even more than the ABM and the SST, divided PSAC scientists, especially during the national turmoil that followed the Cambodian invasion and bombing of Laos, including the killing of several students at Kent State University in early 1970. Edward Purcell of Harvard, who had remained a member of PSAC’s panel on reconnaissance after his PSAC membership expired in 1965, broke his PSAC ties. Years later he recalled not only his outrage with the war but also a sense of critical self-reflection: I didn’t sever all my connections with PSAC until the middle of the Vietnam War when I finally wrote a letter just resigning flatly from everything. I’m ashamed to say how late it was. I think it wasn’t until maybe the bombing of Laos, and then I just withdrew from all government connections . . . here the government was engaged in a crime, which we were all a little slow in recognizing.86

At its meeting on May 18, 1970, devoted to Vietnam, PSAC members debated not only the war but also the appropriateness of members speaking out publicly.

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Frank Westheimer, for example, regarded it as his moral responsibility to speak out against the war, as he wrote DuBridge after the meeting: In my view, the U.S. invasion of Cambodia was a grievous mistake. I have said so publicly, and intend to continue to do so; no other course seems to me consistent with my obligations as a citizen. . . . Several members feel that your permission to members to speak for, but not against a Presidential position on which PSAC has given advice is inconsistent with scientific integrity.87

Westheimer acknowledged that other members held different views. Patrick Haggerty of Texas Instruments, for example, “made a case for our refraining from any political comments, pro or con, on anything at all.” Westheimer also recognized that “the problems of reconciling PSAC effectiveness with conscience are difficult,” but he vowed that he would continue to speak out on Cambodia.88 In his reply, DuBridge defended the policy of allowing PSAC members to speak for, but not against, administration policy on the need to preserve “the future credibility and value of PSAC.” “After all,” he wrote, echoing Robert Oppenheimer’s Scientific Advisory Panel to the Interim Committee in 1945, “PSAC makes its recommendation largely on scientific and technological aspects of a given issue and the President must consider many other factors, often beyond our competence.” 89 The rules and understanding laid down by DuBridge might have seemed reasonable and accepted without much controversy during and following World War II, even in the immediate post-Sputnik era. Indeed, PSAC members had testified in the Senate and otherwise campaigned for the Kennedy administration’s proposed limited nuclear test ban treaty in 1963, without, of course, the need to explicitly forbid dissent. However, in the highly politicized context of the Vietnam War they stirred up a storm. Some PSAC scientists saw these rules as unjustified, politically motivated restrictions on their roles and on their service to the government. They continued to speak out against certain policies of the Nixon administration, both those on which they advised, such as the ABM and the SST, and those on which they did not, such as the Vietnam War. Their public dissent made Nixon and his political staff more determined than ever to drive the rebellious scientists out of the institution of the presidency.

From DuBridge To David As the first step of Nixon’s plan to tighten political control over science advising, DuBridge was, finally, forced into retirement in the summer of 1970. Without consulting DuBridge, presidential aides selected Edward E. David, Jr., of Bell Labs, to replace him. David, then 45, was a young and rising communications scientist and engineer respected by his peers. As executive director of communications systems research at Bell, he had just been elected a member of the NAS for that year (he had been a member of the National Academy of Engineering since 1966). William O. Baker, as vice president of Bell Labs, a former PSAC member, and an infl uential adviser in the Nixon administration, had recommended David to the White House. Yet, David’s appointment to the highest position of science in government surprised

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many scientists. Unlike his predecessors, he was neither an academic scientist, nor a former member of PSAC, although he did serve on some PSAC panels.90 There was concern in the White House that PSAC might not elect David chairman of the committee as a way to express its displeasure at Nixon’s action. As Flanigan explained to Nixon shortly before David’s swearing in: It is a tradition that the President’s Science Adviser is always elected Chairman [of PSAC]. However, it may be that some of the current members of PSAC who prefer an older and distinguished academician as the President’s Science Adviser, may try to break this tradition.91

To prevent such an outcome and to “show his confidence” in David, Nixon personally presided over the latter’s swearing in on September 14, 1970, in the presence of PSAC members.92 He then met with the whole PSAC in the Cabinet Room to hear their reports on science policy, biomedical research, and educational R&D. When Haggerty proposed on behalf of PSAC that the office of science adviser be reorganized and strengthened into a Council of Science and Technology Advisers, along the lines of the Council of Economic Advisers, Nixon appeared receptive but noncommittal. He was interested even less in PSAC’s work in other areas. He concluded the meeting by asking PSAC members to read and comment on Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, which forecast great social and cultural upheavals as a result of rapid technological changes. Clearly Nixon found the meeting with PSAC far less engaging than did Eisenhower more than a decade ago.93 In fact, Nixon’s war with his scientists continued under David. In his next, and, as it turned out, last meeting with PSAC, on February 23, 1971, Nixon discussed with his science advisers his newly launched “War on Cancer.” The project was an example of both technological faith and what the historians called “historical analogizing”: If we could make the atomic bomb and put a man on the moon, we surely could cure cancer if we poured resources into the making of the necessary technology.94 Such a “technological fix” was anathema to the thinking of the PSAC, however, even though its members’ sense of technological skepticism was not quite as strong as in the Eisenhower and Kennedy days. Many PSAC members seemed skeptical toward the war on cancer and advocated more basic research on the biology of cancer. At the meeting, PSAC diplomatically worded its criticism by requesting that the crusade be integrated into the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and into basic biomedical research. Nixon, however, defended his preference for the applied, disease-oriented approach, for it provided a necessary symbol of federal action for the public. He wanted both the NIH and the NSF to adopt a more practical bent and abandon the “more of the same” approach in their traditional emphasis on basic research.95 (A year later, however, Nixon would himself acknowledge that the War on Cancer was a “bust” with $100 million lost largely because, as PSAC had pointed out, the basic biomedical mechanism of cancer was not yet understood.96) With the David–DuBridge transition, Nixon also attempted to reshape the mission and form of presidential science advising and science policy. He wanted

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to reorient federal funds away from academic science and more into applied or industrial research. “Cut the money out of soft science and put it into applied science,” he demanded.97 Indeed, Nixon saw OST and NSF as focusing on “professor subsidy” and producing “no results.”98 He slashed federal aid for universities. Repeatedly, he ordered cutbacks on MIT’s federal research funds as retaliation for Wiesner’s “anti-defense bias.” However, his staff, handling it like a hot potato, dragged their feet.99 In line with his distrust of academic scientists, Nixon also tried to change PSAC from within, pushing his favorite scientists for membership.100 From the beginning, the Nixon White House applied political criteria in the selection of new members for PSAC and its panels. In April 1969, for example, several Nixon aides went over DuBridge’s recommended list of new PSAC members and made notations: Garwin (“anti-ABM”), Murray Gell-Mann (“Brill[ant], not way-left”), Patrick Haggerty (“good”), and Land (“left”). Making the final decision and apparently disregarding Garwin’s anti-ABM stand, Flanigan approved all except Land, who was eventually replaced by physicist Gerald Tape of Associated Universities, Inc.101 Such departure from the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, when PSAC effectively selected its own members, was not new; the Johnson White House had already started political checks. However, the practice became all the more overt in the Nixon administration, especially after the DuBridge–David transition. Nixon pushed David, for example, to get Edward Teller into PSAC. The move would be largely symbolic, of course, because Nixon could and did often turn to Teller for science advice in preference to his formally appointed science adviser and PSAC.102 David, hailed at his swearing-in ceremony by Nixon as “a very practical man,” made a valiant effort to satisfy both Nixon and his academic skeptics. He launched technological initiatives, supported the SST vigorously, and persuaded Nixon to issue the first ever Special Message to Congress on Science and Technology. At Nixon’s request, David also tried to devise ways to assist unemployed aerospace scientists and engineers, whose plight came as a result of cutbacks in defense and space projects and was highly publicized in the media.103 At a White House meeting on February 22, 1971 that was secretly recorded in a new taping system, Nixon asked David to consider taking $100 million out of the NSF’s $600 million to “take care” of aerospace scientists and engineers, instead of giving them to MIT and Harvard as “subsidy” to professors. “Send some of these [unemployed] guys to Antarctica,” Nixon half-jokingly suggested, or “let them play with those mice; it didn’t really matter much who does it.”104 He did not want a massive effort, but mainly the political symbolism “to indicate that we care about them and have a concern for their future.”105 As a result, David did put together some programs to retrain or relocate these unemployed engineers.106 David also responded, although cautiously, to Nixon’s demand for a PSAC membership for Teller. He first asked Teller to join PSAC’s panel on science and technology policy and serve as a consultant to himself on military R&D. Deeply aware of the divisive legacy of the Oppenheimer hearing and of the long-running animosity between Teller and most PSAC members, David, however, stopped

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short of recommending Teller to PSAC for full membership. As he explained to Nixon, pushing Teller into PSAC “could cause an explosion” among liberal scientists whose support he needed and only slowly began to earn.107 The White House, however, did succeed in making Patrick Moynihan, a social scientist and Democratassistant to Nixon, a PSAC member.108 In the mean time, David also reached out to academic scientists, the traditional constituency for PSAC, because, as he later recalled, he soon realized that he could not get things done in matters of science in policy without their help.109 David eventually won praise from liberal PSAC members and alumni by his quiet and moderately successful approach to the Office of Management and Budget to increase the budget for basic research.110 Philosophically, his views on the potentials and limits of science and technology differed from some of PSAC’s traditional beliefs but agreed with them in other respects. Reflecting his interdisciplinary background, David rejected the assembly-line model of technology feeding on science, advocating instead that they feed on each other. As the social impact of both science and technology grew, society would, he predicted, try to shape the direction of both. Such societal interventions were not all bad: “There have been some astounding successes in goal-oriented efforts.” Even the fiascos, he argued, could be turned into justifications for basic research: “Failures in technology often encourages fundamental science.” Echoing PSAC’s technological skepticism, David dismissed wild technological enthusiasm—“because we can put a man on the moon, we ought to . . .”—as ignoring “the problem of timing and the limits of both the technological state of the art involved and the fundamental knowledge available” or even laws of nature. Thus, to ensure that the social pressure did not lead to technological dead ends, David argued that “scientists and engineers must be active in decision-making where goals are set.”111 Nixon, however, grew increasingly impatient with the kind of technological skepticism traditionally associated with PSAC’s argument for arms control. At his June 1969 Air Force Academy speech, he had already accused “the skeptics and the isolationists” as timid and short-sighted. To him, any restraint on technological progress meant being dangerously “soft”—just as he had accused the Democrats in the early 1950s of being soft on communism. At one point, when a staff member urged him to educate the public that “the hyper-individualistic—‘We’re No. 1’—frontier American philosophy is bankrupt and outdated,” Nixon scuffled: “Wrong on this—Typical Ivy League.”112 When the Senate voted down the SST on March 24, 1971, Nixon declared the decision “both distressing and disappointing.” It not only threatened jobs and world leadership of the American aerospace industry, but “[m]ore deeply,” Nixon argued in a statement, “it could be taken as a reversal of America’s tradition of staying in the vanguard of scientific and technological advance.”113 Shortly afterward, in September 1971, Nixon brought in William M. Magruder as his special consultant in charge of a “New Technological Opportunities Program” to turn up technical fixes for national problems. A former test pilot sporting a Ronald Reagan-esque tough-guy look, Magruder had spearheaded the administration’s fight for the SST and clashed with Garwin in their testimony in

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Congress. His appointment demonstrated Nixon’s desire both to act on his technological enthusiasm and to send a signal about his displeasure with PSAC-OST’s trademark advocacy of technological moderation.114 Thus, despite David’s fence-mending activities, PSAC-OST’s relationship with the Nixon White House remained strained. The problem was as much institutional as personal. Shortly after the off-year election in 1970, Nixon told his aides that he still “wants OST out of here.” “Defense, NASA, AEC,” Nixon said, “will support research adequately.” His comment indicates that by then he thought of PSACOST scientists purely in terms of policy for science and, worse yet, as lobbyists for federal funding of science. PSAC-OST’s vital role in providing independent technological evaluations completely escaped the president’s attention. Nixon did not think the reactions in the scientific community would be too bad if the timing was right. “Do OST at time of budget in which research is upgraded,” for example, through increases in NSF budget, he cunningly instructed.115 He knew just as well as PSAC scientists that he could manipulate the dialectics of policy for science and science in policy to his advantage. Having made up his mind on the abolition of PSAC-OST, Nixon further removed his science advisers away from major policies, including arms control and scientific diplomacy.116 Neither David nor PSAC were involved in the historical reopening of relations with China that Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger orchestrated in 1971–1972, even though scientific exchange would soon play a key part of the burgeoning bilateral relations.117 Several former PSAC members, such as Wiesner, Panofsky, and Seaborg, and one current member, Garwin, however, saw the China reopening as a great opportunity not only to reestablish bilateral scientific relations, but also to bring China into the international system of nuclear arms control. Under the sponsorship of the FAS and the NAS, they visited China in the early 1970s and engaged Chinese scientists and officials in valuable discussions on arms control amidst the turbulent Cultural Revolution. In other words, they sought to do, via nongovernmental channels, what PSAC used to do but could not now do under Nixon.118 During the 1972 presidential election, scientists were once again divided up into partisan groups around Nixon and his Democratic rivals. The scales of scientists’ involvement did not quite match those in 1964 and 1968, but the intensity remained as high. At one point, Kistiakowsky, for example, vowed to offer his service “in the cause of retiring Mr. Nixon to almost anybody that the [Democratic] convention might nominate.”119 That turned out to be Senator George McGovern (with a PhD in American history), who promised to withdraw American troops from Vietnam if elected. In contrast to 1968 and especially 1964, this time former PSAC members lined up on both sides of the campaign: in addition to Kistiakowsky, Bethe, Purcell, and York joined the Scientists for McGovern, whereas William O. Baker helped to organize, with industrialist Simon Ramo, a Science and Engineering Council as part of Nixon’s reelection committee. It now boasted, in addition to Baker himself and former Goldwater supporters Libby, Wigner, and Teller, another former PSAC member, Gordon MacDonald, and two current members, Haggerty and Howard

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Turner, a construction industrialist. Ominously for the future of PSAC, the Nixon campaign, when announcing the formation of the Baker–Ramo group, declared that it would not only work to support the president’s reelection, but probably live on after the election to serve as “another link” between the scientific community and the Nixon administration.120 Among the proposals the council forwarded to the White House for Nixon’s consideration was a study on “the feasibility of damming the Bering Strait as a means of controlling the climate of North America and Siberia.”121 If PSAC remained skeptical of several of the president’s initiatives, here was a group still full of technological enthusiasm.

Attack From the Left Ironically, just as moderate scientists associated with PSAC were marginalized by their conservative critics within the Nixon administration, they ran into angry protests by antiwar radicals as well. The countercultural and New Left movements challenged not only the Enlightenment ideal of scientific rationality, but also scientists’ role in the military-industrial complex behind the Vietnam War. Under attack were both those scientists on the right such as Edward Teller and those insiders who had considered themselves liberals or moderates.122 After the revelation of the Jasons’ role in the making of the electronic barrier project in the Pentagon Papers in 1971, for example, many radical students, sometimes under the sponsorship of SESPA, staged protests against known members of the scientific group. A massive protest at Columbia in late April 1972, for example, demanded that Columbia Jasons resign from that group or from the university. Garwin, as one of the best known Jasons and an adjunct professor at Columbia, faced protestors both in his office and outside his home, despite his prominent role in opposing Nixon’s SST program.123 Calling it a McCarthyist drive for political purity, Garwin refused to quit Jason. In a May 1972 statement, he asked his critics on the Columbia faculty to rethink their support for removing professors with Pentagon ties: Remember the State of California Oath of 1950 and the long and degrading history of political tests for membership in a university. Which faculty member is sure that, ten years hence, 50 faculty members could not be found to demand either his own recantation or his dismissal? I long for an end to the Viet Nam War. But lies and violence here at home and the attempted denial of legal rights of individuals (by antiwar activists or by others) will only injure further our society, which sorely needs all our energies turned toward improvement of its mechanisms and substance.124

It was a typical clash of the New Left, impatient for radical changes, and those moderates who clung to the liberal consensus on anticommunism abroad and improving society through incremental reforms at home. For Garwin, both his work on military technology in Vietnam and his opposition to Nixon’s SST were part of the same technological rationality that he believed was crucial to the functioning of a democratic government and society. To the radical protesters, however, PSAC and Jason stood for a system that was hopelessly corrupt, a

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Cold War technological establishment that upheld values that were anathema to morality and social justice, their technological skepticism and advocacy for arms control notwithstanding. To them, PSAC and Jason might have questioned the means, but not the ends of the Vietnam War or the Cold War—they were still part of the establishment. “Jason’s counsel to stop the bombing of the North was on the basis that it wasn’t working, not on the basis that it was better for Vietnamese to live than to die,” charged Charles Schwartz and his colleagues in the Berkeley SESPA chapter, apparently discounting the moral anguish about the war that had motivated Kistiakowsky and several others to propose the barrier project in the first place. What mattered to the New Left and the countercultural activists was not technological rationality or objectivity, which they regarded as contested concepts, but political and ethical choices.125 Thus, whereas Garwin and his colleagues viewed their science advising as a way to improve American society’s “mechanism and substance,” SESPA saw it as misguided and counterproductive instrumentalism: the science advisers’ objectivity “can help the earnest McNamaras and their generals to accomplish their objectives better.”126 The two sides clearly had different understandings of what it meant to speak truth to power in a time when political consensus was no longer possible. Garwin was not the only PSAC veteran to face the radical rebellion and not all such interactions were turned into confrontations. Panofsky, for example, actually succeeded at Stanford in channeling some of the student protest into such constructive causes as arms control.127 Others tried to engage in dialogues with the rebels to varying degrees of success. Perhaps most typical was the experience of Rabi, who, when caught up in the confl ict at Columbia, attempted to communicate with the young protesters during a well-publicized encounter outside his office. But this effort failed. Years later, Rabi reflected on both this incident and his PSAC experience: I had no word to reach them. But it did teach me something, sort of too late. I’d go to Washington to all these committees and things, but I only gave my courses the straight material and never brought in anything extraneous, so I never told them, or my colleagues, what I was doing in Washington.

Partly it was the culture of secrecy, the scientists’ elitism, their preference for working within the system that was to blame for their reluctance to engage in a broader discussion with their students and the public about the role of science in policy, about their technological skepticism, about their opposition as well as their support for American Cold War policy. When Rabi realized that “I didn’t have to betray any secrets” to tell students about his experiences and his views on scientists’ social responsibility, “it was too late. They wouldn’t listen.”128

The Demise of PSAC Unfortunately for Rabi and his PSAC colleagues, neither would the Nixon White House. By the time of his reelection victory in late 1972, Nixon was determined not to have “more of the same” in presidential science advising. His suspicion

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of disloyalty of PSAC-OST, frustration at their ineffectiveness in promoting his technological programs, and, increasingly, a desire for self-seclusion amidst the Watergate scandal, led him to abolish the whole presidential science advisory structure in December 1972.129 During the postelection conferences with his aides on government reorganization at Camp David, Nixon first considered moving PSAC and OST to the NSF, but finally decided to abolish both.130 Apparently valuing David’s service, Nixon offered him the AEC chairmanship, but the latter declined, knowing that the Nixon administration was planning to break the AEC up into two separate agencies.131 PSAC, unaware of Nixon’s abolition decision but sensing danger, belatedly fought for its own survival. Its members first tried to make the committee more relevant to Nixon’s technological programs.132 Then, in a letter to Nixon on December 19, 1972, PSAC defended presidential science advising as a channel of ideas independent of the bureaucracy and as a vital instrument of planning, an early-warning radar that could help the government “detecting incipient failures early in technical programs.” The committee also promised loyalty, vowing to “avoid outside discussions and public testimony regarding its work.” It pledged to be “responsive to the President and his national programs and policies,” rather than to “the scientific community, industry, academia, labor, or the interests of any agency or bureaucracy.”133 Theoretically, the president was, of course, entitled to such confidentiality in his advisers, and in normal times such pledge of loyalty would probably have been taken for granted. But under the circumstances, it was a sad commentary on the polarization of American society and on the science–government partnership that the science advisers had to choose between the president and the scientific community or the society at large as if their interests would fundamentally collide. The post-Sputnik days when representing the voice of the scientific community was viewed as a positive, not a negative, service to the presidency were gone. Instead, the letter pointed to an erosion in the faith, deeply held among many American scientists and scholars during World War II and the early Cold War, that there was a fundamental identity of the objectives of the American state as an embodiment of democracy and the ideals of science.134 PSAC’s effort came too little too late. Its letter never reached Nixon. On January 2, 1973, David resigned from his position as science adviser to become vice president of Gould, Inc., an electronics firm.135 Shortly afterward, Nixon announced his “Reorganization Plan No. 1 of 1973.” It abolished the OST, and implicitly with it, PSAC. They were no longer needed in the Executive Office of the President, Nixon said, because of the growing scientific strength in other parts of the government that they had helped build. The plan transferred much of the OST’s science policy role back to the NSF. As an afterthought, Nixon, at Baker’s suggestion, requested the NSF director, H. Guyford Stever, to take added responsibility as his science adviser to coordinate civilian and international efforts in science.136 Stever would report not to Nixon but to George Shultz, secretary of treasury and Nixon’s special assistant for domestic affairs. Stever’s main support unit, the Science and Technology Policy Office, would be located in the NSF, not

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in the Executive Office of the President.137 On January 26, 1973, Nixon signed a letter to every member of PSAC in which he announced, after praising their past service, that he had decided to disband PSAC by accepting their pro forma resignations.138 Thus, a major institution of American science and government, which President Truman initiated during the Korean War, which President Eisenhower revitalized in the aftermath of Sputnik, which helped him and Kennedy curb the runaway nuclear arms race with its technological skepticism, and which helped hold American science and state together for two decades of the Cold War, ended unceremoniously in the Nixon administration after a steady decline during the turbulent Vietnam War era. PSAC scientists set out to serve both science and the state in the interest of society, but in the end, largely failed to please either side of the partnership. On June 15, 1973, it fell to David Beckler, the unsung hero of the post-Sputnik presidential science advisory system, to announce to former members of PSAC the official closing of the committee and the OST. By then he had served as executive officer of the committee for twenty years, dating back to 1953, when he first started in that position with the ODM-SAC, and as trusted chief of staff for all the science advisers since 1957. A devoted public servant and able administrator, Beckler had, in many ways, personified the institutional continuity of presidential science advising to the hundreds of scientists and engineers who went through the PSAC system in its two decades of existence. Now, as acting director of the OST, Beckler thanked past PSAC members for their contributions to “the cause of good government and a better and more peaceful life for all.” Quoting Eisenhower’s comment during his last meeting with PSAC in December 1960 that “Washington has no monopoly on brainpower,” Beckler promised that he would continue his effort of linking scientists and the government in his new position as assistant to President Philip Handler of the NAS.139 Among the PSAC oldtimers, Beckler’s letters evoked a renewed sense of nostalgia, sorrow, and rage toward the Nixon administration. Rabi, for example, wrote Beckler that “your farewell letter moved me very deeply.” Recalling their associations since the early 1950s, Rabi tried to console Beckler: You grew gray in the service and gave it your best years. The achievement was great and only marred by the abrupt ending brought on by a barbarian invasion into the highest level of our government. . . . When we look back and think of PSAC our thoughts first go to you and to the quiet self-effacing leadership and solid support you gave us through your unwavering faith in the importance of our tasks and our objectives.140

Many other scientists were also shocked and dismayed by Nixon’s decision to disband PSAC-OST, yet there was surprisingly little public, organized protest. Perhaps they were resigned to the reality that one could not force science advice on a president who did not want it. There was also a sense that the setup had, as Garwin believed, long been corrupted or ceased to be effective anyway—Science characterized the scientific community’s reaction “rather like an amputee whose phantom

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feet continued to hurt long after the leg is gone.”141 A few weeks later, the NAS held a reception “in memory of OST.” It was attended by, among others, Jerome Wiesner, the first OST director. “It was,” as Beckler reported to James Killian, “a sad, but heartwarming occasion” that lent “dignity to the departure of an organization that has made so many vital contributions to the nation’s welfare.”142

Conclusion Clearly, Nixon’s political style, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the ABM and SST debates helped to doom PSAC. The politicization of science did not start with Nixon, but there was no doubt that it reached a new intensity during his term. Nixon viewed every activity in the White House from its political impact, often ignoring the need for judicious deliberation necessary to anticipate problems and make wise choices. He let his political disputes with several PSAC members on ABM and SST to obscure the vast resources and expertise in PSAC and in its panels on national security, on defense and space programs, and on the environment, with far-reaching impact not only on the presidency, but on the whole government.143 When Nixon abolished PSAC to get rid of dissenting scientists from his circle, he also removed, with the same stroke, a significant presence of independent, outside expertise from many levels of the federal system. Yet, Nixon’s personality and personal politics were not the only factors that led to PSAC’s demise. Its decline also fit in the larger historical context of the radical transformation of American society and the changing relationship between American science and the Cold War. The surging African American civil rights movement, which spread into the fights for equality for women and other minorities as well the environmental movement, ended the long postwar liberal consensus that had built on the foundation of anticommunism abroad and incremental reforms, particularly through technological and economic progress, to solve social problems at home. As American society polarized to the poles on the right and left, PSAC, which was perhaps, in many ways, a quintessential institution of that earlier liberal consensus, was left stranded at the dead center. The coming of détente also brought a lessening of post-Sputnik Cold War tension in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It diminished the national security role of scientists, including those in PSAC. It gave rise to increasing demands for a new science policy that emphasized practical results. The public became disillusioned with the technocratic visions of the post-Sputnik era. Many Americans, especially youths, joined the counterculture movement to question the social, political, and philosophical values of modern science. Science was now less associated with abundant nuclear energy and exciting space exploration, and more with technological excesses leading to mass bombing in Vietnam and widespread environmental destruction at home (and also in Southeast Asia). The failure of American scientists, including PSAC, to articulate their case for basic research adequately and to convince the American public of the relevance of their pursuing it undermined the social contract between American science and state that had first been drawn at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War.

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The counterculture movement also deprived PSAC of a unique voice in the critical period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. During the late 1950s, PSAC had stood as virtually the only effective, technically competent advocate for technological restraint in the Eisenhower administration. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, PSAC’s moderate critique of technological enthusiasm had given way to a widespread public questioning of science and technology. Perhaps not coincidentally, scholars have widely pinpointed this period as the end of an era of American technological enthusiasm.144 Thus PSAC’s demise might have marked the beginning of the decline of science and technology’s role in legitimating American public policy, even though the need for critical evaluation of technology by experts did not lessen.145 Indeed, just as PSAC was driven out of the White House, the Office of Technology Assessment was being established on a bipartisan basis in Congress, reflecting both a need for legislative science advice and widespread public opinion that technology was to be regulated, not just promoted.146 However, the division of American society during this anti-Vietnam era was such that, instead of the countercultural movement giving PSAC a much-needed constituency, their philosophical affinity worked to erode the credibility of PSAC inside the White House. The Nixon administration, as we have seen, increasingly espoused a resurgent technological enthusiasm and viewed PSAC as a symbol of the antiwar academic elite pouring cold water on its technological drive. Ironically, the efforts by PSAC during the David days to be responsive to Nixon’s agenda made it appear, to much of the public and some in the scientific community, to be part of the reactionary status quo. As one Nixon administration official put it shortly after the demise of PSAC-OST, “If science has been downgraded, it is because it has been downgraded by society—and by the people making the reorganization plan.”147 All these developments reinforced not only Nixon’s hostility, but even more his indifference, to his science advisers, which in turn helped doom PSAC. In part, both the rise and fall of PSAC demonstrated that the workings of science advising, as much as those of science and politics, depended on trust.148 It was the consensus about the need for a strengthened science–state partnership that brought the initial group of scientists together in the ODM-SAC in the aftermath of the Korean War but the lack of Truman’s trust in them—perhaps due to the H-bomb debate—severely limited their freedom of action. What finally made PSAC scientists into what Kistiakowsky called a “coherent, thinking organism” in the post-Sputnik era was both their internal agreement on the need to increase federal support of basic research and to pursue arms control and Eisenhower’s endorsement of these goals and consequent trust in his science advisers. Indeed, as mentioned before, James Killian, for one, eventually came to regard Eisenhower’s confidence in his science advisers as “exaggerated” and “somewhat naïve.”149 In turn PSAC worked on a trust system when it conducted its investigations in both science in policy and policy for science. One scientist testifying before a PSAC panel on Project West Ford in the early 1960s, for example, recognized that the group was judging him, not his calculations, by asking him tough questions to see whether he could “pass muster.”150 Likewise, when the Piore panel on science

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policy advocated that the yardstick for an adequate science policy was whether all competent scientists were supported, it implied that the government should trust the scientists themselves on responsibly using public funds. Although such a trusting atmosphere largely prevailed in the immediate post-Sputnik era, it receded in the 1960s. Under Kennedy, his and PSAC’s interests converged enough to allow the committee to play a major role in the momentous debates over the test ban and pesticides, but its position as the president’s principal technological brain trust weakened. Despite initial promises, such personal chemistry disappeared during the Vietnam War years under Johnson and especially Nixon, leading to a breakdown of the presidential science advisory system. PSAC’s demise, however, did not mean a complete failure of the experiment in presidential science advising as a key element of the science–state partnership. Even the turbulent experiences of science advising in the Nixon years served as a case study of the difficulties in turning national science and technology policy from one dominated by national security to one focused on domestic national wellbeing. They also point to the need to find a way, in the structure of the American system, to accommodate the infusion of critical technical input into public policymaking, without resorting to either technocratic insulation from the necessary political process or complete politicization that resulted in the distortion of scientific and technological arguments. To a large extent, PSAC’s successes and failures framed subsequent debates over the proper form of American science policy and science advising. They did so not only because PSAC veterans continued to participate actively in major debates over science, technology, and public policy, but also because generations of younger scientists would find PSAC’s articulation of technological skepticism—with its understanding of both the potentials and limits of technological solutions of social and political problems, its advocacy for a strong science–state partnership, and its defense of the necessity of dissent, both political and technological, within the American democratic system—relevant to their own struggles. PSAC may be dead but its ghost continued to haunt future debates on American science advising, policy, and politics.

Epilogue In 2001, following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, the U.S. government, under President George W. Bush, launched a global war on terror, together with a mobilization of federal and national scientific and technological resources on a scale that brought comparisons with the Cold War.1 The overwhelming American military-technological strength no doubt made it possible—and perhaps enticing—for the Bush administration to start the invasion of Iraq in 2003 on what turned out to be false or manipulated intelligence about the Iraq leader Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. Code-named Shock and Awe, the military operations went well, and, as Bush himself later acknowledged, perhaps too well: The planners had not devised a workable plan to deal with the social problems and mounting insurgency of antiAmerican forces in Iraq.2 Ironies abounded, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd observed, in the way technological enthusiasm led the United States into the new Iraqi War (and the earlier invasion of Afghanistan immediately following 9/11): What unleashed Shock and Awe and the most extravagant display of American military prowess ever was a bunch of theologically deranged Arabs with box cutters. The Bush administration thought it could use scientific superiority to impose its will on alien tribal cultures. But we’re spending hundreds of billions subduing two backward countries without subduing them.3

Meanwhile, scientific groups, led by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), accused the Bush administration of suppressing and distorting politically unwelcome scientific findings, such as reports on global warming and analysis of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. They also charged the government of applying political litmus tests in its appointments to federal science advisory bodies.4 Furthermore, much of the scientific community was critical of the Bush administration’s support for creationism as a rival theory to evolution in school and its policy against stem cell research based on ideological and religious grounds.5 In many ways, the clash with the Bush administration led to a level of political activism on the part of American scientists that recalled the 1964 and 1968 campaigns. By the time of the November 2004 presidential election, forty-eight Nobel laureates and many other leaders of American science had signed a statement, sponsored by the UCS, condemning the administration for ignoring “objective and impartial” scientific input in public policy.6 Among the prominent signatories of the 2004 statement were such surviving PSAC veterans as Lewis Branscomb, Paul Doty, Richard Garwin, Wolfgang Panofsky, and Herbert York.7 To some of them, 311

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the politicization of science advice had become so serious that they even spoke wistfully of the Nixon years.8 It was not the first time that American scientists missed PSAC and the post-Sputnik golden age of presidential science advising. Even during what David Beckler called the “dark moment” that followed PSAC’s demise in 1973, its former members had already started to regroup and remobilize themselves in an effort to regain the voice of scientists in the White House. On January 12, 1973, a New York trio, Emanuel Piore, I. I. Rabi, and James Fisk, met to discuss the chaotic state of science and technology policy in Washington. Deploring the deviations “from directions that you set in 1957,” Piore afterward proposed to Killian a gathering with other PSAC oldtimers “like Din Land, Bill Baker, Ed Purcell, Zach [Jerrold Zacharias]” to chart a corrective course of action. Killian replied that he and Jerome Wiesner already had “frank and fruitless” discussions with administration officials, but he encouraged Piore to continue his agitations.9 Soon the locus of these efforts by Piore and others shifted to the NAS, with support from its president, Philip Handler, a longtime member of PSAC, as well as David Beckler, serving now as Handler’s special assistant. In September 1973, the academy’s governing council established a “blue ribbon” ad hoc Committee on Science and Technology under Killian to examine presidential science advising and policymaking.10 “All your past associates will certainly roll up their sleeves and help you,” Piore promised Killian.11 As a political move, the NAS group sought to reestablish science in the White House without directly challenging Nixon’s decision to abolish PSAC, despite the fact that the Killian panel was dominated by former PSAC members.12 “We may have been disturbed by the dismantling of PSAC and OST,” Killian explained to the academy’s leadership, “but perhaps this gives us an opportunity to suggest something better to take their places.”13 From meetings with administration officials he knew that “the PSAC concept would doubtless meet with awfully little enthusiasm in many quarters. . . . There was unquestionably a concern if not a fear that bringing in a large outside group such as PSAC might present problems and create opposition.”14 In other words, PSAC became a symbol of scientific dissent and political disloyalty. Its independence and its technological skepticism, which Eisenhower had appreciated so much in the post-Sputnik days, now stood for political liabilities in the eyes of the Nixon administration. To avoid the recalling of PSAC’s ghost, the Killian committee was determined even to stay away from policy for science or federal support of science at all, for fear that it would be viewed as another attempt at special pleading by the scientific community, as PSAC had been accused of.15 The strategy met with only limited success, however. In the group’s discussions with people in and out of the government, the question of the dual allegiance of the science advisers that had dogged scientists’ participation in public policy from the founding of the NAS to the fall of PSAC often took center stage. Should a revived science advisory institution serve the interest of the scientific community or the needs of the president? In its final report issued in July 1974, the Killian group addressed the duality question implicitly by advocating that the

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primary responsibility of presidential science advisers was to the president. As to the specific form, it proposed (as had a PSAC panel under Patrick Haggerty) a Council for Science and Technology in the style of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President. Like the original PSAC, the new council was justified by a growing need for presidential science advice independent from the different agencies. In contrast to the PSAC system, however, the new council would have three full-time members, with one serving as chairman. It was hoped that such an arrangement would reduce reliance on outside scientists and allow the council to integrate more easily into presidential policymaking. The existing arrangement, with the NSF director as science adviser, the Killian report concluded, presented an “untenable” confl ict of interest.16 Like the ODM-SAC’s Princeton memorandum of 1953 and in contrast to the tone of the post-Sputnik White House meeting that led to the establishment of PSAC in 1957, the NAS effort represented an appeal by the scientists to the government, instead of the other way around. The Killian report was met with mixed reactions. The New York Times gave it front-page treatment, printing extensive excerpts of the report, and followed with an editorial calling on Nixon to implement it and close “the science gap.”17 The report also helped mobilize several scientific organizations, such as the FAS, which had been disturbed by PSAC’s dissolution and had pushed for “putting the scientists back into the White House.”18 Its most important audience was, of course, the White House. Initially the panel was encouraged by Vice President Ford’s reassurance that the idea of a science council “appealed” to him.19 He expressed further “enthusiasm” when Killian and Handler came back to brief him after the report was finished.20 Other parts of the Nixon administration, however, proved much less receptive. “On behalf of the President,” Kenneth Cole, a Nixon aide, thanked Handler for a copy of the Killian report, but pointedly reminded the scientists that, as the report itself acknowledged, “each President must choose the way in which he secures advice and counsel in science and technology.” “The current arrangements are,” Cole insisted, “working well.”21 Roy Ash, the man who had helped Nixon get rid of PSAC-OST and was now director of the Office of Management and Budget, was likewise skeptical of the need for “a science presence immediately in the White House.”22 Just when Killian was resigned to inaction, the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign and Ford was sworn in as president in August 1974. Given Ford’s sympathetic attitude, scientific leaders felt encouraged and redoubled their effort.23 For his part, Ford remained a supporter of science advising but developed misgivings about anything like the restoration of a PSAC or even the three-person council, his earlier endorsement notwithstanding. As early as July 1974, when Ford was still vice president, he told Guy Stever that he would welcome the return of a science adviser but not a PSAC. “He was well aware of the potential problems that led to its end,” Stever later recalled.24 Ford, perhaps with Garwin’s testimony on the SST in mind, was especially concerned that PSAC’s right to initiate studies of its own might embarrass the administration if the latter ever disapproved of the

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committee’s findings.25 Furthermore, to avoid charges of imperial presidency that had been leveled against Nixon and to give the new science office more stability, President Ford decided to establish a science office not by a presidential directive, but by a congressional act. He asked Nelson Rockefeller, his newly nominated vice president, to carry out an investigation on the matter for him.26 At this point, the debate over science in the White House reached a new level of intensity, as those within the White House who had helped drive out the scientists under Nixon put up a fierce resistance to their return.27 Even among former PSAC associates subtle differences developed. William T. Golden, for example, preferred a single presidential science adviser with a small staff. Harvey Brooks and Eugene Skolnikoff, in their critique of the Killian study, proposed a division of labor in science advising. Science in policy, they argued, was advisory in nature; it belonged in the White House subject to adjustment and tight control by each president. In contrast, policy for science, the more mundane science policymaking, deserved to be put on a permanent basis in the Executive Office of the President. These differences of opinion, Killian feared, might weaken the consensus for action.28 He also grew concerned that Edward Teller, PSAC’s old nemesis who was infl uential in the Rockefeller circle, might give him advice markedly different from that of the NAS committee.29 Thus Killian and several of his supporters decided to lobby Rockefeller directly for their cause. Killian had known Rockefeller from the 1950s when the two worked together under Eisenhower to establish NASA and when Killian served on an informal study panel for the Rockefeller Brothers.30 Rockefeller appeared sympathetic, although not completely receptive, to the Killian group’s concern. On March 11, 1975, in a meeting with Killian and Handler, he expressed his support for a science and technology advisory mechanism in the White House that “could represent the interests of the scientific and technical community.” Handler quickly responded that the science advisers “must serve the needs of the President, not as a representative of the scientific community.”31 That was the politically correct answer, of course. In fact, unbeknownst to Handler and Killian, one week earlier Rockefeller had told Ford that the PSAC-OST system’s loyalty to the scientific community was a major cause for its demise—as the OST’s “allegiance to its constituency grew, its effectiveness in serving the president diminished.”32 Despite these misgivings, however, Rockefeller promised to recommend to Ford the establishment of something close to what the Killian panel proposed.33 Finally, in a statement issued on June 6, 1975, Rockefeller announced the administration’s plan to establish the position of a science and technology adviser to the president through a congressional act to bring scientific and technological expertise to bear on policymaking, including national security, to provide the president with early warning of both problems and opportunities, and, surprisingly, given Handler’s earlier protestation, “to assure a permanent voice at the seat of Executive power for a great constituency of our national life—the world of science and technology.”34 It was probably calculated to win the support of the scientific community during the upcoming 1976 presidential election. Indeed,

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reflecting his continuing ambivalence, Rockefeller warned in the same statement that the science adviser should “avoid even the appearance of being a ‘spokesman for science.’”35 Nevertheless, it was Rockefeller who ended the internal debate by taking a decision memo personally to Ford. “When it came out signed, staff could only fall in line.”36 Once the White House sent the legislative proposal to Congress, it became entangled in the normal, messy political process. Stever believed that partisan politics slowed actions on the bill because the Democrats hoped to save “the honor and fun” possibly for their own administration, just as in the case of the Stanford linear accelerator in 1960.37 One group of congressmen took advantage of this opportunity to resurrect the idea of a Department of Science and Technology.38 It did not gain the Ford administration’s approval, and neither did another bill backed by Senator Edward Kennedy that would have given the science adviser the authority to approve—and disapprove—budgetary requests, much as Kistiakowsky had advocated in 1960. The idea received support from several PSAC alumni, including Killian, David, and Brooks at a gathering of the Vice President’s Science and Technology Consultants in September 1974, but it was not acceptable to the White House.39 Finally, in May 1976, Congress passed and Ford signed the National Science and Technology Policy, Organization, and Priorities Act of 1976, which established the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the Executive Office of the President. It authorized the OSTP director (Stever, initially) to participate in both science in policy, including national security, and in policy for science, as well as international scientific affairs. It formalized the Federal Council for Science and Technology into the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering, and Technology, but it did not provide for a PSAC. Indeed, no one seems to have even suggested a revival of PSAC throughout the whole process.40 Neither was it seriously considered in Jimmy Carter’s Democratic administration when a PSAC alumnus, Frank Press, headed the OSTP, despite a strong appeal in that direction by several former science advisers in the book Science Advice to the President, edited by Golden during the election campaign of 1980.41 With the election of Ronald Reagan, the relationship between the Republican administration and the scientific community entered a period that was marked, like the Nixon years, by profound tension. A White House Science Council (WHSC) was established in the OSTP, but it reported to the science adviser, first George Keyworth and later William Graham, not the president. Chaired by Solomon Buchsbaum of Bell Labs, himself a PSAC member under Nixon, the thirteenmember council had two other former PSAC members, Edward David and John Bardeen.42 Bardeen, who was opposed to many of Reagan’s policies, reluctantly accepted Keyworth’s invitation to join the council after friends persuaded him that “they needed really good people with courage and strength.”43 The presence of the moderate Bardeen also helped to counterbalance the views of such politically conservative scientists as Edward Teller, whom Keyworth claimed to be his mentor.44 But no amount of balancing in the WHSC could prevent the clashes

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between the Reagan administration and the scientific community over cuts in federal budgets for basic research, restrictions on scientific communication, and, above all, the president’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to devise a defense against nuclear attacks on American cities and thus make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.”45 A number of PSAC alumni, including Hans Bethe, Garwin, York, and Wiesner, believed that the SDI, or Star Wars, supported by Teller and, after initial skepticism, by Keyworth, was another case of misguided technological enthusiasm. They believed that the president made the decision because he lacked objective scientific advice. Bardeen resigned his WHSC membership in protest of the decision and of the fact that it was made without consultation with the WHSC.46 During the prolonged national debate over SDI, many scientists once again called for the reestablishment of an independent PSAC to apply a healthy skepticism to military technological projects and to help the government moderate the reheated nuclear arms race. In 1986, three years and billions of dollars later, SDI still could not overcome the technical deficiencies that its scientific critics had pointed out in the beginning. That year Bardeen joined Bethe in an infl uential New York Times op-ed piece that blamed the SDI decision and the recent space shuttle Challenger tragedy on a weak presidential science advising system. SDI “had no basis in scientific knowledge” and the Challenger accident happened “when technical judgments become subservient to schedules and politics.” “If we are not to commit further follies,” they contended, “we shall have to recreate a scientific advisory system that has sufficient independence and prestige to give advice that is politically unpalatable.”47 In another article, Bethe argued that “whatever group deliberates on the worth of a new weapons system should show restraint and should not lightly follow the technological imperative.”48 In the 1988 presidential election, many PSAC veterans and others joined Bethe and Bardeen in their call for the return of a PSAC-like science advisory system in another volume of essays edited by Golden.49 As the perceived need for technological skepticism grew in the shadow of the SDI controversy, so did the reputation of PSAC. Scientists’ campaign to restore PSAC came closest to realization under Reagan’s Republican successor, President George H. W. Bush. During his term the presidential science advisory system seemed to enjoy its former glory at least institutionally: D. Allen Bromley, a widely respected physicist from Yale, was appointed the science adviser with the prestigious title Assistant to the President; Bush also created a President’s Council of Advisers for Science and Technology (PCAST) which reported, like PSAC, to both Bromley and himself.50 In the Bush years, economic competitiveness ranked high on the American national agenda, and the end of the Cold War made it imperative to convert the military-industrial complex, and the associated scientific and technological resources, to peaceful ends. No one would argue that the first Bush administration succeeded in meeting all its technological challenges, but in retrospect, even some of its former critics came to appreciate its moderation in science policy. In denouncing the politicization of science under his son, George W. Bush, the UCS’s 2004 report, for example, quoted approvingly a statement made by the first President Bush in 1990: “Science, like any field of

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endeavor, relies on freedom of inquiry; and one of the hallmarks of that freedom is objectivity. Now more than ever, on issues ranging from climate change to AIDS research to genetic engineering to food additives, government relies on the impartial perspective of science for guidance.”51 Another indication of the support for the first Bush’s science advising system was the fact that it was largely continued in Bill Clinton’s Democratic administration, when John Gibbons, longtime director of the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, became the science adviser and the PCAST was retained (it was now called the President’s Committee instead of Council). Under Clinton, a National Science and Technology Council was also established that was chaired by the president himself and superseded the FCSST. However, the end of the Cold War during this period also brought curtailment to some of the scientific programs traditionally favored by PSAC. High-energy physics, for example, suffered a stunning setback when Congress voted to stop funding for the multibilliondollar Superconducting Super Collider project in 1993. Economic competitiveness, rather than intellectual achievement or Cold War competition for national prestige that had helped gain federal funding for SLAC, came to preoccupy the nation. In contrast, the space station that received much criticism from American scientists for its huge cost and lack of scientific justification survived partly on its pork barrel appeal.52 Thus, despite various problems, scientists generally enjoyed a close working relationship with the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations, but dramatic changes took place under President George W. Bush. John Marburger, former director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, was appointed OSTP director, but he no longer enjoyed the status of assistant to the president or even of science adviser. He reported not to Bush himself, but Bush’s chief of staff. In many ways, as described at the beginning of this chapter, the relationship between the administration and the scientific community reached a nadir under George W. Bush that had not been seen since the Nixon and Reagan administrations. In the 2004 election, an overwhelming majority of American scientists voted for the eventually unsuccessful Democratic candidacy of Senator John F. Kerry.53 No wonder most of Bush’s PCAST members, in sharp contrast to PSAC, hailed from the corporate and industrial world.54 At the same time, the campaign by the UCS for integrity in the science policy and science advising process marked the beginning of a new wave of scientific activism. How such politics of science will shape the 2008 and future presidential elections remain to be seen, but if we learn anything from this examination of PSAC’s experience, it is that scientific and technological dissent forms a vital part of the American democratic experiment.

Conclusion Now, more than half a century after the launching of Sputnik and decades after the demise of the PSAC, we live in an paradoxical era that in many ways resembled the one they book-ended. The Cold War is over, but nuclear weapons, concern for which had helped propel PSAC into national prominence in the first place, have remained, as they did then, the most serious threat confronting the United States and the world. American society faces other unprecedented challenges, such as global warming, which PSAC first called public attention to in 1965, and terrorism, and seeks technological solutions for them. Especially in the shadow of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack, the U.S. government has launched a technological push that recalled the post-Sputnik reaction. Yet, even as we combat these menaces grimly, we seem to have embraced a new sense of technological enthusiasm. The end of the Cold War nuclear arms race coincided with the emergence of a new wave of high technology, especially global information technology and biotechnology, which have replaced space and nuclear energy of the post-Sputnik period as the technological hopes for the new millennium. The American faith in technological solutions to social and political problems—whether it is educational lag or terrorism—has in many ways reasserted itself. Personal computers and the internet were thought to have ushered in a new economy; genetically engineered crops and drugs, including those expected from stem cell research, promise another green revolution and, perhaps finally, cures of cancers and other dreaded diseases. High tech in the classroom are supposed to boost student performance, the V-chip has been touted as the solution to violence and sex on TV, and politicians are hoping that hydrogen-fueled cars and other technologies will help us avert global warming without changing our lifestyle. “The way forward is through technology,” President Bush declared in his 2007 State of the Union address when talking about ways to solve energy and environmental problems. As Eisenhower recognized, it is precisely at a moment like this that we need scientists who can provide our government and citizens with the kind of informed, competent, and independent technological advice and skepticism that PSAC gave him and his successors. Technology has its place in solving many of our problems, but what Eisenhower and PSAC scientists learned from their long struggle with nuclear weapons is there are limits to technological fixes that we ignore at our peril. It is consensus on this point, as I have tried to illustrate in the previous chapters, that drove Eisenhower, and to lesser extent many of his successors, to put science advice into more and more subjects of national policy. Such close partnership between scientists and the federal government has, however, become elusive, if not impossible, in the twenty-first century. Even the 318

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idea of the possibility of nonpartisan, objective scientific advice that was widely held in the late 1950s and 1960s has increasingly come under question. What happened to make this shift possible? To put it differently, in what sense was the post-Sputnik period a seeming exception in the politicization of science, science advising, and science policy? To these questions, several scholars have offered their thoughtful analyses. On the one hand, some, although recognizing the infl uence of the broader environment, have emphasized the importance of the particular historical circumstances that made the science–state partnership a success under Eisenhower. Bruce L. R. Smith, for example, argued that science advising in the 1950s succeeded because of Eisenhower’s need and desire for it in building up the American deterrence— “the most important [factor] was simply that President Eisenhower wanted the advice”—and because of scientists’ ability to make technical contributions without self-interest.1 Gregg Herken, although less analytical in his approach, likewise pointed to the personal chemistry as a key part of PSAC’s success under Eisenhower and its disappearance—“a progressive loss of faith in the process by both sides” against the background of the polarizing Vietnam War and ABM debate—as a cause for the decline of science advising in later years.2 Both interpretations, focused as they were on science in policy and not policy for science, emphasized scientists’ perceived objectivity as a marker of their effectiveness. However, as we have seen, what distinguished the science advisers, both before and after Sputnik, was not their supposed cognitive objectivity—their division with Edward Teller made such professional unity plainly impossible to Eisenhower and the public—or even their purity from self-interest, as their advocacy for basic research and university science demonstrated. Others, on the other hand, have seen the shift as the inevitable result of a broader social and political transformation of the role of science in Western society. Yaron Ezrahi, for example, saw a parallel between the rise and fall of science advising and those of science in American popular imagination and political thinking across the postmodern divide that he dated to the 1960s.3 Although thought provoking, such broad analyses tend to neglect the internal dynamics on the scientists’ end of the science–state relationship and deny them their agency. What this study has indicated instead is, I believe, that the golden age of science advising in the late Eisenhower years and under Kennedy derived from the powerful convergence of both the particular historical circumstances and the broader transformation of American science and society: the pressure and opportunity generated by the Sputnik shock, the philosophical congruence between Eisenhower, and to a lesser degree, Kennedy, and their science advisers, over the limits of technological solutions of the Cold War, and, perhaps most important, the ideology of liberal consensus that dominated American political and social life in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It took the Sputnik crisis to neutralize the traditional resistance to the presence of scientists at the center of the American political power that was shared by Eisenhower, his close political advisers, and the public at large, thus the establishment of the modern presidential science advisory system

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was to a certain extent a contingent, not a predetermined event. It also muted, if only for a moment, the division among scientists as a legacy of the 1950 debate over the H-bomb and 1954 Oppenheimer hearing. Yet, Sputnik was a necessary but not a sufficient cause for the extraordinary effectiveness of the science advisers under Eisenhower: it brought them into the White House but what kept the scientists there and made Eisenhower “put science advice into more and more subjects of national policy” was their remarkable agreement over the need to moderate the nuclear arms race and to curtail the expansion of the military-industrial complex. These concerns led them to broaden the conception of technological rationality and led them to embrace a technological skepticism that, although recognizing the potentials of technological developments, emphasized the limitations of technological fixes to essentially social and political problems and the balance between long-term and short-term objectives, including that between basic and applied research. At the heart of this new conception of scientific and technological rationality was not conformity, as social theorists like Herbert Marcus had feared, but critical thinking.4 What mattered to Eisenhower was not so much the supposed objectivity of the scientists—he had seen many scientific disagreements on the question of the test ban alone and would come to realize that most policy issues had technical dimensions but not primarily technical problems in the end—or their refrain from advocating for science; he actually came to accept their argument that basic research was a worthy pursuit on its own and was an antidote to potentially misguided technological enthusiasm. What did matter to Eisenhower was the independence of his science advisers from the forces pushing for the militarytechnological momentum. In other words, he valued his science advisers for their critical evaluations of military-technological systems at least as much as, if not more than, for their positive technological contributions. There were differences in motivations between them: whereas PSAC scientists were driven in part by their pursuit of public support for science, Eisenhower’s Republican political ideals of small government underlay his opposition to what he regarded as an increasing militarization of American society. However, they united on their shared belief in the danger of an uncontrolled nuclear arms race, which they regarded as a menace quite separate from, and even greater than, the considerable Soviet threat itself. In this they parted company with those who held opposite views such as Edward Teller and Lewis Strauss. All these elements of agreement between the scientists and the president survived into the Kennedy years, but often in a weakened form due to Kennedy’s activist political philosophy that, among others, led him to undertake an aggressive space policy against PSAC’s advice. However, as the PSAC investigation of pesticides in response to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring demonstrated, they found new areas of convergence. In this case PSAC scientists’ technological skepticism matched Kennedy’s belief in the government’s active regulatory function. In contrast, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, science advisers’ effectiveness would decline not only because the Sputnik urgency faded amidst the new crisis of the Vietnam War, but also because their reputation for

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moderation and technological skepticism put them under attacks from both the left and the right. More broadly, the rise and fall of PSAC fit into the formation and collapse of “the ideology of the liberal consensus” that governed American political life in the decade that stretched from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. Embraced by everyone except for the radical left and extreme right, the liberal consensus was actually conservative in essence; it centered on the dual need to combat communism abroad and to hold faith in the “perfectibility of America” at home through governmentsponsored incremental reforms, economic growth, and technological progress. As journalist Geoffrey Hodgson, who popularized the phrase, put it, “never so much hope in America, never so much danger abroad.”5 Despite the sharp differences on nuclear weapons between liberal scientists represented in PSAC and their conservative counterparts led by Edward Teller, or in political philosophy between Eisenhower and Kennedy, all agreed on the necessity to wage the Cold War and on the fundamental soundness of the American liberal capitalism. It was this consensus and continuity that ensured PSAC’s smooth transition across the 1960 election and gave it a bipartisan reputation. It was in this context that Kistiakowsky spoke, in 1964, of his support for Johnson and for his bipartisan foreign policy. When the liberal consensus broke down amidst the Vietnam War and radicalized civil rights movement, the foundation and the trust on which PSAC scientists participated in public policy was shaken. In the polarized political environment, their traditional technological skepticism was no longer viewed as helpful criticism within the consensus but as a sign of political dissent or even disloyalty. For the scientists, it was difficult to “work within the system” when the consensus on which the system was built was gone. In this connection, Garwin’s decision to testify against the SST despite his foreboding that it might destroy PSAC was especially revealing. Thus it was not the loss of “scientific objectivity” but the newly magnified political significance of scientific division, which had long existed, that led to the decline of presidential science advising. The political consensus that characterized the golden age of science advising never completely returned either before or after the end of the Cold War, and even less in the post-9/11 period of partisanship intensified by another unpopular war in Iraq.6 Thus, despite the fervent wishes of many of its veterans, the return of a bipartisan, “objective” science advising system like PSAC would likely remain a dream, as long as the highly partisan political atmosphere prevailed. To be sure, PSAC scientists were not always successful even at the height of their infl uence; neither did they always act with consistency or free of considerations of institutional self-interest. Most of them supported the decision to drop the atomic bomb during World War II but nevertheless sought to control the arms race in the postwar period; they denounced the removal of Oppenheimer’s security clearance and other McCarthyist acts but identified with the objectives of the national security state during the Cold War; their obsession with ensuring federal support of academic science often led many of them to insist on establishing close ties between science and the military establishment; they came to recognize the

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pitfalls of technological fixes but advocated many such fixes during the Vietnam War before finally breaking with their traditional insider status to speak out against administration policies in the debates over Vietnam, the ABM, and the SST. Their advocacy of arms control, a balanced space program, and increased support for basic research was what brought them into a position of infl uence under Eisenhower and Kennedy, but the same advocacy led to their confl ict with and demise under Johnson and Nixon. Indeed, the problem of dissent in science advising persisted both during and after the committee’s existence and will certainly be a part of the process in the future. Instead of dreading it as evidence for a lack of objectivity on the part of the scientists, we should accept it as an indication that science advice, just as science itself, is constructed in a social and political environment. We should welcome it as a healthy part of the democratic give-and-take among experts and between them and the rest of society. In the same spirit we should view the question of dual allegiance—to the scientific community and to the government—that plagued science advisers as public scientists throughout the period we have examined. Although it might be theoretically possible to segregate the two sides of science advising—science in policy and policy for science—institutionally, it is doubtful that it would work in practice in the long run. For one, with the increasing convergence of science and technology in fields such as biomedical, information, and materials research, it is more difficult than ever to separate science and technology policy, or basic and applied research. Given the political economy of American science funding and the reality of interest-group politics, it is inevitable that whoever occupies the positions of science advisers to the government will have to consider both its support and use of science and technology. The best solution to the problems of confl ict of interest and elitism in both science in policy and policy for science is to increase openness and transparency in the process of science advising.7 For policymakers who are disappointed by the lack of scientific objectivity and certainty as a basis for decisions on controversial issues, they might find the experiences of Eisenhower instructive. As we have seen, Eisenhower was often troubled by disagreements among his science advisers, but, instead of restricting them to narrow technical issues and forcing them to come up with a consensus view, he allowed, indeed encouraged, them to take a broad perspective relating the technical with the social and political. He made political choices after weighing all opposing arguments and after considering the possible self-interests of their advocates. Fortunately for both him and his science advisers, they agreed on the fundamental issues, such as the need to moderate the space race and arms race. However, even in those areas on which they disagreed, at least initially, such as the question of military versus civilian control of the space program, the issue of the missile gap, and the need for federal support of basic research, the two sides resolved their differences through thoughtful, reasoned discussions, without questioning each other’s motives or loyalty or filtering technical evaluations through ideological blinders.

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What is remarkable here is not that science advising was depoliticized under Eisenhower, but rather that both he and his science advisers came to recognize the value of independent scientific and technological evaluations and the limits of technological solutions in view of the ultimate need for political actions. The pattern largely continued under Kennedy, who shared his science advisers’ commitment to arms control and environmental protection—as exemplified by the achievement of the limited nuclear test ban and their joint, incisive response to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—but also tolerated and even appreciated their dissent on issues of the Apollo Project and civil defense. The subsequent deterioration of science advising under Johnson and Nixon was due to both personality confl ict and a changed social and political context engendered especially by the divisive Vietnam War. PSAC scientists were not without their critics from the right for questioning the technological imperative or the left for remaining part of the establishment, but their advocacy of technological restraints won them the trust of President Eisenhower and the support of many of their fellow scientists and others who were concerned with the implications of technological enthusiasm of the militaryindustrial complex at the height of the Cold War. Their insistence on a broader definition of technological rationality, on the necessity of critically examining the end, not just the means, of technology, of keeping in mind both what it could and what it could not do, and of maintaining a balance between long-term scientific strength and short-term technological fixes remain reasonable and as applicable to the post–Cold War era as it did during it. For example, it is tempting to put hope in a national missile defense to keep the menace at bay—indeed it is prudent to investigate appropriate technological options in meeting the threat of terrorism in its full complexity—but it is important not to be carried away by unrealistic wishful thinking. Although it is crucial to clarify the scientific argument over global climate change, it takes political leadership, and often scientific activism, to move toward the making of prudent decisions to avert or at least mitigate a possible environmental catastrophe. However, the George W. Bush administration, like the Nixon and Reagan administrations before it, seems to think that, on the one hand, faith-based politics and ideology take priority over evidence-based scientific reasoning and technological evaluations, and, on the other hand, that American military-technological superiority could be relied on in pursuing domestic and international objectives. What is potentially at stake is not just precious resources wasted or critical warnings ignored, but the cultivation of a blind faith in technological solutions to social and political problems that had led the United States into disasters like the Vietnam War, and, in many ways, the war in Iraq. Although few would dispute the goal of promoting democracy in Iraq or other places, many Americans, including many scientists, disagreed with the means with which the United States sought to accomplish it. This division over the Iraq War, just like that over the Vietnam War, has unfortunately also spilled over into other areas of the relationship between the scientific community and the federal government, deepening the breach that

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already existed over the federal support of basic research and the formulation of a sound environmental policy. That is a pity, because it will take more than the “shock and awe” of military and technological power to win the war on terror and solve the myriad other problems facing America and the world. We still need to move out of Sputnik’s shadow. If PSAC scientists’ experiences in the post-Sputnik era of the Cold War hold any relevance for us today, if their technological skepticism still speaks to our own age of technological enthusiasm, it should alert us to not just the potentials but also the limits of technological fixes, to the necessity of taking actions in the face of potentially catastrophic environmental changes, to the need for a balanced science policy that looks beyond immediate technological payoff, and to the value of transparency and dissent in a democratic society.

Appendix Members of the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization (1951–1957) and the President’s Science Advisory Committee (1957–1973) Name

Institution and Field

Years

Alvarez, Luis W.

Univ. of Calif., Berkeley; physics

Bacher, Robert F.

Calif. Inst. of Tech.; physics

1953–1956 1957–1959

Baker, William O.

Bell Telephone Labs; physical chemistry

1957–1959

Baldeschwieler, John D.

Stanford Univ.; chemistry

1969–1973

Bardeen, John

Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; physics

1959–1962

Beadle, George W.

Calif. Inst. of Tech.; biology

Bennett, Ivan L., Jr.

Johns Hopkins Univ.; pathology

1966–1970

Berkner, Lloyd W.

Associated Universities, Inc.; physics

1957–1958

Bethe, Hans A.

Cornell Univ.; theoretical physics

1956–1959

Bradbury, Norris E.

Los Alamos Scientific Lab.; physics

1955–1957

Branscomb, Lewis M.

Joint Institute for Lab. Astrophysics; physics

1965–1967

Bronk, Detlev W.

The Rockefeller Inst.; physiology, biophysics

1951–1962

Brooks, Harvey

Harvard Univ.; physics

1960–1964

Brown, Harold

Livermore Lab.; physics

1973

1960

1961

Buchsbaum, Solomon, J.

Sandia Lab (1971), Bell Labs. (1972–73); physics

1971–1973

Buckley, Oliver E.

Bell Telephone Labs; electrical engineering

1951–1955

Cairns, Theodore L.

DuPont de Nemours & Co.; chemistry

1971–1973

Calvin, Melvin

Univ. of Calif., Berkeley; organic chemistry

1963–1966

Chance, Britton

Univ. of Pennsylvania; biophysics, biochemistry

Coleman, James S.

Johns Hopkins Univ. (1971–72), Univ. of Chicago (1973); sociology

1971–1973

Conant, James B.

Harvard Univ.; chemistry

1951–1953

David, Edward D., Jr.

Science Adviser to the President; physics, electrical engineering

1971–1973

Doolittle, James H.

Shell Oil Co.; aeronautical engineering

1957–1958

Doty, Paul M.

Harvard Univ.; biochemistry

1961–1964

Drell, Sidney D.

Stanford Univ.; theoretical physics

1966–1970

1959

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Appendix

Dryden, Hugh L.

National Advisory Com. on Aeronautics; physics 1951–1956

DuBridge, Lee A.

Calif. Inst. of Tech. (1951–56), Science Adviser to the President (1969–71); physics

1951–1956 1969–1973

Ference, Michael, Jr.,

Ford Motor Company; physics

1967–1970

Fisk, James B.

Bell Telephone Labs.; physics

1952–1960

Fitch, Val L.

Princeton Univ.; physics

1970–1973

Fletcher, James C.

Univ. of Utah; physics

1967–1970

Friedman, Herbert

U.S. Naval Research Lab.; physics

1970–1973

Garwin, Richard L.

IBM Corporation; physics

1962–1965 1969–1972

Gell-Mann, Murray

Calif. Inst. of Tech.; theoretical physics

1969–1973

Gilliland, Edwin R.

Mass. Inst. of Tech.; chemical engineering

1961–1964

Goldberger, Marvin L.

Princeton Univ.; physics

1965–1969

Haggerty, Patrick E.

Texas Instruments, Inc.; electrical engineering

1969–1971

Handler, Philip

Duke Univ.; biochemistry

1964–1971

Haskins, Caryl P.

Carnegie Inst. of Washington; genetics, physiology

1955–1958

Hewlett, William R.

Hewlett-Packard Co.; electrical engineering

1966–1969

Hornig, Donald F.

Princeton Univ. (1960–64), Science Adviser to the President (1964–69); physical chemistry

1960–1969

Killian, James R., Jr.

Mass. Inst. of Tech. (1951–57, 1959–61), Science Adviser to the President (1957–59); administration

1951–1961

Kistiakowsky, George B.

Harvard Univ. (1957–59, 1961–63), Science Adviser to the President (1959–61); physical chemistry 1957–1963

Land, Edwin H.

Polaroid Corp.; physics

1956–1959

Lauritsen, Charles C.

Calif. Inst. of Tech.; physics

1952–1957

Loeb, Robert F.

Columbia Univ.; internal medicine

1951–1955 1960–1962

Long, Franklin A.

Cornell Univ.; physical chemistry

1961–1962 1963–1966

MacDonald, Gordon J. F.

Univ. of California, Los Angeles (1965), Institute for Defense Analysis (1966–68), Univ. of California, Santa Barbara (1968–69); geophysics

1965–1969

MacLeod, Colin M.

New York Univ.; microbiology

1961–1964

McElroy, William D.

Johns Hopkins Univ.; biology, biochemistry

1963–1966

Moynihan, Daniel P.

Harvard Univ.; economics

1971–1973

Old, Bruce S.

Arthur D. Little, Inc.; metallurgy

1951–1956

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Olsen, Kenneth H.

Digital Equipment Corp.; electrical engineering

1971–1973

Oppenheimer, J. Robert

Institute for Advanced Study; physics

1951–1954

Pake, George E.

Washington Univ., St. Louis; physics

1965–1968

Panofsky, Wolfgang K. H.

Stanford Univ.; physics

1960–1964

Pierce, John R.

Bell Labs; electrical engineering

1963–1966

Piore, Emanuel R.

IBM Corporation; physics

1959–1962

Pitzer, Kenneth S.

Rice Univ.; physical chemistry

1965–1968

Press, Frank

Calif. Inst. of Tech.; geophysics

1961–1964

Purcell, Edward M.

Harvard Univ.; physics

1957–1960 1962–1965

Rabi, Isidor I.

Columbia Univ.; physics

1952–1960

Robertson, H. P.

Calif. Inst. of Tech.; physics

1957–1959

Seaborg, Glenn T.

Univ. of Calif., Berkeley; chemistry

1959–1961

Seitz, Frederick

National Academy of Sciences; physics

1962–1970

Simon, Herbert A.

Carnegie-Mellon Univ.; psychology, computer science

1968–1971

Slichter, Charles P.

Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; physics

1964–1969

Smith, Cyril

Univ. of Chicago; physical metallurgy

Smith, Lloyd H., Jr.

Univ. of Calif., San Francisco; medicine

1970–1973

Tape, Gerald F.

Associated Universities, Inc.; physics

1969–1973

Thomas, Charles A.

Monsanto Chemical Corp.; chemistry

1951–1955

Thomas, Lewis

New York Univ. Medical School (1967–68), Yale Univ. Medical School (1969–70); medicine

1967–1970

Mass. Inst. of Tech. (1966–67), Univ. of California, Berkeley (1967–70); physics

1966–1970

State Univ. of New York, Stony Brook; electrical engineering

1970–1973

Tukey, John W.

Princeton Univ. and Bell Labs; mathematics

1960–1963

Turner, Howard S.

Turner Construction Company; chemistry

Waterman, Alan T.

National Science Foundation; physics

Townes, Charles H. Truxal, John G.

1959

1972 1951–1956

Webster, William

New England Electric System; physics

Weinberg, Alvin M.

Oak Ridge National Lab; nuclear physics

1960–1962

1951

Weiss, Paul A.

The Rockefeller Inst.; biology

1958–1959

Westheimer, F. H.

Harvard Univ.; chemistry

1967–1970

Whitman, Walter G.

Mass. Inst. of Tech.; chemical engineering

1951–1955

Wiesner, Jerome B.

Mass. Inst. of Tech. (1956–61), Science Adviser to the President (1961–64); electrical engineering

1956–1964

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Appendix

Wood, Harland G.

Case Western Reserve Univ.; biochemistry

1968–1972

Wyngaarden, James B.

Duke Univ. Medical School; medicine, biochemistry

1972–1973

Livermore Lab (1957–58), Dept. of Defense (1958–61), Univ. of California, San Diego (1961–67); physics

1957–1958 1964–1967

York, Herbert F.

Zacharias, Jerrold R.

Mass. Inst. of Tech.; physics

1952–1958 1961–1964

Zinn, Walter H.

Combustion Engineering, Inc.; physics

1960–1962

Notes • Sources for the membership are “Present and Past Members of the President’s Sci-

• •

• •

•

•

•

ence Advisory Committee” (through 1972), undated, in Killian Papers, box 19, folder 1; Golden (1980, viii–ix). Institutional affiliation is at time of service. The formal title of the science adviser to the president was Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. Only in the Nixon administration was the title formally changed to Science Adviser to the President. Oliver Buckley, Lee DuBridge, and I. I. Rabi were successively chairmen of the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization. Robert Bacher, James Fisk, Charles Lauritsen, Bruce S. Old, I. I. Rabi, Walter G. Whitman, and Jerrold R. Zacharias were appointed consultants to ODM-SAC before they became full members. See David Z. Beckler, “Resume of Activities of the Science Advisory Committee,” June 8, 1954, in JRK, box 226, folder “Science Advisory Committee, 10 April–December 1954.” Donald A. Quarles, assistant secretary of defense for research and development, and Emanuel Piore, then deputy chief and chief scientist of the Office of the Naval Research, were appointed associate members of ODM-SAC. See Beckler, “Resume . . . ,” June 8, 1954. Consultants at Large: Harvey Brooks, Detlev Bronk, James Fisk, Donald Hornig, James Killian, Edwin Land, Colin MacLeod, Emanuel Piore, I. I. Rabi, and Jerome B. Wiesner became consultants at large to PSAC on expiration of their terms on the committee. See “Present and Past Members. . . .” PSAC consultants: Most of the science administrators in government, such as NSF director, director of defense research and engineering, science adviser to the secretary of state, director of the National Institutes of Health, NASA deputy administrator, AEC commissioner and later chairman, assistant director of the Central Intelligence Agency for science and technology, assistant director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and deputy director of the Institute of Defense Analysis were appointed consultants to PSAC. “Present and Past Members. . . .” “[PSAC] Members and Consultants,” July 15, 1959, in PSAC Papers, reel 2, 852–854.

Abbreviations Used in Notes AIP-CHP: American Institute of Physics, Center for History of Physics. Anderson Papers: Papers of Clinton Anderson, Library of Congress Manuscript Division BAS: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. BOB: National Archives, Record Group 51 (Bureau of the Budget). Bronk Papers: Rockefeller Archives Center, Detlev W. Bronk Collection. Bundy Memos: Memos of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, 1963–1966 (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1985). Busby Papers: Johnson Library, Horace Busby Papers. Bush Papers: Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Papers of Vannevar Bush. CSCC Archives: George Washington University, Gelman Library, Archives of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China. David Files: National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, Staff Members and Office Files, [Edward] David. DDRS: Declassified Documents Reference System, online database at http://galenet. galegroup.com/ with subscription. Also available in microfiche (Washington, DC: Carrollton Press, 1981–). DNSA: Digital National Security Archives database. DNSC: Paul Kesaris (ed.), Documents of the National Security Council, 1947–1977, microfilm, 5 reels (Washington, DC: University Publications of America, 1980). DuBridge collection: Cal Tech Archives, DuBridge collection. Ehrlichman Files: National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, White House Special Files, Staff Members and Office Files, Ehrlichman, Numerical Subject File Ehrlichman Notes: Paul Kesaris (ed.), Papers of the Nixon White House, Part 3. John Ehrlichman: Notes of Meetings with the President, 1969–1973, microfiche (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1988). Eisenhower Cabinet Minutes: Paul Kesaris and Joan Gibson (eds.), Minutes and Documents of the Cabinet Meetings of President Eisenhower (1953–1961), microfilms, 9 reels (Washington, DC: University Publications of America, 1980). Eisenhower Diaries: Robert Lester (ed.), The Diaries of Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953–1961, microfilm, 28 reels (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1986). Eisenhower Legislative Meetings: Robert Lester (ed.), President Eisenhower’s Meetings with Legislative Leaders, 1953–1961, microfilm (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1986).

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Abbreviations Used in Notes

Eisenhower PPF: Eisenhower Library, Post-Presidential Files FRUS: United States State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States (USGPO), multivolumes, some of which are available at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/. Cited with period, volume number, document number or page number [e.g., FRUS, 1955–1957, 19: 384–394, or FRUS, 1955–1957, v. 19, document no. 101]. Goodpaster memcon: Andrew J. Goodpaster, “Memorandum of Conference with the President . . .” or “Memorandum of Conversation with the President . . .” (if the memcon was prepared after the date of the meeting, both dates will be given). References have been given, in many cases, to these memoranda in Eisenhower Diaries; some, but not all, of them are also available in DDRS or FRUS. Haldeman Notes: Paul Kesaris (project coordinator), Papers of the Nixon White House, Part 5. H. R. Haldeman: Notes of White House Meetings, 1969–1973, microfiche (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1993). Haworth Papers: Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Leland Haworth Papers. Hornig Papers: Johnson Library, Papers of Donald F. Hornig. HST: Harry S. Truman Library, Papers of Harry S. Truman, Official Files. JFK/NSF: John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Presidential Papers of John F. Kennedy, National Security Files. JFK/POF/DAS: John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Presidential Papers of John F. Kennedy, President’s Office Files, Departments and Agencies Series. JFK/POF Part 2: President John F. Kennedy’s Office Files, 1961–1963 (Washington, DC: University Publications of America, 1997), Part 2. Staff Memoranda, microfilm, 9 reels. JFK/POF/PR: John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Presidential Papers of John F. Kennedy, President’s Office Files, Presidential Recordings. JFK/POF/SM: John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Presidential Papers of John F. Kennedy, President’s Office Files, Staff Memoranda. JFK/WHCF: John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Presidential Papers of John F. Kennedy, White House Central Files. John Eisenhower memcon: John S. D. Eisenhower, “Memorandum of Conversation with the President . . .” JRK: MIT Archives, AC-4 (Karl Compton and James Killian Collection). JRO: Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, DC, J. Robert Oppenheimer Papers. Killian Papers: MIT Archives, Cambridge, MA, Collection 85–27 (Killian Papers). Killian Papers II: MIT Archives, Cambridge, MA, Collection 80–8 (Killian Papers). Kistiakowsky Papers: Harvard Archives, George Kistiakowsky Papers (HUG(FP) 94.14). LBJ/NSF: Johnson Library, National Security Files, Agency File. LBJ/OSTH: Johnson Library, “Adm. History, Office of Science and Technology” collection, box 1, volume I, Administrative History.

Abbreviations Used in Notes

331

LBJ/WHCF: Johnson Library, White House Central Files. MacArthur Collection: Johnson Library, AC 69–19 (Mrs. Diana T. MacArthur). McCone Papers: Eisenhower Library, John McCone Papers. NASA History Office collection: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) History Office, Washington, DC, various collections on PSAC members. Nixon FG 6–9: National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, White House Central Files, Subject Files, FG 6–9. Nixon FG 209: National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, WHCF Subject Files, President’s Science Advisory Committee FG 209. NSC discussion: “Memorandum of Discussion at the . . . Meeting of the National Security Council, Washington, [meeting date].” [e.g., NSC discussion, April 4, 1957]. NSC Documents: Paul Kesaris (ed.), Documents of the National Security Council, 1947–1977, microfilm, 5 reels (Washington, DC: University Publications of America, 1980). OSANSA: Eisenhower Library, Office of Special Assistant on National Security Affairs collection, Administrative Subseries. OSAST: Eisenhower Library, White House Office collection, Office of the Special Assistant for Science and Technology, I. Alphabetic Series. OSS: Eisenhower Library, White House Collection, Papers of Office of Staff Secretary, Subject Series, Alpha Subseries. OST: National Archives, RG 359 (Records of the Office of Science and Technology). Panofsky Papers: SLAC Archives, Panofsky Papers. PDDE: Louis Galambos and Daun Van Ee (eds.), The Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower: The Presidency, v. 14–17, The Middle Way; v. 18–21, Keeping the Peace (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996–2001); available online at http://www.eisenhowermemorial. org/. Cited by volume range and document no. Piore Report of 1958: “U.S. Policy and Actions in High-Energy Accelerator Physics: Report of a Special Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee and the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission,” included as “Appendix 3: Piore panel report—1958” in Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (1965, 135–142). PPP: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. A complete online version is available at www.presidency.ucsb.edu. PSAC Papers: Robert Lester (ed.), The Papers of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, 1957–1961, microfilm, three reels (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1986). Rabi Papers: Library of Congress Manuscript Division, I. I. Rabi Papers. Ribicoff hearings: U.S. Senate, Committee on Government Operations. 1965, Interagency Coordination in Environmental Hazards (Pesticides), hearings before the Subcommittee on Reorganization and International Organizations, 88th Congress, 1st session (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964–1965).

332

Abbreviations Used in Notes

Robertson Collection: Archives of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, H. P. Robertson Collection. Seaborg Papers: University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, Glenn T. Seaborg Files, no box numbers. Sevareid Papers: Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Papers of Eric Sevareid. Teller’s FBI Files: FBI Files on Edward Teller released to author on Freedom of Information Act request, August 2006. Urey Papers: University of California, San Diego, Special Collections, Harold C. Urey Papers. USGPO: United States Government Printing Office. VB: Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Papers of Vannevar Bush. Waterman Papers: Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Alan T. Waterman Papers. Wigner Papers: Princeton University Special Collections, Eugene Wigner Papers. WP/M: SLAC Archives, Stanford, CA, Wolfgang Panofsky Papers, binder “Project M.” WTG: William T. Golden, “Government military-scientific research: Review for the president of the United States, 1950–51” (Unpublished collection of interviews and other documents with continuous pagination, deposited at American Institute of Physics Niles Bohr Library, College Park, MD).

Notes preface 1. This episode has been nicely captured in Miller (1996). In April 2008, Xu was awarded the Andrei Sakharov Prize by the American Physical Society “for a lifetime’s advocacy of truth, democracy, and human rights.” See http://www.aps.org. 2. Seaborg (2001). For a guide to the Seaborg papers at the Library of Congress, see http://www.loc.gov/rr/mss/text/seaborg.html.

Introduction 1. Goodpaster memcon, December 19, 1960, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 28, 314–317. Eisenhower was apparently reacting to Kennedy’s campaign promise to be “a Chief Executive in every sense of the word—who responds to a problem, not by hoping that his subordinates will act, but by directing them to act.” J. Smith (1991, 122). 2. Goodpaster memcon, December 19, 1960. 3. Eisenhower (1965, 224). 4. Killian (1977, 241). 5. For more on Eisenhower’s farewell speech, see chapter 9. 6. On American technological enthusiasm and post-Sputnik technocracy, see McDougall (1985) and Hughes (2004). 7. Bob Park, “What’s New” (American Physical Society newsletter), May 7, 1993, online at http://www.aps.org/WN/WN93/wn050793.cfm, accessed in 2004. Attention to such division within the scientific community, it is hoped, will help alert us to the problems of any generalized discussion about the confl ict or cooperation between science and the state, or about the political and ideological roles of science and technology in liberaldemocratic societies. For example, Yaron Ezrahi’s otherwise insightful discussion of science in American political discourse—Ezrahi (1990)—rarely touches on the profound political division among the scientists. 8. Hughes (2004). 9. See, for example, Ezrahi (1990). 10. Kohlstedt (1985), on 33. 11. Recent institutional histories covering the postwar period include Sapolsky (1990); Hewlett and Holl (1989); Crease (1999); Westwick (2003). 12. See, e.g., Harvey Brooks, “The Scientific Adviser,” in Gilpin and Wright (1964, 76). Charles Maier’s insightful “Introduction” to Kistiakowsky’s published diary followed a

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Notes to Pages 6–15

similar division. See Kistiakowsky (1976, xiii–lxvii). Major works on the history of American science policy include Dupree (1986), Stine (1986), and B. L. R. Smith (1990). 13. In one of the standard histories—Herken (1992)—of presidential science advising, for example, historian Gregg Herken focuses on “science-in-policy,” especially on nuclear weapons, and gives the impression that the science advisers were driven mainly by their concern with the arms race, not their institutional self-interest. 14. David Beckler, “Excerpts from Meeting of the President’s Science Advisory Committee [on March 14, 15, 1960]: Discussion of the Organization of Science in Government,” in OST, box 176, folder “Government R&D.” 15. Major studies in the debate over the relationship between American scientists and the national security state include Forman (1987), Kevles (1990), Leslie (1993), and Needell (2000). 16. Recent biographical studies of prominent ODM-SAC and PSAC members include: Hoddeson and Daitch (2002) on Bardeen, Needell (2000) on Berkner, Hershberg (1993) on Conant, McElheny (1998) on Land, Bird and Sherwin (2005) on Oppenheimer, Schweber (2000) on Oppenheimer and Bethe, Rigden (1987) on Rabi, and Goldstein (1992) on Zacharias. A number of other members have written autobiographies or memoirs that touch on their service on PSAC. See, e.g., Killian (1977), Panofsky (2007), Piore (1990), Seaborg (2001), Simon (1991), Townes (1999), Weinberg (1991), and York (1987). 17. An earlier version of chapter 9 appeared as Z. Wang (1995b) and chapter 12 as Z. Wang (1997). Both are substantially revised and expanded here. 18. See Gieryn (1983). See also Jasanoff (1990). 19. See Galison (1997a), especially chapter 4. 20. Chandra Mukerji (1989), in her study of American oceanographers, has likewise argued that what was most important to the government was not the science, but the technological and evaluative skills of the oceanographers it funded. 21. PSAC, “Nuclear Test Ban Negotiation,” July 12, 1960, in OSAST, box 8, folder “Disarmament—Nuclear Test Policy (7).” See also Kistiakowsky diaries on July 14–21, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 368). 22. L. Graham (1993).

Chapter 1 — American Public Science, 1863–1945 1. For reactions to Sputnik, see McDougall (1985), Divine (1993), and P. Dickson (2001). Eisenhower, “Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 9, 1958, accessed at www.presidency.ucsb.edu in 2006. 2. Turner (1980). 3. Killian (1977, 228). 4. Killian comments in U.S. Department of Commerce (1977, 286). 5. Dupree (1986, 138). The charter is reprinted in Cochrane (1978, 595–596). 6. Dupree (1986, 294, 308–309).

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7. Cochrane (1978, 652); “Roosevelt’s ‘Scientific Cabinet’ to Shape His Technical Policies,” New York Times, January 9, 1934, 4. 8. Cochrane (1978, 349–357). 9. See Kargon and Hodes (1985). 10. Compton (1933, 515–518). On the technocracy movement, see Akin (1977). See also “M.I.T. Head Scouts Technocracy Peril,” New York Times, December 20, 1932, 16. 11. Kevles (1997, 254). 12. Ibid., 255. 13. Ibid., 256. 14. “Victory for Hoover Seen in Straw Poll,” New York Times, November 5, 1932, 9. 15. Science Advisory Board (1935, 18). 16. Kevles (1997), 257. 17. Jewett to Frank Lillie, January 8, 1936, quoted in Cochrane (1978, 377). 18. See Hounshell (1980). 19. On the British case, see, for example, Z. Wang (1995a). 20. George Gray, “Science Shares in National Planning,” New York Times, January 21, 1934, SM6. 21. Kline (1995). 22. Rydell (1993, 98–99). 23. Mumford (1963, 218–219), emphasis added. 24. See, for example, Mukerji (1989), Sarewitz (1996), and Galison (1997b). 25. Rabi (1970, 5). 26. Zachary (1997, 280). See also Schweber (1992, 172). 27. Feynman (1980, 106). 28. Rabi (1960, 5). 29. Ibid. 30. Schweber (1992, 173). 31. Rabi (1970, 5–6); Hoddeson et al. (1993, 4). 32. The best work in this regard is Galison (1997a), especially chapter 4. See also Kevles (1997, 367). 33. Rabi (1986, 10). The committee held its first meeting on September 23–24, 1940. See Curtis W. Lampson to Urey, July 20, 1960, Urey Papers, box 91, folder 22. 34. J. Bernstein (1978, 94–95). Again, Rabi acknowledged that he learned this way of dealing with the military from his British colleagues on the radar project. See also Rabi (1960, 7), and Rigden (1987, 141). 35. Zachary (1997, 166–174). 36. A. K. Smith (1970, 29–30).

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Notes to Pages 20–24

37. The Franck Report, June 11, 1945, reprinted in A. K. Smith (1970, 371–372). See also Price (1995). 38. Williams and Cantelon (1984, 63–64). See also Herken (1992, 25–26). 39. B. J. Bernstein (1988). 40. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970, 34). 41. Thorpe (2006, 128-159). 42. A. K. Smith (1970, 51). 43. Ibid., 380. 44. For insightful studies of technological determinism see M. R. Smith and Marx (1994). 45. Kistiakowsky (1980, 59). 46. Panofsky (1994, ix). 47. General Thomas F. Farrell was quoted in Groves to Stimson, July 18, 1945, in Stoff et al. (1991, 192); Kistiakowsky (1980, 60). 48. Hershberg (1993, 234). 49. Rabi (1970, 139). 50. Feynman (1980, 132). 51. Bethe quoted in Sykes (1994, 122). 52. Feynman quoted in Sykes (1994, 120–121). Despite his public persona as a fun-loving physicist, Feynman actually cared deeply about the social impact of science and technology. See, for example, Feynman (1998). 53. Stoff et al. (1991, 110–111).

Chapter 2 — The Origins of Technological Skepticism, 1945–1950 1. A. K. Smith (1970, 361). The controversy over a 1995 Smithsonian exhibit on Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, demonstrated that the decision on the use of the bomb has remained a sensitive issue even more than fifty years after the event. Books on the Enola Gay controversy include Bird and Lifschultz (1998) and Hogan (1996). 2. A. K. Smith (1970, 80). 3. Boyer (1994, 49). 4. Mumford’s article was published in the March 2, 1946 issue of Saturday Review of Literature and discussed in Mendelsohn (1990, 355–356). See also Forman (2007a). 5. A. K. Smith (1970, 72). 6. Boyer (1994, 59). 7. A. K. Smith (1970, 357). 8. “Topics of the Times,” New York Times, October 21, 1945, E8; “Scientists Not Different,” New York Times, November 3, 1945, 11; A. K. Smith (1970, 175–177).

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9. A. K. Smith (1970, 351). 10. Ibid., 229. 11. Bush (1945). 12. Ibid. 13. Reingold (1994). 14. Lowen (1997, 17–42). 15. Bush (1945); Kline (1995, 220). An engineer himself, Bush privately, however, lamented the tendency to give credit for all wartime achievements to the physicists. Zachary (1997, 287–288). For a critical evaluation of the legacy of the Bush report, see Kleinman (1995). 16. Hollinger (1996, 97-120). 17. J. Wang (1995). 18. Bush (1945, 12). 19. Ibid., 20–21. 20. Oppenheimer to Stimson, August 17, 1945, in Stoff et al. (1991, 254–255). 21. Ibid. 22. Oppenheimer to Conant, October 29, 1949, emphasis in original, quoted in Hewlett and Duncan (1990, 378–379). 23. Hershberg (1993, 333, 356); Bird and Sherwin (2005, 433). 24. Hershberg (1993, 569). 25. Zachary (1997, 292). 26. In 1949 Bush advanced his technological skepticism in a book, Modern Arms and Free Men. Zachary (1997, 317, 345–349). 27. Hershberg (1993, 468–479). 28. See Lilienthal diary of October 29, 1949, in Lilienthal (1964, 581). 29. “USAEC General Advisory Committee Report on the ‘Super,’” October 30, 1949, reprinted in Williams and Cantelon (1984, 120–127). 30. Ibid., 126. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970), 80. 31. Williams and Cantelon (1984, 127). 32. Ibid., 124, 127. 33. Ibid., 125. Oppenheimer, “Speech to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists,” in Smith and Weiner (1980, 317). 34. Williams and Cantelon (1984, 127). 35. Seaborg, “Science Advice to the President,” January 18, 1989. A copy in the author’s collection. 36. Bird and Sherwin (2005, 421). 37. Buckley to Oppenheimer, December 3, 1949, in DNSA. 38. Teller, “Back to the Laboratories,” BAS 6, no. 3 (March 1950): 71.

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Notes to Pages 29–33

39. Teller (2001, 279–290). 40. Ibid., 372. Whether Teller’s explanation applied to Oppenheimer, it might have explained his own feeling toward the H-bomb. 41. Truman to Dean Acheson, May 7, 1946, in DNSA. 42. Lilienthal diary of January 31, 1950, in Lilienthal (1964, 633). 43. Rhodes (1995, 407). 44. Glenn T. Seaborg diary on January 31, 1950, in Seaborg (1989, v. 4, 40). 45. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970, 83–84, 86, 897–898). 46. On Truman’s decision, see York (1976, 65–74). 47. In January 1951, Rabi told William Golden that none of the GAC’s three nominees for replacements were appointed. WTG, 214. 48. Hershberg (1993, 381–382). 49. See, for example, Roger Robb’s questioning of Oppenheimer in U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970, 958–959). See also Talbott (1989, 112). 50. See U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970, 86, 386); Hershberg (1993, 475). 51. York (1976, 72–73). This led Oppenheimer later to propose to President Eisenhower a “Candor” campaign to educate the public about the nuclear dangers. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970, 95–96). 52. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970, 242–244); Bundy (1988, 214–215).

Chapter 3 — Mobilizing Science for the Korean War under Truman, 1950–1952 1. On the impact of the Korean War on American science, see Kevles (1990). 2. York and Greb (1977, 15). Golden interview with Robert Lovett, October 17, 1950, in WTG, 33–34; with Oppenheimer, Robert Bacher, and Charles Lauritsen, December 21, 1950, in Golden (1995, 37–40); with William Webster, January 2, 1951, in WTG, 203–205. 3. Zachary (1997, 299). 4. Bush (1970, 302–305). On Newman as Truman adviser, see A. K. Smith (1970, 138). 5. Steelman (1947, 23); Stine (1986, 32). 6. Golden with Carroll Wilson, October 11, 1950, in WTG, 28–30; with Bush, October 24, 1950, in Golden (1995, 8–13); with Lee DuBridge, James Killian, and Irvin Stewart, October 25, 1950, in Golden (1995, 14–16). See also Herken (1992, 55–57). 7. Golden interview, June 5, 1991; Wells (1976, 319); F. J. Lawton to Truman, October 19, 1950, in Golden (1995, 3–4). 8. Golden with Stowe, October 31, 1950, in WTG, 62. 9. For a list of Golden’s interviewees, see Golden (1995, 92–97). 10. Lee Edson, “Scientific Man for All Seasons,” New York Times, March 10, 1968, SM28–36, on 34.

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11. Golden with Dean, October 27, 1950, in WTG, 54. 12. See the numerous Golden interviews with Bush, Oppenheimer, and Conant in WTG. 13. Golden’s interviews with Bush, Oppenheimer, and Conant in WTG. 14. Golden with Rabi, January 5, 1951, in Golden (1995, 44–45). 15. Golden with H. P. Robertson, January 25, 1951, and with Robert Bacher, February 3 and 8, 1951, in WTG, 242, 266–267, 274–275, respectively. 16. Golden with Steelman, December 27, 1950, in WTG, 193; Golden to Truman, December 18, 1950 and attached memo, in WTG, 393–404, on 401. 17. Golden with George Hines, January 25, 1950, in WTG, 243. 18. Golden with Clay, January 19, 1951, in Golden (1995, 48–49); Bronk (1980, 250). See also Herken (1992, 56), but note that contrary to Herken’s account, it was Clay, not Golden, who made the initial suggestion of locating the new science committee in the ODM. 19. Golden with Clay, January 26, 1951, in WTG, 245–246. 20. England (1982, 113, 141–144). 21. Bronk (1980, 249); England (1982, 143–144). 22. Buckley was the White House’s, not Golden’s (or his scientist-interviewees’) choice. Golden with Henry Loomis, March 9, 1951, in WTG, 338–339. 23. Golden with Steelman, December 27, 1950, in WTG, 193. 24. Golden with Oppenheimer, March 20, 1951, in WTG, 357. 25. Golden with Killian, March 24, 1951, in Golden (1995, 59). 26. Golden with Buckley, March 31, 1951, in WTG, 377. See also Herken (1992, 57), but note that contrary to Herken’s (and James Killian’s) claim, the downgrading of the position from presidential science adviser to chairman of the committee was made before Buckley, who has been blamed for it, was even approached for the position. 27. Truman to Buckley, April 19, 1951, in JRK, Box 225, folder “Science Advisory Committee, Jan.–Aug. 1951.” 28. Golden with Lawrence, December 17, 1950, in WTG, 169; Golden with Strauss, December 11, 1950, in WTG, 158. Quote from Golden to Truman, December 18, 1950, in WTG, 393–404, on 401, emphasis added. 29. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970, 93–94). 30. Buckley to Killian, April 25, 1950, and attachments, in JRK, Box 225, folder “Science Advisory Committee, Jan.–Aug. 1951.” 31. A copy of the statement is in JRK, box 225, folder “Science Advisory Committee, September–December 1951.” 32. Buckley, “Chairman’s Report: Period—September 8 to November 8, [1951],” undated, in JRK, box 225, folder “Science Advisory Committee, September–December 1951.” 33. For an interesting comparison with a somewhat similar experiment in West Germany in this period, see C. Carson and Gubser (2002).

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Notes to Pages 38–42

34. “Summary [of ODM-SAC] Meeting no. 1,” May 12, 1951, 3, in JRK, box 225, folder “Science Advisory Committee, Jan.–Aug. 1951.” 35. Lilienthal diary for February 14, 1950, in Lilienthal (1964, 636). 36. See Boyer (1994, 98). 37. See also Herken (1992, 57), but note that it mistakenly named Arthur Flemming— who would only become ODM director under Eisenhower—as Wilson’s successor. 38. Herken (1992, 58–65); Zachary (1997, 362–363). 39. In making up the list of membership, Golden was careful to clear with the White House the inclusion of four GAC members, noting their opposition to the H-bomb. But Sidney Souers, Truman’s assistant on national security, did not seem to mind. See Golden with Souers, April 19, 1951, in WTG, 389. 40. Wiesner (1986, 21). 41. Matthew J. Connelly to Buckley, December 10, 1951, in HST, 3000-D. 42. Garwin interview, July 18, 1992. 43. Diary of AEC chairman Gordon Dean on April 6, 1951, in Dean (1987, 137–138). 44. Wells (1976, 322). 45. Truman did not know who DuBridge was in late 1949. Lilienthal diary on November 18, 1949, in Lilienthal (1964, 598). 46. Truman to DuBridge, May 16, 1952, in HST, 3000-D. Summaries of ODM-SAC meeting no. 12, June 15, 1952 and meeting no. 13, September 12, 1952, both in JRK, box 225, folder “Science Advisory Committee 1952.” 47. Summary of ODM-SAC meeting, June 15, 1952, in JRK, box 225, folder “Science Advisory Committee 1952.” 48. Summary of ODM-SAC meeting, November 7–9, 1952, in JRK, box 225, folder “Science Advisory Committee 1952.” 49. The following account is based on “Draft Statement to [the] President,” in JRK, box 225, folder “Science Advisory Committee 1952.” DuBridge actually drafted a letter of resignation. See Herken (2002, 257). 50. Allen, “Memorandum for Record,” October 27, 1952, DDRS. 51. Killian (1977, 67). More generally on scientists and the Red Scare, see J. Wang (1999) and Schweber (2000).

Chapter 4 — Science and the National Security State under Eisenhower, 1952–1957 1. NSC, “Review of Basic National Security Policy: Military and Non-Military Aspects of Continental Defense,” NSC 5707/4, March 26, 1957, in DNSC, reel 4 (no frame numbers). 2. Bronk (1980, 253). Eisenhower, “Memorandum to Directors and Chiefs of War Department . . . ,” April 30, 1946, in JRK, box 266, folder “Science Advisory Committee, 1955–January 1956.” Also see Killian (1977, 59), and H. S. Aurand, “The Army’s Research Program,” BAS 2, no. 9 (November 1946): 10.

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3. NSC discussion, February 25, 1953, in DDRS. See also Herken (1992, 71). 4. DuBridge to ODM-SAC, January 5, 1953, in JRK, box 226, folder “Science Advisory Committee January–October 1953.” 5. York and Greb (1977, 20–21). Other advisers to the administration, including Vannevar Bush, made similar suggestions. Zachary (1997, 364–365). 6. See the correspondence in VB, box 30, folder “Cutler, Robert.” The quote is from Bush to Cutler, May 7, 1953. See also Cutler (1965, 297–298). 7. DuBridge to ODM-SAC members, April 20, 1953 and May 20, 1953, both in JRK, box 226, folder “Science Advisory Committee January–October 1953.” Beckler to Oppenheimer, October 20, 1953; Oppenheimer to Flemming, October 26, 1953, both in JRO, box 19, folder “Beckler, David.” Beckler was also chief of the RDB’s technical intelligence branch. Beckler interview, June 5, 1991. 8. Beckler, “Resume of Activities of the Science Advisory Committee,” June 8, 1954, in JRK, box 226, folder “Science Advisory Committee, 10 April–December 1954.” 9. Beckler interview. 10. The phrase “blank wall” first appeared in Eisenhower to Herbert Brownell, attorney general, December 3, 1953, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 2, 747. 11. Murrey Marder, “The Fort Monmouth Story,” BAS 10, no. 1 ( January 1954): 21–25; Killian (1985, 154–155). 12. Eisenhower (1963, 123). 13. Eisenhower diary, December 3, 1953, in Eisenhower (1981, 260–261). 14. Cutler memo on the Oppenheimer case, December 19, 1953, in DDRS. 15. “Telephone Calls, December 2, 1953,” in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 3, 184. 16. On Vista, see McCray (2004). On Lincoln, see Leslie (1993, 32–43). 17. See, for example, Krige (2005). 18. C. A. Rollander to Strauss, February 25, 1954, in DDRS. 19. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 41–47). 20. Lilienthal diary entry of July 24, 1946, in Lilienthal (1964, 70). 21. Eisenhower (1981, 259–261); Hewlett and Holl (1989, 70). In a narrow sense, Strauss was right: even in March 1954, after his clearance was suspended, Oppenheimer was still able to obtain the classified yield of the Bravo H-bomb test from a friend. Rhodes (1995, 543). 22. DuBridge to Flemming, January 26, 1954, and attached DuBridge to Nixon, January 27, 1954, and “Memorandum on Security Problems,” same date, in JRK, box 226, folder “Science Advisory Committee, November 1953–February 1954.” On Nixon and the Oppenheimer case, see B. J. Bernstein (1990, 1404). 23. Hoover to Charles Wilson, June 4, 1954, in DDRS. 24. DuBridge to ODM-SAC members, February 15, 1954, in JRK, box 226, folder “Science Advisory Committee, March–9 April 1954 [sic].”

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Notes to Pages 45–49

25. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970). 26. Seitz to Teller, April 12, 1954, in Wigner Papers, box 66, folder 4. 27. Some recent studies of the hearing include Polenberg (2002), Herken (2002), and Bird and Sherwin (2005). The exchange is in U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970, 34, 959). See also McGrath (2002, 159–160). 28. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970, 383–394 [Conant]; 452–473 [Rabi]; 514–534 [DuBridge]; also 596–602 [Zacharias]); 608–630 [Bacher]). 29. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970, 567). Zachary (1997, 375). 30. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970, 468). 31. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970, 698–709 [Pitzer]; 709–727 [Teller]; 770–805 [Alvarez]). 32. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970, 710). See also Herken (2002, 292–293). 33. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970, 1016–1017, 1031). Bush is quoted in McGrath (2002, 164). See also B. J. Bernstein (1990) and Thorpe (2006, 229). 34. See Williams and Cantelon (1984, 170–171). On the Oppenheimer case, see Hewlett and Holl (1989, chapter 4), and B. J. Bernstein (1990, 1383–1484). Rabi to Strauss, June 14, 1954, in Rabi Papers, box 7, folder “Strauss, Lewis, L. 1954–1967, and undated.” 35. Williams and Cantelon (1984, 171); Hewlett and Holl (1989, 105–109). 36. See J. Wang (1992, 1999). 37. Eisenhower Diaries, reel 4, 167, and reel 3, 322. Curiously, however, Eisenhower decided not to send the letter. See also Ambrose (1984, 167); Hershberg (1988, 420–421). Bundy (1988, 317), apparently unaware of the Eisenhower–Conant meeting, argues that had the president met with Conant or Rabi on the case, he might have changed his view. 38. “Scientists Affirm Faith in Oppenheimer,” BAS 10, no. 5 (May 1954): 188–191; “Scientists Express Confidence in Oppenheimer,” BAS 10, no. 7 (September 1954): 283–286. 39. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 104–106). Eisenhower Diaries, reel 4, 167. “Los Alamos Cited for H-Bomb Role,” BAS 10, no. 7 (September 1954): 302–303. 40. Lilienthal diary entry for June 22, 1954, in Lilienthal (1966, 521–522). 41. Ambrose (1984, 166). 42. Eisenhower to Strauss, June 16, 1954, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 4, 666. 43. Eisenhower to Robert Sherwood, April 21, 1954, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 4, 193. See also Eisenhower (1963, 314). 44. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 111–112). 45. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 109–112). Edward David, science adviser to Richard Nixon in the 1970s, could still feel the ripples of the Oppenheimer case. David interview, June 12, 1992. 46. Bird and Sherwin (2005, 549). 47. On science and secrecy, see Dennis (1994) and Westwick (2000).

Notes to Pages 49–54

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48. Thorpe (2006, 197–199). 49. York (1987, 86–97); Beschloss (1986, 73–74). 50. “Meeting of the Cambridge-New York Group of the Science Advisory Committee,” March 10, 1954, in JRK, box 226, folder “Science Advisory Committee, March–9 April 1954”; Hewlett and Holl (1989, 172–173. See also Kevles (1990, 260). 51. “Meeting of the Cambridge. . . .” The full ODM-SAC committee convened the next day and Gardner again attended the meeting. See U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970, 527–528). 52. Killian (1977, 68). 53. For a pertinent discussion of Jerrold Zacharias’s experience with a study on the nuclear-powered airplane, see Goldstein (1992, 91–94). 54. DuBridge to Flemming, May 24, 1954, in DDRS. 55. Ibid. On the various summer studies, see, for example, Goldstein (1992, 94–122). 56. Flemming to Eisenhower, July 9, 1954; DuBridge to Flemming, July 21, 1954; Eisenhower to Killian, July 26, 1954, all in JRK, box 227, folder “Science Advisory Committee Technological Capabilities Panel 1954–March 1955”; Killian (1977, 69). Herken (1992, 87) missed the point that it was the scientists, not Eisenhower, who broadened the project. 57. Dale Corson to Zacharias, August 26, 1954, DuBridge Collection, box 187, folder 4. 58. Whitford to Zacharias, August 25, 1954, DuBridge Collection, box 187, folder 4. 59. Killian to DuBridge, September 15, 1954, DuBridge Collection, box 187, folder 4; Killian (1977, 69–70, 86). 60. TCP, “Meeting the Threat of Surprise Attack,” February 14, 1954, v. 1–2, in DDRS, declassified in 1997 (hereafter TCP report). 61. Land to Dulles, November 5, 1954, in DDRS. 62. Killian (1977, 79–85). See also Goodpaster memcon, November 24, 1954, in DDRS; Beschloss (1986, 81–82). 63. TCP report, v. 2, 146–148, 152. See also McDougall (1985, 116–121); Bulkeley (1991, 96–97); Hall (1995, 213–229); and D. A. Day (1998). For a discussion of the connections between the TCP and the American proposal for International Geophysical Year satellites, see Needell (2000, 325–331). 64. For a discussion of scientists and American intelligence policy, see Doel and Needell (1997). 65. Bundy (1988, 325); Killian (1977, 86–90); Eisenhower (1963, 313). 66. Killian (1977, 86). 67. Kevles (1990). 68. NSC discussion, October 4, 1956, in FRUS 1955–1957, 19: 366–369, on 367; Ambrose (1984, 400); Kevles (1990). Eisenhower’s misgivings about the Killian study have been overlooked in several accounts of it. See, for example, Damms (2000).

344

Notes to Pages 54–57

69. Goldstein (1992, 111, 113, 126); Kevles (1990). See also Leslie (1990). The military domination of science funding and its effects on the direction of science are examined in Forman (1987). 70. England (1982, 298–300). 71. Eisenhower (1963, 120–122); and Leuchtenburg (1989, 53–57). 72. See Sapolsky (1990, 68). Charles Erwin (“Engine Charlie”) Wilson is not to be confused with Charles Edward (“Electric Charlie”) Wilson, who headed General Electric before becoming director of ODM in 1950. 73. As a substitute, some BOB officials had once hoped that the ODM-SAC might help it assess military R&D. England (1982, 148–149, 189, 196–198). See also Joseph Dodge (BOB director) to Sherman Adams, May 12, 1953, in BOB, series 52.1, box 7, folder “E4–1/4 Interdepart’l Comte on Scientific Research and Development.” 74. England (1982, 181–202). 75. Ibid., 199–201. 76. Golden with Kenneth Pitzer, November 1, 1950, in WTG, 68–69, on 69. 77. England (1982, 199–200). 78. See Forman (1996, 296). 79. Seitz to DuBridge, January 8, 1954, in DuBridge Collection, box 187, folder 2. 80. DuBridge to James Killian, June 29, 1953, in JRK, box 226, folder “Science Advisory Committee January–October 1953”; England (1982, 198). For ODM-SAC membership, see David Beckler, “Resume of Activities of the Science Advisory Committee,” June 8, 1954, in JRK, box 226, folder “Science Advisory Committee, 10 April–December 1954.” 81. DuBridge to Flemming, August 27, 1953, and attached ODM-SAC memorandum on “Support of Basic Research,” in JRK, box 226, folder “Science Advisory Committee January–October 1953.” 82. ODM-SAC, “Support of Basic Research.” 83. ODM-SAC, “Support of Basic Research.” Emphasis in original. 84. DuBridge to Flemming, January 26, 1954, in JRK, box 226, folder “Science Advisory Committee January–October 1953.” First emphasis in original and second emphasis added. For a scholarly analysis of scientists as a “reserve force,” see Mukerji (1989). 85. DuBridge to Flemming, January 27, 1954, and the attached letter to Flemming dated January 26, 1954, in JRK, box 226, folder “Science Advisory Committee January– October 1953.” 86. Ibid. 87. As historian Jacob Hamblin (2002, 2005) points out in his study of the Navy’s use of oceanography, some of the data and basic research findings were indeed directly useful to the Navy for its navigational needs. 88. DuBridge to Cutler, May 15, 1953, in Bush Papers, box 34, folder “DuBridge, Lee A.” 89. Ibid., emphases original.

Notes to Pages 58–60

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90. Eisenhower memo for the secretary of defense, May 28, 1953, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 2, frame 39, emphasis original. 91. William D. Carey to files, February 2, 1954, in BOB, series 52.1, box 7, folder “E4–3 Budget and financial management.” DuBridge to ODM-SAC, February 15, 1954, in JRK, box 226, folder “Science Advisory Committee, March–9 April 1954.” The DOD dropped the $3 million general-purpose basic research for fiscal year 1955 but the NSF, as scientists had feared, failed to pick all of it up. See England (1982, 222). 92. England (1982, 201–203). 93. See, for example, Bruce L. R. Smith’s (1992) otherwise insightful study. 94. L. A. Minnich, “Memorandum of Conference with the President, March 10, 1956,” in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 8, 654. 95. “Mr. Brundage’s Statement . . . ,” undated but ca. July 1957, in Eisenhower Cabinet Minutes, reel 6, 180–183, on 180. 96. DuBridge to Flemming, October 13, 1955, in BOB, series 52.1, box 6, folder “E4– 1/1.3 NSF.” England (1982, 217); Stine (1992, 239–240). 97. Carey to files, October 2, 1956, in BOB, series 52.1, box 6, folder “E4–1 1952–56.” 98. See, for example, Goodpaster memcon, November 9, 1956, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 10, 541–542. 99. Goodpaster memcon July 31, 1956, dated August 1, 1956, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 9, 661–662. Congress championed the ANP, but Eisenhower directed the DOD and AEC to “drag your feet” on the project by concentrating on research on the reactor. Bryce Harlow, notes on Eisenhower’s meeting with Wilson and others, June 26, 1957, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 13, 281–283. 100. Rabi to Flemming, October 10, 1956, in OSS, box 23, folder “Science Advisory Committee (1).” See also Bulkeley (1991, 136–137). In April 1956, the DOD actually threatened to cancel the International Geophysical Year satellite project for lack of funds. Wilson to Eisenhower, April 5, 1956, in BOB, series 52.1, box 6, folder “E4–1/1.3 NSF: Budget and financial matters.” See also Eisenhower (1965, 209–10); and Bronk (1980, 245–256, on 249). 101. Minnich, “Minutes of Cabinet Meeting” and Maxwell M. Rabb, “Actions of the Cabinet,” March 11, 1957, in Eisenhower Cabinet Minutes, reel 5, 549–556. On Eisenhower’s opposition to the ANP in 1953, see Hewlett and Holl (1989, 14). 102. Rabi agreed to chair the committee after Killian and Fisk had declined the position in mid-1956. See DuBridge correspondence with Flemming, Killian, and Fisk in early 1956 in DuBridge Papers, box 187, folder 7. As DuBridge and several others rotated off the committee, Norris E. Bradbury of Los Alamos, Caryl P. Haskins of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Edwin H. Land of Polaroid, Hans A. Bethe of Cornell University, and Lloyd V. Berkner of Associated Universities, Inc., joined in 1955–1956. 103. The following account of the meeting is based on Goodpaster memcon, March 29, 1957, dated April 1, 1957, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 12, 239–241.

346

Notes to Pages 60–63

104. Wheeler to Seitz, November 15, 1956, in Wigner Papers, box 66, folder 4. 105. Goodpaster memcon, March 29, 1957. 106. Eisenhower to Alfred Gruenther, November 6, 1967, in Eisenhower PPF, Special Names, box 6, folder “Gruenther, Alfred, march 1967 (1).” 107. Rabi to Gray, July 19, 1957, and attached “Research and the Department of Defense,” in JRK, box 227, folder “Science Advisory Committee Basic Research Paper, 1957.” 108. Outside of the government, infl uential scientists such as Glenn Seaborg of Berkeley were calling for a doubling of federal funds for basic research. Seaborg, “The University and Basic Science,” Chemical and Engineering News 35 (March 4, 1957): 34–38. 109. L. A. Minnich, “Minutes of Cabinet Meeting, August 2, 1957,” and attachments, in Eisenhower Cabinet minutes, reel 6, 154–191. 110. Testimony by Quarles, in U.S. Congress (1958a, 270–271). Dael Wolfle, “Ups and Downs in Research Support,” Science 126 (October 18, 1957): 723. 111. George A. W. Boehm, “The Pentagon and the Research Crisis,” Fortune 57 (February 1958): 134–135, 153–154, 158, 160, on 154). 112. Killian, “The Challenge of Soviet Science,” in JRK, box 226, folder “Science Advisory Committee, 1957.” 113. Orr E. Reynolds to assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering (ASD/R&E), September 17, 1957; Advisory Panel on General Sciences to ASD/R&E, September 17, 1957, both in OSS, box 23, folder “Science Advisory Committee (2).” 114. Staff notes, September 28, 1957, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 14, 452. 115. See Beckler’s memos on this subject in OST, box 18, folder “PANEL—DISARMAMENT—ODM Documents.” Hewlett and Holl (1989, 296). 116. Beckler, “Memorandum for the Record,” December 28, 1956, in OST, box 18, folder “Panel—Disarmament—ODM Documents.” Hewlett and Holl (1989, 296–299, 361–370, 375–402). In late 1956 Eisenhower, however, began to weigh more the pro-ban opinion of Rabi and the ODM-SAC. See Ambrose (1984, 343–344). 117. “The President’s News Conference, July 17th, 1957,” from www.presidency.ucsb.edu. 118. Robert C. Cowan, “Physicists Score ‘Work-Bench’ Role,” Christian Science Monitor, January 18, 1955. 119. DuBridge to Flemming, February 13, 1956, and attached, in OST, box 18, folder “Pre-White House Science Advisory Committee Documents 1951–1958).” 120. Rabi to Flemming, December 19, 1956, in DDRS. See also Beckler to Flemming, October 9, 1956, in DDRS. 121. “R. C.” [Robert Cutler], “Two-hour Conference with Gordon Gray and the Science Advisory Committee,” March 21, 1957; Cutler to Flemming, February 11, 1957; George Weber to Cutler, January 23, 1957, all in DDRS. 122. “Transcript of Panel Discussion, Brandeis University, December 16, 1983,” p. 2, attached to Jack S. Goldstein to Rabi, January 17, 1984, in Rabi Papers, box 71, folder “Scientists as Citizens.”

Notes to Pages 64–71

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123. “R. C.” [Robert Cutler], untitled note, March 12, 1957, in DDRS. 124. “Copy of Killian Redraft of the Rabi Letter, March, 1957,” in DDRS. 125. For example, Rabi advised Eisenhower on British nuclear weapons program in 1949. See Lilienthal (1964, 549). See also Eisenhower (1967, 347–348) and Rabi interview (1026–1028). 126. “G.O.P. Unit Opens ‘Egghead’ Drive,” New York Times, August 8, 1956, 13. “200 Scientists Back President’s Leadership,” New York Times, October 27, 1956, 10. Other current and former ODM-SAC members who endorsed Eisenhower were Detlev Bronk, Caryl Haskins, Oliver Buckley, and Charles Thomas. See the full page advertisement by Committee of Arts and Sciences for Eisenhower in New York Times, October 29, 1956, 17. Cutler helped the scientists draft their statements and brought them to meet with Eisenhower for an hour. See Cutler (1965, 345). 127. Rabi, “The President and His Scientific Advisers,” in Golden (1980, 22). 128. Goodpaster memcon, March 29, 1957. NSC discussion, December 21, 1956, in FRUS, 1955–1957, 19: 384–394, especially 392; and NSC discussion, January 11, 1957, ibid., 401–409, especially 409. 129. “Transcript of Panel Discussion . . . ,” January 17, 1984. 130. NSC discussion, April 4, 1957, FRUS, 1955–1957, 19: 459–464. Cutler (1965, 354–355). See also Snead (1999). 131. The scientist-participants included William Webster, Jerome Wiesner, Albert G. Hill, Lloyd Berkner, William A. Higinbotham, Edwin McMillian, and Herbert York. Mervin Kelly and Ernest Lawrence served on the panel’s advisory committee and I. I. Rabi, James Killian, and James Fisk formed the liaison between the panel and the ODMSAC. See Halperin (1975, 47–70, and 71–109) for a reprint of the Gaither report. 132. Halperin (1975, 50, 71–109); Snead (1999). 133. See Weart (1988, 20). 134. Mead and Rhoda Métraux, “Image of the Scientist among High-School Students: A Pilot Study,” Science, 126 (August 30, 1957), 384–390, on 384. For a general survey, see LaFollette (1990). 135. Halberstam (1987, 475–476).

Chapter 5 — Eisenhower, Sputnik, and the Creation of PSAC, 1957 1. “Red Moon over the U.S.,” Time 70 (October 14, 1957): 27; and “Soviet Embassy Guests Hear of Satellite. . . . ,” New York Times, October 5, 1957, 3. 2. Bush (1949, 24). 3. “Soviet Satellite Sends U.S. into a Tizzy,” Life 43 (October 14, 1957): 34–37. See also McCray (2006). 4. William J. Jordan, “Dog in Second Satellite Alive . . . ,” New York Times, November 4, 1957, 1. On American criticism of Soviet secrecy and inconsistency in the International Geophysical Year satellite program, see Walter Sullivan, “Light May Flash in

348

Notes to Pages 72–75

Soviet ‘Moon,’” New York Times, October 1, 1957, 1, 14; “New Launching Seen Near,” New York Times, October 7, 1957, 1; “Staff Notes,” October 23, 1957, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 14, 549. 5. Divine (1993, xv). 6. Testimony by Teller, Bush, and Doolittle, in U.S. Congress (1958a, 4–89, 111–141, 342); Allen Drury, “Missile Inquiry Will Open Today,” New York Times, November 25, 1957, 1. 7. Kennedy was quoted in James Reston, “A Test for 1960,” New York Times, November 15, 1957, 6. 8. See McDougall (1985, 148–149). 9. See, for example, letters to the editors in Time, 70 (November 4, 1957), 4, and 70 (November 11, 1957), 8; Life, 43 (November 11, 1957), 18, and 43 (November 18, 1957), 19. 10. Bridges was quoted in Finney, “McElroy Assumes Rule of Missiles to Spur Program,” New York Times, October 19, 1957, 3. 11. J. V. Card to Lyndon Johnson, October 7, 1957, in Lyndon Johnson Library, U.S. Senate collection, box 355, folder “Satellite 2 of 2.” 12. Truman’s statement appeared in the Washington Post, November 12, 1957, as quoted in McDougall (1985, 157). See also “Truman Decries Lag on Satellite,” New York Times, November 12, 1957, 9. 13. Rabi is quoted in Major (1971, 288–89), and “Dr. Rabi Speaks,” New York Times, November 24, 1957, 200. 14. “JPC” [J. Patrick Coyne] to Cutler, December 9, 1957, in DDRS. 15. Z. Wang (2002, 210). 16. Eisenhower (1965, 206); Sullivan, “Light May Flash.” 17. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 257–260). 18. See McDougall (1985, 120; Wells (1976, 385); Bulkeley (1991, 137). 19. Day (1996). 20. Minnich, “Minutes of Cabinet Meeting,” October 18, 1957, pp. 2–3, in Eisenhower Cabinet Minutes, reel 6, 252–253. 21. Goodpaster memcon (Quarles and others), October 8, 1957, dated October 9, 1957, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 14, 814; U.S. Congress (1958a, 285, 312–321). 22. Secretary of Defense (most likely Quarles) memorandum for the president, October 7, 1957, in DDRS. 23. See, for example, Killian (1977, 12–30) and Divine (1993, 47–52). 24. “The President’s News Conference, June 26th, 1957,” from www.presidency.ucsb.edu. 25. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 398–402). 26. Herter, “Memorandum of a Conversation . . . July 30, 1957,” in FRUS, 1955–1957, 20: 666–667, on 667. 27. Bronk, “Science Advice in the White House,” in Golden (1980, 245–256), on 256.

Notes to Pages 75–80

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28. John Finney, “ . . . President Meets Scientists Today,” New York Times, October 15, 1957, 1, 14. 29. York (1987, 101): Killian (1977, 2). 30. Interview with Rabi by Chauncey Ollinger, Jr., February 25, 1984, Columbia University Oral History Research Office, 721. 31. Interview with Bethe by Thomas Soapes, November 3, 1977, pp. 6–7, Eisenhower Library. 32. Rabi interview by Ollinger, 721. 33. Rabi, “Topics Covered in Luncheon with General Goodpaster on 10/12/1957,” Rabi Papers, box 45, folder “PSAC Meetings Agendas and Minutes, 1957–1966.” 34. Rigden (1987, 248); ODM-SAC, “Suggested Topics for Discussion at the Meeting of the ODM Science Advisory Committee with the President, October 15, 1957,” in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 14, 787. 35. The following account of the meeting is based on Goodpaster memcon, October 15, 1957, dated October 16, 1957, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 14, 783–786. Present were Lloyd Berkner, Hans Bethe, Detlev Bronk, James Fisk, Caryl Haskins, Albert Hill, James Killian, Edwin Land, I. I. Rabi, Herbert Scoville, Alan Waterman, Jerome Wiesner, and Jerrold Zacharias. See also Eisenhower (1965, 211–212); Killian (1977, 15–17). 36. Goodpaster memcon, October 15, 1957. For a good historiographical discussion of science and American foreign policy, see Doel (1997). 37. Bethe (1986, 17). 38. Edward Teller, “We Must Win the H-War before It Starts,” Los Angeles Times, October 13, 1957, M8. 39. McDougall (1985, 157). 40. On liberal consensus, see Hodgson (1976, 67–98); Chafe (2007, 177–184). 41. On the right-wing attacks and Killian’s response, see Killian to Allen Dulles, February 2, 1956, in Killian Papers, box 18, folder 19; Killian (1977, 31–32). 42. See Rabi interview by Ollinger, 736; Goodpaster (1986). See also Cutler (1965, 352; Killian was “our first, and only choice”). 43. Cutler, “Outline of a Possible Mechanism for Better Coordinating at Top Level U.S. Scientific Work . . . ,” October 23, 1957, in DDRS. 44. Ann Whitman diary on October 24, 1957, in DDRS; Killian (1977, 20–26). 45. Goodpaster memcon, October 29, 1957, dated October 30, 1957, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 14, 747–749. See also Rabi to Gray, October 28, 1957, in DDRS. 46. Goodpaster memcon, October 29, 1957. 47. Ibid. 48. Goodpaster memcon of Eisenhower meeting with Strauss, October 29, 1957, dated October 30, 1957, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 14, 750. It was apparent to Goodpaster that Rabi and the ODM-SAC were trying to use the preignition effects to advance the test ban.

350

Notes to Pages 80–84

Goodpaster interview, June 17, 1992. In Herken (1992, 104), Strauss’s statement on Rabi was mistakenly attributed to Eisenhower. 49. Goodpaster memcon (with Dulles and others), January 12, 1959, dated January 19, 1959, in DDRS. 50. Goodpaster memcons, October 29, 1957; Eisenhower (1981, 348–349). 51. A one-day technical discussion concluded that “technical facts now available did not support a recommendation that an immediate moratorium should be declared.” See untitled report that started with “Statement of Problem,” December 23, 1957, apparently attached to Strauss and Killian to Eisenhower, December 26, 1957, in DDRS. 52. Goodpaster memcon, November 4, 1957, dated November 6, 1957, in DDRS; Eisenhower (1965, 220–223; Goodpaster memcon, March 29, 1957, dated April 1, 1957, in DDRS. 53. Wiesner (1986, 22). 54. Wiesner, “Up the Ladder to the White House,” in Rosenblith (2003, 241–265), especially 241–258. Herken (1987, 116–117). 55. Goodpaster memcon, November 4, 1957; Eisenhower (1965, 219–323); NSC discussion, November 7, 1957, in FRUS, 1955–1957, 19: 630–637; NSC discussion, January 6, 1958, in FRUS, 1958–1960, 3: 4–9. 56. Beckler to Goodpaster, November 6, 1957, and attached PSAC proposals, in OST, box 627, folder “PSAC-Title Folder.” 57. Eisenhower, “Radio and television address . . . November 7, 1957,” PPP 1957, 789–799. Project Mercury was a NASA program to send a human into orbit around the earth. 58. Ibid. 59. Eisenhower, “Radio and television address [from Oklahoma City] to the American people on ‘our future security,’ November 13, 1957,” PPP 1957, 807–817. 60. Killian to Eisenhower, November 15, 1957, in PSAC Papers, reel 1, 290–294. Eisenhower’s letter of appointment of November 22, 1957 is in PSAC Papers, reel 1, 289. The White House announcement can be found in Library of Congress (1967, 262–263). PSAC agenda of November 22, 1957, in PSAC Papers, reel 2, 1049–1050; Killian (1977, 107). 61. On the offices, see Divine (1993, 50). On the White House mess, see Beckler to Jerome Wiesner, November 8, 1962, in OST, box 856, folder “Pres. Sci. Adv. Comm-Title Folder 1962.” 62. Killian interview by Eugene Skolnikoff, April 28, 1967, in NASA History Office collection. 63. Eisenhower to Killian, December 7, 1957, reprinted in Killian (1977, 35–36). 64. Both sets of terms of references are reprinted in Killian (1977, 275–276). 65. Killian to Eisenhower, November 15, 1957, in PSAC Papers, reel 1, 290–294. For Kistiakowsky’s work at Los Alamos, see his “Reminiscences of Wartime Los Alamos,” in Badash et al. (1980, 49–63). 66. On Killian’s role in IBM’s hiring of Piore, see Watson and Petre (1990, 246–248). 67. Piore (1990, 56).

Notes to Pages 84–87

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68. Besides NSF director and DDRE, PSAC consultants also included science adviser to the secretary of state, NASA deputy administrator (long held by Hugh L. Dryden), and in the 1960s, AEC chairman (Glenn Seaborg) and assistant director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. See “Present and Past Members of the President’s Science Advisory Committee” (through 1972), undated, in Killian Papers, box 19, folder 1. For Weiss’s proposal of natural resources study, see Weiss to Kistiakowsky, July 30, 1959, in PSAC Papers, reel 2, 263–264. 69. Lowen (1997). 70. Kistiakowsky, “Presidential Science Advising,” Science 184 (April 5, 1974): 38–42, on 39. 71. Kistiakowsky (1976, viii). 72. In 1957, Jewish American members included Rabi, Bethe, Land, Wiesner, and Zacharias, and Rabi, Bethe, and Kistiakowsky were born abroad. 73. As the journalist Philip M. Boffey put it, “a cabal of scientists seized the opportunity presented by the war to push through the creation of a national academy that would be a worthy counterpart of the European academies.” Boffey (1975, 5, 15); Dupree (1986, chapters 5–7). 74. Killian interview by E. M. Emme and A. F. Roland, July 23, 1974, NASA History Office collection, 11–12. 75. PSAC agenda of November 22, 1957, in PSAC Papers, reel 2, 1049–1050; Killian (1977, 107). 76. PSAC, “Actions Taken at Science Advisory Committee Meeting, January 2, 3, 1958,” in PSAC Papers, reel 3, 195–198, on 196. 77. Years later Killian compared PSAC to a Science Court that was proposed to adjudicate technical issues involved in public policy making. See U.S. Department of Commerce (1977, 286). 78. Sullivan, “Scientists Cheer Choice of Killian,” New York Times, November 8, 1957, 11; Divine (1993, 49). 79. Waterman to Eisenhower, November 5, 1957, and attachment; Eisenhower to Waterman, November 12, 1957; both in OSAST, box 12, folder “Meetings with the President.” 80. Interview with Brode by David C. Berline, November 20, 1972, 28, in Columbia University Oral History Research Office. 81. On NSC reform, see Eisenhower to Senator Jacob K. Javits, March 3, 1958, PDDE, v. 18–21, document no. 585. On a Department of Science, see Eisenhower to Senator Charles E. Potter, October 21, 1957, PDDE, v. 18–21, document no. 396. 82. Killian (1977, 29–30). 83. Gray, “Memorandum for the Record,” January 17, 1961, in FRUS, 1961–1963, v. 25, document no. 3. 84. Lilienthal diary for November 24, 1957, in Lilienthal (1969, 232). 85. On von Braun, see Neufeld (2007). 86. Goodpaster memcon, October 15, 1957.

352

Notes to Pages 87–91

87. Eisenhower to Strauss, November 25, 1957, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 15, 64; “Telephone Calls, November 25, 1957,” in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 15, 283.

Chapter 6 — PSAC and the Launching of NASA, 1957–1960 1. “The President’s News Conference of February 5, 1958,” in PPP 1958, 143. 2. Ezrahi (1990, 218). 3. Griffith (1982, 120–121). 4. Cutler to McElroy, October 17, 1957; Navy Secretary Thomas S. Gates to McElroy, October 22, 1957; McElroy to Gates, October 29, 1957, all in OSAST, box 15, folder “Space (1).” 5. See Koppes (1982, 85); Medaris (1960, 159, 165–179); Green and Lomask (1970, 220). 6. Notes on PSAC meeting on December 9–11, 1957, in PSAC Papers, reel 1, 5–15. See also Killian (1977, 120). 7. Notes on PSAC meeting, December 9–11, 1957; McDougall (1985, 168); York (1987, 107–109). There is no direct evidence but it appears likely that the York panel prompted Eisenhower to give the final go-ahead to Jupiter C’s first launch (York interview, July 18, 1992). The panel did not, as reported by Herken (1992, 107), recommend the “cancellation” of Vanguard. 8. Killian (1977, 120–122); Killian to McElroy and Quarles, December 28, 1957, in OSAST, box 12, “IGY”; Kistiakowsky interview by Thomas Soapes, November 17, 1976, p. 8, in Eisenhower Library, OH-412; Waterman to Killian, December 6, 1957, OSAST, box 15, “Space (3),” and attachment. 9. Notes on PSAC meeting, January 2–3, 1958, in PSAC Papers, reel 1, 21–28. 10. Notes on the following PSAC meetings in PSAC Papers: December 9–11, 1957, reel 1, 5–15, on 7; January 2–3, 1958, reel 1, 21–28; February 7–8, 1958, reel 1, 33–47, on 42. 11. Notes on PSAC meeting, December 9–11, 1957, on 12. 12. Figures for other fields in FY 1958 underscored further to PSAC the imbalance between basic research and some dubious projects: the atomic reactor program was allocated $212 million, and another $198 million was to be spent on a nuclear-powered bomber project. Notes on PSAC meeting, March 11, 12, 1958, in PSAC Papers, reel 1, 51–58. 13. Notes on PSAC meeting, March 11–12, 1958, on 53. 14. Notes on PSAC meeting, February 7–8, 1958, in PSAC Papers, reel 1, 33–47, on 44. 15. Notes on PSAC meeting, January 2–3, 1958. 16. Notes on PSAC meeting, February 7–8, 1958, on 40. For an excellent biography of Berkner, see Needell (2000). 17. See notes on PSAC meetings on March 11–12, 1958 (Land, quote on 53, and Bethe); December 9–11, 1957 (Wiesner, quote on 12, and Bronk); January 2, 1958 (Rabi and Bronk, quote on 25). 18. Minnich, “Legislative Leadership Meeting, February 4, 1958, Supplementary Notes,” in Eisenhower Legislative Meetings, reel 2, 316–318, on 317. 19. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 91–95

353

20. York to Killian, February 18, 1958, in OSAST, box 15, folder “Space (4).” 21. Eisenhower to McElroy, March 24, 1958, and attachments, and Killian to Eisenhower, March 20, 1958, in OSAST, box 15, folder “Space (4).” 22. Notes on PSAC meeting, March 11–12, 1958. 23. Minnich, “Legislative Leadership Meeting, February 4, 1958, Supplementary Notes,” in Eisenhower Legislative Meetings, reel 2, 316–317. 24. Notes on PSAC meeting, February 7–8, 1958, 37. See also relevant documents in Eisenhower Cabinet Minutes, reel 6, 678–693; Minnich, “Minutes of Cabinet Meeting,” March 14, 1958, in ibid., reel 7, 7; NSC discussion, March 6, 1958, in DDRS; Purcell interview, June 9, 1992. 25. Goodpaster interview, June 17, 1992. 26. Interview of Purcell by Katherine R. Sopka, June 8 and 14, 1977, p. 48, in AIP-CHP; Killian interview by Emme and Roland, July 23, 1974, p. 26. 27. Wolfe (2002). 28. PSAC (1958a). 29. “The President’s News Conference of April 16th, 1958,” PPP 1958, document no. 74. 30. See S. Paul Johnston to Killian, February 21, 1958, in PSAC Papers, reel 2, 166–175, especially 170–171. Johnston worked as a staff assistant for the Purcell panel. See also York’s comments in notes on PSAC meeting, February 7–8, 1958, 38. 31. Notes on PSAC meeting, December 9–11, 1957. 32. “Actions Taken at Science Advisory Committee Meeting, January 2, 3, 1958,” PSAC Papers, reel 3, 195; “Briefing on Army Satellite Program,” November 19, 1957, OSAST, box 15, “Space (2).” ARPA’s contracting projects back to the services and York’s appointment as its chief scientist might have overcome these doubts by PSAC. 33. Minnich, “Legislative Leadership Meeting, February 4, 1958, Supplementary Notes,” Eisenhower Legislative Meetings, reel 2, 316–317. 34. Killian, “Memorandum on Organizational Alternatives for Space Research and Development,” December 30, 1957, in PSAC Papers, reel 2, 193–197. 35. Notes on PSAC meeting, December 9–11, 1957. 36. Rhodes (1986, 454). 37. Notes on PSAC meeting, December 9–11, 1957. 38. Johnston to Killian, March 12, 1958, and attached, in PSAC Papers, reel 2, 72–112, especially 96–112. See also Johnston to Killian, February 21, 1958, and attached memo, in PSAC Papers, reel 2, 166–175. 39. Killian, “Memorandum on Organizational Alternatives,” December 30, 1957. 40. Minnich, “Legislative Leadership Meeting, February 4, 1958, Supplementary Notes,” in Eisenhower Legislative Meetings, reel 2, 316–317. See also Minnich, “Minutes of Cabinet Meeting,” February 7, 1958, and attached documents, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 6, 679–693; Killian (1977, 133).

354

Notes to Pages 95–101

41. Waterman to Killian, December 6, 1957, and attached, in OSAST, box 15, “Space (3).” 42. “Control of Space Research,” Science 127 (February 21, 1958): 392. 43. Notes on PSAC meeting, December 9–11, 1957. 44. “Control of Space Research”; Roland (1985, 291–293). 45. Notes on PSAC meeting, February 7–8, 1958. On York’s appointment at ARPA, see York (1987, 141). 46. Paul E. Klopsteg to Waterman, February 26, 1958, in Waterman Papers, container 28, folder “National Science Foundation, 1958.” However, months later and surely to the great delight of Dryden, who became deputy administrator of NASA, York fought successfully to transfer the von Braun team from the Army to NASA. York (1987, 173–176). 47. Eisenhower to McElroy, March 24, 1958, and attachments, and Killian to Eisenhower, March 20, 1958, all in OSAST, box 15, folder “Space (4).” 48. Johnston to Killian, March 12, 1958, and attached. 49. Killian interview by Emme and Roland, p. 40; Schoettle (1966, 238–239). 50. Killian (1977, 133). 51. Goodpaster interview, June 17, 1992. 52. Killian (1977, 125–144). 53. York (1987, 174–176). Kistiakowsky diaries in Kistiakowsky (1976): 100 (September 29, 1959), 104–105 (October 1, 1959), and 125 (October 21, 1959). 54. PSAC, “Report of the Ad Hoc Panel on Man-in-Space,” December 16, 1960, reprinted in Logsdon et al. (1995, 408–412). 55. Kistiakowsky diary on October 26, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 409–410). 56. PSAC, “Report of the Ad Hoc Panel on Man-in-Space,” December 16, 1960, in PSAC Papers, reel 3, 594–602; Logsdon (1970, 34–36). John S. D. Eisenhower, “Memorandum of Conference with the President,” October 13, 1960, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 27, 374–376. 57. Swenson et al. (1966, 304). 58. Eisenhower to Killian, July 16, 1959, reprinted in Killian (1977, 212). 59. Killian (1977, 239). 60. A. K. Smith (1970). 61. Goodpaster memcon, January 21, 1958, dated January 22, 1958, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 15, 842; NSC discussion, January 22, 1958, in DDRS.

Chapter 7 — Military Technology, 1957–1960 1. Interview with Thomas S. Gates, Jr., by John T. Mason, Jr., August 3, 1967, p. 59, Eisenhower Library. 2. York (1987, 123). 3. Armacost (1969, 166–179), on 172.

Notes to Pages 101–103

355

4. Goodpaster memcon (with Wilson and others), October 8, 1957, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 14, 816–820. 5. Goodpaster memcon, November 22, 1957, dated November 23, 1967, in FRUS, 1955– 1957, 19: 687–688; Goodpaster “memorandum for record” on meeting on November 26, 1957, dated December 2, 1957, in DDRS; Divine (1993, 69–70); Armacost (1969, 173–179). 6. Kistiakowsky, “A Report of an Investigation of the Ballistic Missile Program . . . November 24–30, 1957,” in DDRS. Herken (1992, 107) mistakenly stated that PSAC picked Jupiter over Thor. 7. Goodpaster memcon, November 22, 1957. 8. Goodpaster “memorandum for record” on meeting on November 26, 1957. 9. Killian to Eisenhower, December 28, 1957, in DDRS. 10. Killian (1977, 144–145); Eisenhower, “Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 9, 1958, PPP 1958, 2–15, on 4. 11. Killian to Eisenhower, January 15, 1958, and Kistiakowsky to Killian, January 3, 1958, both in DDRS. 12. Goodpaster memcon, March 10, 1958, dated March 11, 1958, in DDRS. 13. See, for example, Kistiakowsky panel to Killian, April 22, 1959, in DDRS. 14. See the following Goodpaster memcons in Eisenhower Diaries: February 6, 1958, reel 16, 92–95; March 10, 1958, reel 16, 633–634; June 29, 1959, reel 21, 939–940; see also Killian (1977, 144–150). 15. Interview with Goodpaster, July 22, 1974, by E. M. Emme and A. F. Roland, p. 46, in NASA History Office. 16. See, for example, NSC discussion, April 1, 1960, FRUS, 1958–1960, 3: 389–392; NSC discussion, May 5, 1960, DDRS. 17. Eisenhower (1965, 244–253), especially 250. 18. See, for example, Goodpaster memcons, May 14, 1956 and May 18, 1956, FRUS, 1955–1957, 19: 301–305. 19. Goodpaster memcon, October 8, 1957, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 14, 816–820, on 819. 20. Goodpaster memcon, October 11, 1957, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 14, 805–806, on 806. 21. Goodpaster memcon, October 30, 1957, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 14, 731–735; “Bipartisan Meeting, December 3, 1957,” in Eisenhower Cabinet Minutes, reel 2, 301–303; Yanarella (1977, 38–40); York (1987, 136–139). 22. Goodpaster memcon, October 30, 1957, on 734. 23. See Paul D. Foote to I. I. Rabi, November 8, 1957, and attached, in OSAST, box 6, folder “Department of Defense (1)”; York (1987, 138–140); Medaris (1960, 172–174). For a history of the DSB, see Cunningham (1991, 97–118). 24. Beckler to Killian, December 20, 1957, OSAST, box 6, “Department of Defense (1)”; H. P. Robertson (chairman of DSB), “Memorandum for Record,” January 3, 1958, and other documents in Robertson Collection, box 11, folder 12.

356

Notes to Pages 103–105

25. See Killian to Beckler, October 22, 1957, and enclosed memo; Beckler to Goodpaster, November 6, 1957, and attached PSAC proposals; James Fisk, “Efficiency and Results in U. S. Military Technology,” October 1957, all in OST, box 627, folder “PSAC Title Folder.” 26. PSAC, “Science and Technology in Defense,” undated, and related documents in OSAST, box 6, folder “Department of Defense (1)”; Goodpaster memcon, November 4, 1957, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 15, 178–188. 27. Killian to McElroy, December 30, 1957, and PSAC, “Memorandum on Research and Development in the Department of Defense,” January 14, 1958, OSAST, box 6, “Department of Defense (1).” 28. PSAC, “Memorandum on Research and Development in the Department of Defense,” January 14, 1958. 29. Goodpaster memcon, February 27, 1958, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 16, 36–38, on 38. 30. McElroy testimony, in U.S. Congress (1958b, 6024–6029). In contrast to the president’s science adviser, however, the DDRE had operational authority. 31. Eisenhower (1965, 244–253), on 244; Killian (1977, 234–237); Cole et al. (1979, 187–235), on 204–205; Armacost (1969, 232–237). 32. Eisenhower (1965, 244–253); York (1987, 166–171); Beard (1976, 243–244). 33. York, “Eisenhower’s Other Warning,” in York (1995, 144–148), on 146. 34. Eisenhower to Baker, May 3, 1957, and Baker to Eisenhower, May 13, 1957, both in OSS, box 23, folder “Science Advisory Committee (1)”; Goodpaster memcon (with Killian and others), October 24, 1957, dated October 28, 1957, in DDRS; Goodpaster memcon (with Killian, Baker, and others), February 10, 1958, in DDRS. Baker remained for many years a major science adviser to the U.S. intelligence establishment. Baker interview, June 10, 1992. See also Bamford (1982, 339–342). 35. See John Eisenhower memcon, August 4, 1959, and Kistiakowsky to Eisenhower, August 4, 1959, both in OSS, box 16, folder “Dr. Kistiakowsky (1).” See also PSAC, “Record of Meeting [May 18, 19, 1959],” in PSAC Papers, reel 3, 135–142, on 142. Handwritten minutes of PSAC meeting, March 13–15, 1960, 24–26, in DDRS; Killian (1977, 78); Kistiakowsky diaries in Kistiakowsky (1976): 54–55 (August 25, 1959), and 394 (September 29, 1960). 36. Interview with Kistiakowsky by Thomas Soapes, November 17, 1976, Cambridge, MA, in Eisenhower Library, OH-412. 37. Interview of Kistiakowsky by Soapes, pp. 14–15. 38. The “Aunt Jemima” story attracted much media attention when Kistiakowsky’s appointment was announced in 1959. See, for example, “A Research Scientist: George Bogdan Kistiakowsky,” New York Times, May 29, 1959, 2. On his Los Alamos experience, see his “Reminiscences of Wartime Los Alamos,” in Badash et al. (1980), 49–65. 39. Murray Illson, “Colleges Warned on Arms Research,” New York Times, October 4, 1952, 19; Hershberg (1993, 398). 40. Ian Menzies, “The President’s New Science Adviser,” Washington Star, June 7, 1959; Clarence Smith, “CIA’s Analysis of Soviet Science and Technology,” footnote 3, in Haines and Leggett (2001), accessed in 2008.

Notes to Pages 106–108

357

41. Interview with Hans Bethe by Thomas Soapes, November 3, 1977, 22, Eisenhower Library. 42. See Kistiakowsky’s version of his confl ict with Rabi in Kistiakowsky (1976, 405–406, 417, 422). For Rabi’s account, see “Transcript of Panel Discussion, Brandeis University, December 16, 1983,” p. 2. 43. Kistiakowsky diary on September 11, 1959, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 67). 44. The exact dates of these appointments are in “Present and Past Members of the President’s Science Advisory Committee,” 1969, in Johnson Library, Adm. History, The Office of Science and Technology, box 1, v. 1. On Bardeen, see Hoddeson and Daitch (2002, 254–259). Alvin Weinberg described some of his experiences in PSAC in Weinberg (1994). 45. Paul Weiss to Kistiakowsky, July 30, 1959, PSAC, reel 2, 889–890; Kistiakowsky interview with Eugene Skolnikoff, April 28, 1967, pp. 10–11, in NASA Historical Office collection; Kistiakowsky (1976, 185). 46. NSC discussion, January 6, 1958, and attached report of PSAC Panel on Disarmament, January 5, 1958, in FRUS, 1958–1960, 3: 533–547. 47. Killian to Cabinet Committee on Preparation for a Summit Conference, April 17, 1958, and attached PSAC, “Some Technical Considerations and Their Implications Relating to the Cessation of Nuclear Tests,” April 14, 1958, in DDRS. 48. Dulles to Killian, May 2, 1958, OSAST, box 1, folder “Disarmament—Missiles.” 49. Killian to Dulles, May 23, 1958, OSAST, box 1, folder “Disarmament—Missiles”; Divine (1993, 173). 50. Kistiakowsky to Killian, June 9, 1958, OSAST, box 7, folder “Disarmament—Missiles.” 51. Killian to Kistiakowsky, December 11, 1959, in DDRS; G. W. Rathjens, “The Feasibility and National Security Implications of a Monitored Agreement to Stop or Limit Ballistic Missile Testing and/or Production,” February 18, 1960, OSAST, box 7, folder “Disarmament—Missiles.” 52. Goodpaster memcon, February 4, 1958, dated February 6, 1958, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 16, 92–95; Prados (1982, 78). 53. Goodpaster memcon, February 10, 1959, dated February 13, 1959, in DDRS. 54. Killian (1977, 222). 55. See Robert M. Briber to Killian, October 9, 1958, OSAST, box 1, folder “CIA.” A year earlier Kistiakowsky had joined several consultants to warn Allen Dulles, director of central intelligence, that “the United States is in a period of national emergency.” Kistiakowsky and others to Dulles, October 23, 1957, in DDRS. 56. On the surprise attack conference, see Suri (1997). See also Kistiakowsky diary on September 30, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 395); Wiesner (1965, 181–208). 57. Goodpaster memcon, January 12, 1959, dated January 14, 1959, in DDRS. 58. Goodpaster memcon, November 4, 1957, dated November 6, 1957, in DDRS. See also Bundy (1988, 338); Prados (1982, 78–79).

358

Notes to Pages 108–112

59. Ambrose (1984, 561). Thus, Eisenhower initiated the doctrine of adequacy that has been commonly attributed to Richard Nixon for his evoking it during the early 1970s. See also Powaski (1987, 131). 60. Elinor Langer, “After the Pentagon Papers: Talk with Kistiakowsky and Wiesner,” Science 174 (November 26, 1971): 923–928, on 926. 61. Kistiakowsky diary on August 26, 1959, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 55). 62. Kistiakowsky diary on October 12, 1959, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 115). 63. Kistiakowsky diary on January 7, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 219). 64. Kistiakowsky diaries February 20–March 7, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 262). 65. Handwritten minutes of PSAC meeting, March 13–15, 1960, on p. 1, in DDRS. 66. Kistiakowsky diary on July 8, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 367). 67. Kistiakowsky diary on July 8, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 366); Prados (1982, 113). 68. Bundy (1988, 350–352). Wiesner recalled how he set out, as one of the first things he did as Kennedy’s science adviser, to investigate the sources of U.S. intelligence about Soviet military strength and found out how shaky they were. See Langer (1971, 926). 69. Kistiakowsky (1976, ix). 70. On Kistiakowsky’s reflection on his career, see “Confessions of a Weaponeer,” an episode in the Public Broadcasting System’s NOVA series first aired in 1987. Courtesy of Steven Soter. 71. Bundy (1988, 337). 72. Beckler, “President’s Science Advisory Committee Meeting of December 15, 16, 1958,” December 23, 1958, in DDRS. 73. Kistiakowsky, “Observations on Presidential Science-Advising: An Interview with William T. Golden,” in Golden (1988, 491–502), on 498. 74. See the lists of PSAC panels in PSAC Papers: June 30, 1958, reel 2, 954–956; February 12, 1960, reel 2, 744–749; Beckler to Killian, “Aide Memoire on Major Actions of the President’s Science Advisory Committee November 1957—May 1959,” May 8, 1959, PSAC Papers, reel 2, 859–872, on 860. 75. PSAC, “Review of the FY ’61 Military Budget,” November 10, 1959, in DDRS. 76. PSAC, “Review of the FY ’62 Military Budget,” November 23, 1960, OSAST, box 1, folder “Department of Defense.” 77. Kistiakowsky diary on September 29, 1959, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 100). 78. Ibid. 79. Kistiakowsky to PSAC panel chairmen, October 11, 1959, in PSAC Papers, reel 2, 884; Kistiakowsky diaries in Kistiakowsky (1976): 141, 142 (November 4, 1959), and 157–163 (November 16, 1959). 80. PSAC, “Review of the FY ’61 Military Budget.” 81. For a general history of the ANP, see Lambright (1967). 82. Goldstein (1992, 91–94).

Notes to Pages 112–114

359

83. “Joint Statement by Representative Carl T. Durham . . . and Representative Melvin Price,” March 6, 1958, OST, box 22, folder “ANP—1958.” 84. Lambright (1967). 85. Ibid., 14. 86. E. P. Aurand to Killian, November 21, 1957, OSAST, box 4, folder “ANP (1).” 87. See “Action Areas Stemming from SAC Meeting 9, 10 December 1957,” in PSAC Papers, reel 3, 199–203, on 202. See also “Actions Taken at Science Advisory Committee, January 2, 3, 1958,” PSAC Papers, reel 3, 195–198, on 197. 88. Bacher to Killian, February 11, 1958, in DDRS. Other members of the panel included Hans Bethe, James Doolittle, and Hugh Dryden. See also Killian, “ANP,” June 23, 1959, OSAST, box 4, folder “ANP (2)”; Lambright (1967, 14–15); Beckler to Killian, May 8, 1959, PSAC Papers, 2: 859–872, on 863. 89. Goodpaster memcon, February 25, 1958, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 16, 62–64; Lambright (1967, 15). 90. “Joint Statement by Representative Carl T. Durham . . . and Representative Melvin Price . . . ,” March 6, 1958. 91. Price to Bacher, May 9, 1958, OST, box 22, folder “ANP—1958”; Lambright (1967, 16). 92. York (1970, 71–73); Killian (1977, 179). 93. Lambright (1967, 20–22). 94. Goodpaster memcon, June 23, 1959, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 22, 6–8; Killian, “ANP,” June 23, 1959, OSAST, box 4, folder “ANP (2)”; York (1970, 67–68). 95. See, for example, PSAC, “Review of the FY ’61 Military Budget.” 96. York (1970, 69); PSAC, “Review of the FY ’62 Military Budget,” on 11. 97. Kistiakowsky diary on December 21, 1959, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 204). 98. Killian interview with Eugene Skolnikoff, April 28, 1967, NASA History Office collection. 99. PSAC Missile Panel, “The Skybolt Air-Launched Ballistic Missile Program,” July 20, 1960; OSAST, “Memorandum on Selected Issues in the FY ’60 Defense Budget (as of November 1, 1958),” OSAST, box 1, folder “Department of Defense”; PSAC, “Review of the FY ’61 Military Budget” and “Review of the FY ’62 Military Budget”; York (1970, 52–59, 129, 155); Kistiakowsky diary on December 23, 1959, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 206). 100. PSAC, “Review of the FY ’61 Military Budget,” 23–24; Kistiakowsky diary on August 19, 1959, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 45, 387). See also Baker to PSAC panel, “Review of the 117L System,” July 13, 1960, PSAC Papers, reel 3, 625–626. For a history of American space reconnaissance, see Taubman (2003). 101. Kistiakowsky diary on January 15, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 230); Lakoff and York (1989, 76). 102. York (1970, 188–189). On air defense, see Goodpaster memcons, Eisenhower Diaries: June 8, 1959, reel 21, 860–862; June 9, 1959, reel 21, 835–840.

360

Notes to Pages 114–117

103. See, for example, PSAC AICBM panel to Killian, May 12, 1958, OSAST, box 1, folder “AICBM [March 1958–September 1959].” 104. PSAC AICBM panel to Killian, May 12, 1958. See also Kaplan (1983, 343–345); Lakoff and York (1989, 56–57); York (1987, 177). Indeed, as late as 1961 most PSAC members still thought Nike-Zeus “a piece of junk” (Weinberg 1994, 265). 105. Lakoff and York (1989, 57). 106. Goodpaster memcon, November 11, 1958, dated December 9, 1958, in DDRS. 107. PSAC AICBM panel, “Report of the AICBM Panel,” November 4, 1959; Kistiakowsky, “Notes for Meeting with the President,” January 14, 1959; PSAC, “Review of the FY ’61 Military Budget,” November 10, 1959, on 10–12, all in DDRS. 108. York (1970, 141). 109. Ibid. 110. Kistiakowsky diaries in Kistiakowsky (1976): 42 (August 18, 1959), and 323–324 (May 10, 1960). 111. PSAC, “Report of an Ad Hoc Panel on the Technical Aspects of the Nike-Zeus Pacific Test Program,” May 26, 1960, DDRS. See also Kistiakowsky diary on May 13, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 327). 112. Kistiakowsky diary on June 19, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 357). 113. PSAC, “Memorandum for the Record [on] Nike-Zeus,” October 18, 1960, in DDRS; PSAC, “Review of the FY ’62 Military Budget,” November 23, 1960. 114. Kistiakowsky diary on November 2, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 413). 115. Kistiakowsky diary on October 13, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 404). 116. Kistiakowsky diary on November 2, 1960. 117. H. Brooks (1968, 106). 118. F. Dyson (1979, 127–131). 119. Ulam (1983, 256). 120. Taylor to York, October 17, 1958, and “Staff Notes No. 622,” August 29, 1959, both from DDRS; G. Dyson (2002, 79, 80–82); Ulam (1983, 253); Kistiakowsky diaries in Kistiakowsky (1976): 122–123 (October 16, 1959), and 146 (November 9, 1959). On Bethe’s views, see McPhee (1974, 183). 121. F. Dyson (1979, 114). Orion was finally cancelled in 1965 when the military concluded that there were no worthwhile military applications for it. Ibid., 113; G. Dyson (2002, 268–269). 122. Goodpaster memcon, May 4, 1960, dated May 7, 1960, in DDRS. See also PSAC missile panel to Eisenhower, May 3, 1960, OSAST, box 12, folder “Missiles (5).” 123. Kistiakowsky (1976, 399, 403, 407, 413–416). On Scoville, see Richelson (2001). 124. Goodpaster memcon, November 25, 1960, dated December 1, 1960, in DDRS; Rosenberg (1983, 8). 125. Kistiakowsky (1976, 421).

Notes to Pages 117–124

361

126. Kistiakowsky diary on December 16, 1959, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 200). 127. Melvin Price, “Nuclear Frontiers in the 1960s,” clipping from the Congressional Record (House), 1961, p. 4329, in OST, box 21, folder “Aircraft Nuclear Power—T. F. 1961.” 128. York and Greb (1977, 13–26), on 24. On “technology happy,” see Killian, “Capsule Conclusions,” in Wolfle (1959, 124). 129. York (1970, 128–130). 130. Bundy (1988, 340–344); Divine (1993). 131. On biological and chemical warfare, see PSAC, “Record of Meeting,” June 16, 17, 1959, in PSAC Papers, reel 3, 129–134, on 131–133. See also Kistiakowsky to Killian, June 20, 1958; Herbert Scoville, Jr. to Paul A. Weiss, “Comments on Draft BW-CW Report,” May 8, 1959, both in OSAST, box 5, folder “BW/CW.” 132. NSC discussion, October 4, 1956, FRUS, 1955–1957, 19: 366–369, on 367. Ambrose (1984, 400).

Chapter 8 — The Search for a Nuclear Test Ban, 1957–1960 1. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 375). For an analysis of these measures as propaganda, see Osgood (2006). 2. Goodpaster memcon, June 24, 1957, DDRS; Hewlett and Holl (1989, 400–401). See also Green (2006). 3. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 400–401). 4. Robert Cutler, “Conference on August 9, 1957 . . . ,” DDRS; Hewlett and Holl (1989, 375–402). 5. John S. D. Eisenhower memcons in Eisenhower Diaries: August 9, 1957, reel 14, 89–91; August 16, 1957, reel 14, 49–54, on 54. See also Cutler, “Morning conference on August 9, 1957 . . . ,” in DDRS; Hewlett and Holl (1989, 457). 6. Stassen to Killian, December 10, 1957; Killian to Stassen, December 26, 1957, both in OSAST, box 7, folder “Disarmament-General.” The Killian quote is from Killian (1977, 150). 7. “Actions Taken at Science Advisory Committee Meeting, January 2, 3, 1958,” PSAC Papers, reel 3, 195–197, on 197. 8. NSC discussion, January 6, 1958, FRUS 1958–1960, 3: 533–547; Hewlett and Holl (1989, 469–471); Killian (1977, 150–154). 9. Killian to Gerard C. Smith, February 13, 1958, OSAST, box 7, folder “DisarmamentMissile.” See also draft of Killian’s presentation at the NSC on April 3, 1958, in OSAST, box 1, folder “Disarmament-Nuclear”; Killian (1977, 154). 10. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 477); Killian (1977, 154–156). 11. “Meeting of the Ad Hoc Panel on Nuclear Test Limitation, March 15, 1958,” OSAST, box 3, folder “President’s Science Advisory Committee (5).” 12. “Meeting of the Ad Hoc Panel . . . March 15, 1958”; Maxwell D. Taylor to McElroy, March 13, 1958; Quarles to Bethe, March 21, 1958; Quarles to Cutler, April 1, 1958, all in OSAST, box 2, folder “Disarmament—Nuclear Test Policy.” A summary of the Bethe panel report is in FRUS, 1958–1960, v. 3, document no. 147.

362

Notes to Pages 124–127

13. Interview with Hans Bethe by Thomas Soapes, November 3, 1977, p. 15, Eisenhower Library. 14. Goodpaster memcon, March 24, 1958, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 16, 568–573. 15. Ibid. 16. “The President’s News Conference, March 26, 1958,” PPP 1958, 235. 17. NSC discussion, April 3, 1958, FRUS 1958–1960, 3: 585–589. 18. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 477–479). 19. “The President’s News Conference, April 9, 1958,” PPP 1958, 298–299; Hewlett and Holl (1989, 479). 20. Beckler, “Record of Action [for PSAC’s meeting on April 8, 9, 10, 1958],” in PSAC Papers, reel 3, 192–194; Killian to Cabinet Committee on Preparation for a Summit Conference, April 17, 1958, and attached PSAC, “Some Technical Considerations and Their Implications Relating to the Cessation of Nuclear Tests,” April 14, 1958, in DDRS. Emphasis added. 21. PSAC, “Some Technical Considerations . . . ,” April 14, 1958. On the Hardtack series, see AEC Chairman [Lewis Strauss] to Eisenhower, January 29, 1958, and attached, in DDRS. 22. On the scientists’ campaign against nuclear tests, see Divine (1978) and Wittner (1997). For the differences between physicists and biologists regarding fallout dangers, see Kopp (1979, 403–422). For Rabi’s remarks, see meeting notes of PSAC, April 21, 1958, in PSAC Papers, reel 1, 64–65. 23. York (1987, 117–118; Killian (1977, 157). 24. Wiesner (1986, 20–23), on 22. 25. Interview with Bethe by Soapes, p. 5. 26. Beckler, “Record of Action [for PSAC’s meeting on April 8, 9, 10, 1958],” in PSAC Papers, reel 3, 192–194. Rabi would later come into confl ict with Kistiakowsky over the same issue. See Kistiakowsky (1976), 405 (October 17, 1960). 27. PSAC, “Some Technical Considerations . . . ,” April 14, 1958. 28. Goodpaster memcon, April 17, 1958, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 16, 917–919; Hewlett and Holl (1989, 481). 29. On Dulles’s skepticism, see “Memorandum of Conversation,” April 8, 1958, in FRUS 1958–1960, 3: 590–597. See also Jacobson and Stein (1966, 50, 53); Hewlett and Holl (1989, 486–487). 30. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 481). 31. Meeting notes of PSAC, April 21, 1958, in PSAC Papers, reel 1, 64–65; Loper to Killian, May 13, 1958, and attached, in OSAST, box 2, folder “ Disarmament—Nuclear Test Policy (1).” 32. Killian interview by Skolnikoff, April 28, 1967. 33. Meeting notes of PSAC, April 21, 1958.

Notes to Pages 127–131

363

34. Herken (1992, 109), for example, mistook the April 21 discussion as taking place on April 8–10 at Puerto Rico and missed the Rabi–Killian division entirely. 35. York (1987, 117). 36. Interview with Bethe by Soapes, p. 5. 37. Kistiakowsky diary for October 27–28, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 410–411). 38. For a discussion on the acceptance of experts in government in this period, see Ezrahi (1990). 39. “The President’s News Conference, April 16, 1958,” in PPP 1958, 311–318; Goodpaster memcon, April 17, 1958, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 16, 917–919. 40. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 486–487). 41. Fisk to Killian, May 13, 1958; Warren Johnson to Fisk, May 9, 1958; Anthony A. Tomei to GAC, May 9, 1958, and attachment dated May 7, 1958; all in OSAST, box 5, folder “AEC”; Hewlett and Holl (1989, 486). 42. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 485–486); Goodpaster memcon, May 14, 1958, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 17, 129–130; JCS, “Memorandum re Nuclear Testing,” in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 17, 78–79. 43. D. E. Boster, “Memorandum . . . ,” May 14, 1958, in FRUS, 1958–1960, v. 3, document no. 156; Ronald Spears, “Memorandum of Conversation,” May 19, 1958, FRUS, 1958–1960, v. 3, document no. 158. 44. Dulles, “Memorandum of Conversation with the President,” May 22, 1958, Dulles Papers, Eisenhower Library. 45. Killian to Lawrence, April 14, 1958, in DDRS; Herken (2002, 322). 46. Jacobson and Stein (1966, 55). 47. “Transcript of Meeting with the President, 6/17/58 [sic, should be 6/18/58],” in PSAC Papers, reel 1, 84–95; Goodpaster memcon, June 18, 1958, FRUS 1958–1960, 3: 612–613. See also Herken (1992, 111), who misinterpreted the Eisenhower–Land conversation as an expression of Eisenhower’s concern over the growing importance of scientists in the government. 48. Goodpaster memcon, June 18, 1958; PSAC, “Agenda,” June 17, 18, 1958, and “Transcript of Meeting with the President, 6/17/58 [sic, it should be 6/18/58],” both in PSAC Papers, reel 1, 77–95. Carson Mark of Los Alamos briefed the committee on the Hardtack series on June 17, 1958. See Beckler, “Record of Action,” PSAC, June 17, 18, 1958, in PSAC Papers, reel 3, 184–188. 49. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 539). 50. “Memorandum of Conversation,” April 8, 1958. 51. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 480, 540–541); Jacobson and Stein (1966, 77). 52. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 541–542); Jacobson and Stein (1966, 79–81); Divine (1978, 226–228); Goodpaster memcon, August 4, 1958, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 18, 632–634, at 632.

364

Notes to Pages 131–134

53. Goodpaster memcon, August 12, 1958, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 18, 590. See also the following Goodpaster memcons in the Eisenhower Diaries: August 18, 1958, and attached, in reel 18, 562–567; August 19, 1958, in reel 18, 560–561; August 25, 1958, in reel 18, 545–546; August 25, 1958, in reel 18, 543–544; August 23, 1958, in reel 18, 541. 54. On the antinuclear movement, see Wittner (1997). 55. Killian to Eisenhower, on Argus, November 3, 1958, and PSAC, “Report, Panel on AICBM, Meeting of 17 December 1958,” February 10, 1959, both in DDRS. See also Herken (1992, 113). The experiment worked scientifically but not militarily to achieve a shield against incoming missiles. 56. See, for example, Rabinowitch (1965, 341). See also Gilpin (1962, 214–217). 57. Weisskopf to Killian, September 27, 1958, in OSAST, box 8, folder “Disarmament— Nuclear Test Policy (1).” 58. Goodpaster memcon, January 5, 1959, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 19, 999–1000; Jacobson and Stein (1966, 136, 145–150). In 1963, however, ARPA’s research reversed this conclusion. See John Walsh, “Test Ban,” Science 141 (August 16, 1963): 618–620, on 619. 59. Goodpaster memcon, January 5, 1959; Jacobson and Stein (1966, 140, 145–150). 60. Jacobson and Stein (1966, 136–139, 168, 183). 61. Ibid., 154. 62. Goodpaster memcon, January 5, 1959. 63. Beckler, “Memorandum: West Coast Visit . . . ,” in PSAC Papers, reel 2, 938–942. On the agonizing effects of these new developments on American policymakers, see Goodpaster memcon, January 12, 1959; Hewlett and Holl (1989, 553). See also H. Brooks (1988, 81–107), on 86. 64. Beckler, “President’s Science Advisory Committee Meeting of December 15, 16, 1958,” December 23, 1958, in DDRS. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (1970, 1017–1018). 65. Beckler to Killian, May 8, 1959, PSAC Papers, reel 2, 859–872, on 868. 66. “Findings of the Panel on High Altitude Detection,” undated, in DDRS; Panofsky interview, March 5, 1992. 67. Donald Morris, “Memorandum of Conversation . . . ,” April 15, 1959, in OSAST, box 8, folder “Disarmament—Nuclear Test Policy (3)”; Unsigned, “Memorandum of Conversation [on] Recommendations of the Panels on High Altitude Detection and Seismic Improvement,” April 23, 1959, in OSAST, box 7, folder “Disarmament-NT”; Jacobson and Stein (1966, 177–180). 68. Morris, “Memorandum of Conversation,” January 26, 1959, p. 3, in OSAST, box 8, folder “Disarmament—Nuclear Test Policy (1).” 69. Goodpaster memcon, March 13, 1959, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 20, 593–594; Killian to Eisenhower, March 31, 1959 and attached, in OSAST, box 8, folder “Disarmament— Nuclear Test Policy (3).” 70. Goodpaster memcon, February 25, 1959, dated February 29, 1958, FRUS 1958–1960, 3: 710–712.

Notes to Pages 134–139

365

71. Goodpaster memcon, January 12, 1959, 991. Gilpin (1962, 231–233). 72. Morris, “Memorandum of Conversation,” April 15, 1959; Unsigned, “Memorandum of Conversation,” April 23, 1959. 73. Beckler, “Record of Meeting,” March 16, 17, 1959, in PSAC Papers, reel 3, 147–165. Apparently Panofsky also believed that his panel report implied that there was no military advantage to secretly testing in space. Panofsky interview, March 5, 1992. 74. Beckler, “Record of Meeting,” March 16, 17, 1959; Killian to Gordon Gray, April 7, 1959, in OSAST, box 7, folder “Disarmament-General (2).” 75. Goodpaster memcon, March 13, 1959. 76. Jacobson and Stein (1966, 181–183). 77. Ibid., 183–197. 78. Goodpaster memcon, May 5, 1959, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 21, 547–550. 79. Goodpaster memcon, June 9, 1959, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 21, 872–875. 80. On this point, see also Barth (1998, 34–39). 81. Jacobson and Stein (1966, 195–197). 82. Beckler, “Record of Meeting,” May 18–19, 1959, in PSAC Papers, reel 3, 135–142. 83. The account of the meeting is based on “Meeting of the President’s Science Advisory Committee with the President,” May 19, 1959, in PSAC Papers, reel 3, 143–146. See also Goodpaster memcon, May 19, 1959, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 21, 507–511. Seaborg diary for May 18, 19, 1959, in Seaborg (1987a), v. 1. 84. For an analysis of scientists as captives of the military, see Forman (1987, 149–229). 85. Goodpaster memcon, June 9, 1959; July 23, 1959, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 22, 458– 461; Kistiakowsky (1976), 5, 9, 17–18 ( July 23, 1959). 86. Kistiakowsky diary on August 26, 1959, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 55–56). 87. See Kistiakowsky diaries in September–November 1959 in Kistiakowsky (1976, esp. 87–88, 106, 140–141, 143–144, 145, 154); Jacobson and Stein (1966, 212). 88. Barth (1998); Jacobson and Stein (1966, 210–230). 89. Kistiakowsky (1976), 141, 204 (December 21, 1959), 210; Jacobson and Stein (1966, 226). 90. Eisenhower, “Statement by the President on the Expiration of the Voluntary Moratorium on Nuclear Weapons Testing,” December 29, 1959, in PPP 1959, doc. no. 348. 91. Kistiakowsky diaries in Kistiakowsky (1976): 198 (December 16, 1959), 201–204 (December 18, 1959), 217 ( January 6, 1960). 92. Kistiakowsky diaries in Kistiakowsky (1976): 248–49 (February 9, 1960), 255 (February 13–16, 1960). 93. Kistiakowsky (1976, 210–211); Hewlett and Holl (1989, 559). 94. Goodpaster memcon, March 24, 1960, FRUS 1958–1960, 3: 861–863; Kistiakowsky diaries in Kistiakowsky (1976, 282), March 24, 1960; March 29, 1960, 287.

366

Notes to Pages 139–143

95. Kistiakowsky diary on March 30, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 290). 96. Kistiakowsky diary on May 4, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 316). 97. Kistiakowsky diary on March 29, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 288). 98. Kistiakowsky (1976, 343, 375); Hewlett and Holl (1989, 561). 99. Kistiakowsky diary on May 16, 1960, Kistiakowsky (1976, 328). 100. Interview with Bethe by Soapes, p. 25. 101. Bethe, “The Case for Ending Nuclear Tests,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1960, reprinted in Bethe (1991, 37–53). China conducted its first nuclear test in 1964. 102. Bethe to Kistiakowsky, June 29, 1960, with Kistiakowsky’s handwritten note, in PSAC Papers, reel 3, 850. 103. Breit to Bethe, July 29, 1960, Wigner Papers, box 66, folder 5. 104. Kistiakowsky diary on October 3, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 398). 105. Kistiakowsky diary on October 4, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 398). Teller did debate Leo Szilard, who supported the test ban, on November 12, 1960 on NBC’s The Nation’s Future program. See Jack Gould, “TV Victim of Production Nonsense,” New York Times, November 14, 1960, 61. 106. Goodpaster memcon, March 24, 1958, 570. 107. The argument persisted beyond the 1950s. See Seaborg (1987b, 454). 108. PSAC, “Nuclear Test Ban Negotiation,” July 12, 1960, in OSAST, box 8, folder “Disarmament—Nuclear Test Policy (7)”; Kistiakowsky (1976, 368).

Chapter 9 — The Politics of Big Science, 1957–1960 1. Eisenhower, “Science: Handmaiden of Freedom,” in Wolfle (1959, 133–142); Killian (1977, 220–221); Beckler to Killian, February 27, 1959, in Killian Papers II, box 10. 2. On the origins of SLAC and its impact on Stanford physics, see Galison et al. (1992). For a journalist’s account of the politics of high-energy physics, see Greenberg (1967). 3. Panofsky (1983); D. W. Dupen, “History and Development,” in Neal (1968, 27–38). 4. Ginzton and others to J. E. Wallace Sterling, October 8, 1954, in WP/M. 5. Ibid. See also Ginzton (1995, 120). 6. Ginzton and Panofsky to Sterling, January 31, 1957; Sterling to Waterman of the NSF (and to Orr E. Reynolds of the DOD and Willard Libby of the AEC), April 16, 1957, all in WP/M; Stanford University, “Proposal for a Two-Mile Linear Electron Accelerator,” April 1957, in JCAE (1959b, 283–526), especially 288–289, 309. See also Ginzton and Panofsky to Sterling, January 31, 1957; Sterling to Waterman, April 16, 1957, WP/M. 7. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 257–260, 522). 8. Ibid. (259–260); Greenberg (1967, 219–222). 9. Panofsky to Terman, October 11, 1957, and enclosure, in WP/M.

Notes to Pages 143–146

367

10. See the table of annual expenditure on high-energy physics by government agencies in JCAE (1959b, 536); England (1982, 292–297). 11. See, for example, Panofsky to Terman et al., April 3, 1959, in WP/M. 12. Panofsky, “Report on Discussions . . . ,” January 28, 1958, in WP/M. 13. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 258–260); Greenberg (1967, chapter 10). 14. Fisk to Killian, December 19, 1957, PSAC Papers, reel 3, 973–975, on 974. 15. Panofsky to Terman, October 11, 1957, and enclosure, in WP/M. 16. Pindar, “Pindar and O’Neill Trip to Contracting Agencies in the East—October 1957,” undated, on 11, WP/M. 17. Panofsky to files, November 19, 1957, WP/M. 18. Killian to Donald Quarles, January 10, 1958, OSAST, box 11, folder “High Energy Physics (1).” Fisk to Killian, December 19, 1957, PSAC Papers, reel 3, 973–975, on 974. 19. Fisk to Killian, March 27, 1958, attachment, and related correspondence in OSAST, box 11, folder “High Energy Physics (1)”; “Actions Taken at Science Advisory Committee Meeting, January 2, 3, 1958,” PSAC Papers, reel 3, 195–197, on 195. See also Panofsky and Terman notes of meeting in December 1957 and January 1958 in WP/M. 20. Panofsky to Ginzton, November 27, 1957; Panofsky to files, November 27, 1957; quote from Panofsky to files, January 13, 1958; all in WP/M; Panofsky to Fisk, January 28, 1958, in OSAST, box 11, folder “High Energy Physics (1).” 21. Panofsky to Ginzton, January 21, 1958, in WP/M. 22. Panofsky, “Report on Discussion . . . ,” January 28, 1958, WP/M. 23. Panofsky to Project M committee, March 10, 1958; Panofsky to files, March 18, 1958; both in WP/M; Fisk to Killian, March 27, 1958, in OSAST, box 11, folder “High Energy Physics (1).” 24. Pindar, “Project M,” March 21, 1958, and Panofsky memo on “Project M,” April 23, 1958, in WP/M. 25. Ginzton to M. Chodorow et al., March 20, 1958, in WP/M. 26. Panofsky, “Discussion with John Williams . . . ,” May 5, 1958; Panofsky to Terman et al., May 26, 1958, both in WP/M. 27. Panofsky to Chodorow et al., June 5, 1958; Panofsky to M Committee, July 17 and 21, 1958; Panofsky, “Project M Rumors,” May 12, 1958; all in WP/M. 28. Beckler, “Record of Action [from] PSAC Meeting June 17, 18, 1958,” PSAC Papers, reel 3, 184–188, on 187–188. Panofsky memos to M Committee on July 18, 21, 29, 1958, and on September 12, 1958, all in WP/M. The NSF panel report, dated August 7–8, 1958, is printed in JCAE (1965, 143–150); McCone to Killian, August 13, 1958, and Beckler, “Minutes of Meeting . . . August 19, 1958,” undated, OSAST, box 11, folder “High Energy Physics (1).” 29. Killian to McCone, August 23, 1958; Beckler, “Minutes of Meeting . . . August 19, 1958,” undated; both in OSAST, box 11, folder “High Energy Physics (1).” Hewlett and Holl (1989, 523); Kistiakowsky (1976, 21).

368

Notes to Pages 146–150

30. See Moulton and Pindar memos about their visits in May 1960 in WP/M. 31. Killian to McCone, August 23, 1958; Killian to Piore, October 1, 1958, OSAST, box 11, folder “High Energy Physics (1).” 32. Watson and Petre (1990, 246–248). 33. Panofsky to Project M Committee, September 12, 1958, WP/M. 34. Panofsky to Project M Committee, September 12, 1958 and October 1, 1958, WP/M. 35. Panofsky to Project M Committee, October 6 and 8, 1958, both in WP/M. 36. Ginzton to Project M Committee, October 10, 1958, and Panofsky to Project M Committee, October 10, 1958, both in WP/M. 37. Panofsky to Beckler, October 13, 1958 and attached Ginzton and Panofsky to Piore, October 13, 1958, in PSAC Papers, reel 1, 512–520. 38. Panofsky to Project M Committee, November 3 and 14, 1958, in WP/M. 39. Ibid.; Piore Report of 1958, Unsigned, “Reason for Assignment of Responsibility to the Department of Defense for the Construction of the Stanford Accelerator,” undated, attached to Beckler, “Notes on Meeting of April 2, 1959, with the President re High Energy Accelerator Policy,” undated, OSAST, box 11, folder “High Energy Physics (2).” 40. Piore Report of 1958. 41. Ibid. 42. Panofsky to Project M Committee, November 19, 1958, in WP/M. For GAC’s attitude, see Warren C. Johnson to McCone, February 3, 1959 and May 15, 1959, both in JCAE (1959b, 22–23); Sylves (1987, 219–237). 43. Panofsky to Project M Committee, November 19, 1958, December 23, 1958, January 30, 1959, and March 2, 1959, Panofsky to Terman et al., April 3, 1959, all in WP/M. Interview with Herbert York, July 18, 1992. 44. Goodpaster memcon, April 3, 1959, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 21, 252–253. Anon., “A Primer for Elementary Particle Physics,” February 13, 1959, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 21, 258–278. “Inner Atom Seen Key to Universe,” New York Times, May 17, 1959, 68. 45. Killian, “Notes . . . April 2, 1959,” undated, OSAST, box 11, folder “High Energy Physics (2)”; Killian (1977, 220); Interview with York, July 18, 1992. 46. Killian to Eisenhower, April 2, 1959, OSAST, box 11, folder “High Energy Physics (2).” 47. Beckler, “Notes on Meeting of April 2, 1959.” Goodpaster memcon, April 3, 1959, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 21, 252–253. See also Kistiakowsky (1976, 307). 48. L. A. Minnich, “Minutes of Cabinet Meeting” and Maxwell M. Rabb, “Actions of the Cabinet,” March 11, 1957, in Eisenhower Cabinet Minutes, reel 5, 549–556. 49. Killian (1977, 220). In his press conference on April 29, 1959, Eisenhower defended the Stanford accelerator against a critical Midwestern reporter by saying that PSAC told him that the machine was “the most extraordinary thing that has yet been attempted” PPP 1959, 348. 50. See also Eisenhower’s letters to Killian on the latter’s resignation in spring 1959 as printed in Killian (1977, 208, and 212); Killian, “Notes . . . April 2, 1959.”

Notes to Pages 151–153

369

51. Panofsky to Terman et al., April 3, 1959, in WP/M. JCAE (1959b, 17); Pindar to M files, June 2, 1959, in WP/P; Interview with York, July 18, 1992. 52. Joseph Turner, “Capital Gain,” Science 129 ( June 12, 1959): 1583. 53. Killian to Maurice Stans, April 28, 1959, OSAST, box 11, folder “High Energy Physics (2).” 54. JCAE (1959b), especially 1–13 for McCone’s correspondence with the BOB and the JCAE in April and May 1959. 55. JCAE (1959b), especially 31, 36, 38, 203, 218–219. 56. JCAE (1959a, 16–29); JCAE (1961, v); “Cut in Funds for Stanford Accelerator More Apparent Than Real,” Science 131 (April 22, 1960): 1196–1198. 57. Ginzton to file, August 4, 1959, Moulton to file, October 16, 1959, both in WP/M. McCone to Kistiakowsky, February 26, 1960, and attached; McCone’s memo and personal note to AEC general manager, both dated August 5, 1959, all in McCone Papers, box 2, folder “O&M 7–1 President’s Science Advisory Committee [Folder Two] (3)”; JCAE (1960, 9). 58. Hewlett and Holl (1989, 524); Kistiakowsky diary on July 24, 1959, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 21). 59. Wigner, “To Whom It May Concern,” July 15, 1959, in McCone Papers, box 2, folder “O&M 7–1 President’s Science Advisory Committee [Folder Two] (3).” 60. Ginzton to Panofsky, November 3, 1959, and Pindar, “Notes on Meeting at AEC, Washington, December 9, 1959,” undated, both in WP/M. 61. McCone to Kistiakowsky, December 16, 1959; Kistiakowsky to McCone, December 22, 1959; both in McCone Papers, box 2, folder “O&M 7–1 President’s Science Advisory Committee [Folder Two] (3).” Kistiakowsky diary on November 30, 1959, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 178–179). 62. Piore to McCone and Kistiakowsky, February 5, 1960, in McCone Papers, box 2, folder “O&M 7–1 President’s Science Advisory Committee [Folder Two] (3).” 63. Kistiakowsky diary on February 9, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 249). See also Floberg to Kistiakowsky, February 11, 1960, in McCone Papers, box 2, folder “O&M 7–1 President’s Science Advisory Committee [Folder Two] (2).” 64. Kistiakowsky to Floberg, February 19, 1960, in McCone Papers, box 2, folder “O&M 7–1 President’s Science Advisory Committee [Folder Two] (2)”; Kistiakowsky diaries on February 13–16, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 255). 65. McCone to Kistiakowsky, March 10, 1960, in McCone Papers, box 2, folder “O&M 7–1 President’s Science Advisory Committee [Folder Two] (2).” 66. McCone to Kistiakowsky, February 26, 1960, in McCone Papers, box 2, folder “O&M 7–1 President’s Science Advisory Committee [Folder Two] (3)”; Kistiakowsky diary on March 9, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 264–265). 67. Kistiakowsky diary on March 9, 1960. 68. Kistiakowsky to McCone, March 16, 1960, OSAST, box 11, folder “High Energy Physics (3).” Emphasis in original. Later, Panofsky and his colleagues at SLAC presented

370

Notes to Pages 153–156

a birthday present to Kistiakowsky with the inscription: “Never Has a Chemist Done So Much for Physics.” Panofsky interview, March 5, 1992. 69. Kistiakowsky diary on March 23, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 280); Hewlett and Holl (1989, 524–525). Eisenhower again asked about the Stanford project in July when he met with PSAC. See Goodpaster memcon, July 12, 1960, dated July 14, 1960, in DDRS, and Beckler to Goodpaster, “Stanford Linear Accelerator,” July 14, 1960, OSAST, box 11, folder “High Energy Physics (3).” 70. Kistiakowsky diary on March 23, 1960; Hewlett and Holl (1989, 524–525). 71. Kistiakowsky to McCone, April 5, 1960, in OSAST, box 11, folder “High Energy Physics (3)”; Hewlett and Holl (1989, 523). 72. Marshak to Anderson, April 11, 1960, Anderson Papers, container 819. 73. Kistiakowsky diaries in Kistiakowsky (1976): 298–300 (April 8, 1960), and 303–304 (April 15, 1960). 74. JCAE (1959a, 8–9); Greenberg (1967, 236); Howard Margolis, “Hanford and Stanford: The Issue Is Clear But the Politics Are Complex,” Science 134 ( July 21, 1961): 177–178. 75. “Cut in Funds for Stanford Accelerator. . . .” See also Greenberg (1967, 237–238); Goodpaster memcon, April 7, 1960, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 25, 548–550. 76. JCAE (1959a, 9). 77. “Cut in Funds for Stanford Accelerator . . . ,” 1197. 78. McDaniel to Kistiakowsky, July 13, 1960, OSAST, box 11, folder “High Energy Physics (3)”; JCAE (1961, 2–5); Galison et al. (1992, 70). 79. “Piore Panel Report—1960,” and Wigner, “Commentary . . . ,” in JCAE (1965, 132–134. 80. Kistiakowsky to McCone, December 21, 1960, reprinted in JCAE (1961, 6–8). 81. PSAC, “Government Research and Development: Summary Conclusions and Recommendations,” October 17, 1960, in OSS, box 16, folder “Dr. Kistiakowsky”; The Bureau of the Budget, “Organization of Science in Government,” September 16, 1960, in OSAST, box 9, folder “Federal Council for Science and Technology.” See also Thomas D. Morris to Staas, September 16, 1960, in BOB, series 52.1, box 6, folder “E4–1 1957–1/61.” 82. Goodpaster memcon, December 19, 1960, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 28, 314–317, on 315. 83. Greenberg (1967, 233). 84. JCAE (1959b, 14). 85. U.S. Congress (1960, 264–265). 86. Wilson is quoted by Marvin L. Goldberger in Franklin Institute (1978, 138). 87. Kistiakowsky diary on January 20, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 233). 88. Kistiakowsky diary on January 6, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 217–218). 89. Kistiakowsky diary on March 17, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 273). 90. See Leslie (1993).

Notes to Pages 156–162

371

91. See Greenberg (1967, 227–229, 235). 92. NSF (1971, 220). For a critical assessment of the “Golden Age,” see Reingold (1994).

Chapter 10 — The control of Science Policy under Eisenhower, 1957–1960 1. Killian, “Program of the President’s Science Advisory Committee,” July 7, 1958, OST, box 627, folder “PSAC Title Folder.” 2. Dupree (1986, 215–231). 3. Testimony of Luce, in U.S. Congress (1959, 63–70). 4. Hechler (1980, 14–15). 5. U.S. Congress (1958c). 6. Ibid., 12, 20. 7. Killian to Beckler, October 22, 1957, and enclosed memo, 4; Cutler to Killian, November 22, 1957, both in OSAST, box 6, “Congressional (1).” 8. “Action Areas Stemming from SAC Meeting 9, 10 December 1957,” PSAC Papers, reel 3, 199–203, on 200. 9. Eisenhower call to McElroy, November 21, 1957, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 15, 291; Goodpaster memcon, December 5, 1957, Eisenhower Diaries, reel 15, 352–353; U.S. Congress (1958a, 270–271). 10. On DOD, see U.S. Congress (1958a, 2082–2083). On NSF, see Eisenhower, “Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 9, 1958, PPP 1958, 9, 11–12, and Eisenhower, “Annual Budget Message to the Congress—Fiscal Year 1959,” January 13, 1958, Ibid., 48. 11. National Science Foundation (1971, 220). 12. The following discussion of the briefing to the Piore panel is based on Robert N. Kreidler to Killian, June 6, 1958, “Research Panel,” and the attached “Minutes of the Research Panel, May 28, 1958,” PSAC Papers, reel 3, 260–271. 13. Kreidler to Killian, June 6, 1958, and attached. See also Geiger (1993, 168). 14. PSAC (1958). 15. “1958 Parliament of Science,” Science 127 (April 18, 1958): 852–858, on 855. See also Joseph Turner, “Meeting of Minds,” editorial, Science 127 (March 28, 1958): 673. 16. Beckler to PSAC, June 6, 1958, and attached, PSAC Papers, reel 3, 272–292. 17. Beckler, “Record of Action,” June 17, 18, 1958, PSAC Papers, reel 3, 184–188; Piore to Killian, June 30, 1958, OSAST, box 5, folder “Basic Research (1).” 18. “The President’s News Conference,” June 18, 1958, PPP 1958, 484. 19. Goodpaster memcon, June 18, 1958, OSS, box 23, folder “Science Advisory Committee (4).” 20. L. A. Minnich, “Minutes of Cabinet Meeting,” and Robert Gray, “The Cabinet Record of Action,” December 5, 1958, in Eisenhower Cabinet Minutes, reel 8, 344–360.

372

Notes to Pages 162–166

21. PSAC (1958b). 22. Library of Congress (1976, 222–225);. Eisenhower, “Order,” March 13, 1959, OSAST, box 9, folder “Federal Council for Science and Technology-Designation by President of Chairman.” 23. Library of Congress (1976, 224–225). The PSAC report on “Improving the Availability of Scientific and Technological Information in the United States,” produced by a panel chaired by William O. Baker, was presented to the Cabinet the same day as the Piore panel report. It was issued by the White House as a public release. Minnich, “Minutes of Cabinet Meeting, December 5, 1958,” White House releases on December 7, 1958, Eisenhower Cabinet Minutes, reel 3, 44–96. 24. See, for example, U.S. Congress (1964); McDougall (1985, 175); Office of Science and Technology (1965), 5; Kistiakowsky diaries in Kistiakowsky (1976): 60 (August 28, 1959), 175 (November 24, 1959), and 377 ( July 28, 1960). 25. Killian (1977, 186); Interview with Kistiakowsky by Soapes, November 17, 1976, 19. 26. Kreidler, “Federal Council for Science and Technology Record of Actions, Meeting of March 24, 1959,” in OST, FCST Records, box 1, “FCST Agendas and Minutes = 1959 FCST.” 27. Kreidler, “Federal Council . . . ,” March 24, 1959; “Materials Research Center,” Science 132 (August 26, 1960): 539; Kistiakowsky diaries in Kistiakowsky (1976): 14 ( July 17, 1959), 16–17 ( July 22, 1959), and 148 (November 10, 1959); Baker interview, June 10, 1992; Library of Congress (1967, 94). 28. Library of Congress (1967). 29. Kistiakowsky to Eisenhower, May 18, 1960, OST, box 83, folder “FCST-Title Folder— 1961”; Quote from Kistiakowsky (1976, 244). 30. O. Graham (1979, 123). 31. U.S. Congress (1959). 32. Dupree (1986, xi). 33. U.S. Congress (1959, part 2, 114). 34. Beckler to PSAC, July 22, 1959, and attached Kreidler, “Department of Science and Technology,” July 20, 1959, in PSAC Papers, reel 1, 937–941. 35. “Congress Dissatisfied with the Executive’s Role in Science,” Science 129 ( June 26, 1959): 1726–1727; Mansfield: U.S. Congress (1958c, 12, 20). 36. Killian (1977, 191–196). 37. PSAC (1959). 38. Ibid., 1, 2, 5, 8. 39. Rudolph (2002, 135) 40. Ibid., 3. 41. Ibid., 5. 42. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 166–169

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43. Ibid., 4–6. 44. On this point, see also the insightful discussion on science education in Rudolph (2002). 45. Ibid. 46. Robert Gray to Killian, December 30, 1958; Killian to DuBridge, December 31, 1958; both in OSAST, box 8, folder “Education Panel”; “Minutes of Cabinet meeting,” May 15, 1958, in Eisenhower Cabinet Minutes, reel 9, 3–22. 47. Killian to Eisenhower, February 25, 1959, and attached, in Killian Papers II, box 10, “Washington Assignment (1957–1959) (Background and Supplementary Papers).” See also Eisenhower to Killian, March 3, 1959, and Goodpaster to Killian, February 17, 1959, in the same folder. 48. PSAC (1959). 49. Graham DuShane, “National Goals for Education,” editorial, Science 129 ( June 5, 1959): 1517. 50. Congressional Record, May 26, 1959, Appendix, A4391–4392. 51. See, for example, C. Lee Buxton correspondence with Killian in August–September 1959 in Killian Papers, box 19, folder 6. 52. “Money Is Not Enough,” Wall Street Journal, May 26, 1959, 14. 53. Robert H. Carleton to Eisenhower, June 4, 1959, in Seaborg Papers, folder “SOFG/ F4 224.” 54. DuBridge to the Education Panel of PSAC, February 4, 1960, in Killian Papers, box 19, folder 6. 55. Kistiakowsky to Persons, November 24, 1959, in PSAC Papers, reel 2, 291–292; Kistiakowsky diary on November 24, 1959, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 174–175). 56. Kistiakowsky to Seaborg, July 31, 1959, in Seaborg Papers, folder ID “SOFG/F5 228.” PSAC agenda, July 20, 21, 1959, in PSAC Papers, reel 1, 179. 57. Seaborg, “University and Basic Science,” Chemical and Engineering News 34 (March 4, 1957): 35–38. 58. Seaborg (1994, 93–125, on the space lab; 145–147 on PSAC membership). 59. Waterman later told Kistiakowsky that he did not really mind PSAC’s “usurping” the prerogatives of the National Science Board because the latter lacked political clout. Kistiakowsky diary on August 21, 1959, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 49); Kistiakowsky to Seaborg, August 25, 1959, in Seaborg Papers, folder ID “SOFG/F5 228”; Seaborg (1987a), vol. II, entry for October 28, 1959. 60. Kistiakowsky to Seaborg, November 3, 1959, in Seaborg Papers, folder ID “SOFG/F5 228.” George D. Lukes to record, December 3, 1959 and December 23, 1959, both in Seaborg Papers, folder ID “SOFG/F5 232.” 61. Kreidler to Seaborg panel, January 27 and April 12, 1960, and attached “Comments . . . ,” undated, all in Seaborg Papers, folder ID “SOFG/F5 232.”

374

Notes to Pages 169–172

62. Kreidler to Seaborg panel, January 27, 1960, and attached “Comments. . . .” Kreidler, “Comments . . . by PSAC—June 27, 1960,” in Seaborg Papers, folder ID “SOFG/F5 232”; Panofsky to McGeorge Bundy, June 29, 1960, in Seaborg Papers, folder ID “SOFG/F5 230 XI.” Seaborg (1987a), vol. II, June 28, 1960. 63. Kreidler to the Seaborg panel, January 27, 1960; Kistiakowsky diary on January 16, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 231); Seaborg (1987a), January 17, 1960. Killian quote is from Kreidler, “Comments . . . by PSAC—June 27, 1960.” See also Kreidler to Seaborg, July 31, 1960, in Seaborg Papers, folder ID “SOFG/F5 228.” 64. Seaborg (1994, 590–591). 65. PSAC (1960). 66. Ibid., 10–11, emphasis in original. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Kreidler to Seaborg panel, “Summary of Comments [by FCST],” August 8, 1960, in Seaborg Papers, folder “SOFG/F4 222 XI”; Kreidler notes on FCST minutes and record of actions on August 2, 1960 and September 27, 1960, in OST, FCST Records, box 1, “FCST Agendas and Minutes = 1959 FCST.” Glennan and Flemming were once presidents of Case Western Reserve and Oregon State University, respectively. 70. Kidd (1959, 43, 47) shows that the $0.5 billion federal R&D funds for universities in 1959 were broken down into 36 percent by the DOD, 34 percent by the AEC, 16 percent by the HEW, 7 percent by the NSF, 6 percent by the DOA, and 1 percent by the rest. By 1965, the funds totaled $1 billion, with 41 percent from the HEW, 25 percent from the DOD, 13 percent from the NSF, 8 percent from NASA, 7 percent from the AEC, 5 percent from the DOA, and 1 percent from the rest. See National Science Foundation (1966, Table B-1, 38). Neither the Piore nor the Seaborg reports discussed the question of civilian versus military orientation of federal support. 71. Kistiakowsky diary on October 7, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 401). 72. Kistiakowsky (1976, 379, 422); PSAC (1960, v). 73. Goodpaster memcon, July 14, 1960, in DDRS; Kistiakowsky interview with Eugene Emme and Alex Roland, May 22, 1974, in NASA History Office collection. 74. PSAC, “Scientific Progress and the Federal Government,” Science 132 (December 16, 1960): 1802–1815; Kreidler to the Seaborg panel, December 6, 1960, in Seaborg Papers, folder “SOFG/F5 234 XI.” 75. Kreidler to Seaborg, March 18, 1960, in Seaborg Papers, folder ID “SOFG/F5 228 XI.” 76. On education policy in the 1960s, see H. D. Graham (1984). See also Geiger (1993). 77. See, for example, Kistiakowsky diary on December 16, 1959, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 199). 78. Kistiakowsky diary on February 9, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 249). PSAC, “Discussion on Science Organization,” in OST, box 176, folder “Government R&D.”

Notes to Pages 172–178

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79. Kistiakowsky diary on January 14, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 227–228). See also Goodpaster memcon, December 19, 1960, in Eisenhower Diaries, reel 28, 314–317. 80. Beckler, “Excerpts from Meeting [of PSAC, February 14–16, 1960]: Discussion of the Organization of Science in Government,” in OST, box 176, folder “Government R&D.” 81. Beckler, “Excerpts from Meeting [of PSAC, February 14–16, 1960].” 82. Beckler, “Excerpts from Meeting [of PSAC, March 14–15, 1960]: Discussion of the Organization of Science in Government,” in OST, box 176, folder “Government R&D.” 83. Kistiakowsky diaries on March 13–15, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 269–270). 84. PSAC, “Government Research and Development: Summary Conclusions and Recommendations,” October 17, 1960, in OSS, box 16, folder “Dr. Kistiakowsky.” 85. See Goodpaster’s marginal notes on PSAC, “Government Research and Development,” October 17, 1960. 86. Kistiakowsky diaries on June 30–July 8, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 360–366). 87. The Bureau of the Budget, “Organization of Science in Government,” September 16, 1960, in OSAST, box 9, folder “Federal Council for Science and Technology.” See also Thomas D. Morris to Elmer B. Staas, September 16, 1960, in BOB, series 52.1, box 6, folder “E4–1 1957–1/61.” 88. Goodpaster marginal note on the first page of PSAC, “Government Research and Development,” October 17, 1960. 89. Goodpaster memcon, December 19, 1960. They also discussed the Stanford accelerator, the Seaborg report, the FCST, and arms control. 90. Kistiakowsky (1976, 424–425). For an identification of the presidential science advisers with the “scientific-technological elite,” see Daniel S. Greenberg, “Science and Richard Nixon,” New York Times, June 17, 1973, 230. 91. Kistiakowsky (1976, 425). 92. Kistiakowsky to PSAC members, January 19, 1961, in Panofsky Papers, box G025, folder “PSAC—Federal Council. . . .” Eisenhower shortly after wrote Kistiakowsky that the letter expressed “my views exactly.” Charles Maier, “Introduction,” Kistiakowsky (1976, lxvi). 93. Graham DuShane, “Footnote to History,” Science 133 (February 10, 1961): 355. See also Kistiakowsky (1976, 424–425). 94. “The President’s News Conference of January 18th, 1961,” in PPP 1960–1961, document no. 422. 95. Eisenhower (1965, 224ff ). 96. York (1995, 147). My thanks to Michael Neufeld for drawing my attention to this quote. 97. Killian (1977, 241). 98. Killian, “Capsule Conclusions,” in Wolfle (1959, 121–126), on 122.

376

Notes to Pages 178–185

99. Beckler, “Excerpts from Meeting [of PSAC, March 14–15, 1960]: Discussion of the Organization of Science in Government,” in OST, box 176, folder “Government R&D.” 100. Neither did Eisenhower himself always stand for “the free university” and “free ideas” he idealized in his farewell address, as indicated by his cautious approach to McCarthyism and his assent to the AEC’s handling of the Oppenheimer case. 101. PSAC (1960, 12).

Chapter 11 — Science at the New Frontier under Kennedy, 1960–1963 1. Kennedy’s speech is printed in the New York Times, July 16, 1960, 7. 2. Time, January 2, 1961. 3. See, for example, Bundy (1988, 352). On liberal consensus, see Hodgson (1976, 67–98); Chafe (2007, 177–184). 4. Seaborg (1981, 31–32); Bundy (1988, 460–461); Chang (1988). 5. Kistiakowsky diary for September 27, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 392–393). 6. Interview with Wiesner by Eugene Skolnikoff, August 8, 1967, in NASA History Office, Wiesner Biographical Files; Kistiakowsky diary on August 22, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 383–384); Wiesner, “Kennedy,” in Rosenblith (2003, 269). 7. “Committees of Scholars Support Candidates: Scientists Joining,” Science 132 (October 28, 1960): 1238. 8. Kistiakowsky diary on July 12, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 368–369), on 369. Killian apparently did not join the Nixon camp. 9. Dupree (1980, 183). 10. Kistiakowsky diary for November 12, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 416–417); Nitze, “Memorandum of Conversation with George Kistiakowsky,” November 12, 1960, in JFK/ POF/DAS, box 86, folder “PSAC 1/61–4/61.” See also Herken (1992, 127–128), but note that there are a numbers of errors in its account of the Nitze–Kistiakowsky exchange. For example, it was Nitze who initiated the contact with a phone call to Kistiakowsky, instead of Kistiakowsky doing so by writing a letter to Nitze complaining about the delay in the appointment of a science adviser. 11. Nitze, “Memorandum . . . ,” November 12, 1961. Herken (1992, 261) mistakenly attributes Kistiakowsky’s “good progress” comment to apply to the test ban negotiations in Geneva and implies that the subsequent discussion on the AEC was along the same line. 12. Nitze, “Memorandum . . . ,” November 12, 1961. 13. Kistiakowsky diary on November 12, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 416–417), and Nitze, “Memorandum . . . ,” November 12, 1961. Nitze recorded seven (not four, as reported in Herken (1992, 128)) candidates from Kistiakowsky with their strengths and weaknesses: William O. Baker (“first class” but communicating “somewhat obliquely”), Wiesner, Harvey Brooks (“unerring good sense”), Edward Purcell (“both brilliant and sound” but might not stand “bureaucratic infighting”), Edwin Land (“has more prestige

Notes to Pages 185–187

377

and perhaps greater breadth” but might not immerse in administrative detail), James Fisk (“highly regarded”), and Glenn Seaborg (“great prestige . . . not a member of the Teller school of thought” but need to learn about “military strategic problems”). 14. Kennedy’s new national security adviser McGeorge Bundy initially opposed his appointment but later did work well with him. Wiesner, “Kennedy,” 272. 15. Kistiakowsky diary entry on November 12, 1960, and Nitze, “Memorandum . . . ,” November 12, 1961. 16. Wiesner (1965, 209–246). 17. Howard Margolis, “Pugwash Conferences,” Science 133 (May 26, 1961): 1694–1695, on 1695; Kistiakowsky (1976), 322 (May 9, 1960). 18. Margolis, “ . . . Wiesner’s Appointment,” Science 133 ( January 20, 1961): 179–181, on 180. 19. Margolis, “Pugwash Conferences.” 20. Wiesner, “Kennedy,” 272–275, on 272. See also interview with Wiesner by Skolnikoff, August 8, 1967; Herken (1992, 128). 21. Wiesner, “Kennedy,” 283, 287. 22. Ibid., 273. See also Kistiakowsky diary on August 22, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 384). 23. Seaborg (2001, 181). 24. Theodore C. Sorensen, “A View from the White House,” in Rosenblith (2003, 39–42), on 40. 25. The White House initially called Brown a Republican, but soon discovered, on Brown’s own “somewhat indignant” protest, that he was actually a Democrat. Oral history interview with Harold Brown, undated, DDRS. 26. Fred W. McLafferty, Barry K. Carpenter, and Jerrold Meinwald, “Franklin Asbury Long,” Biographical Memoirs [of] the National Academy of Sciences, v. 79 (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2001), accessed on the Web at http://books.nap.edu/html/ biomems/flong.html in 2004. 27. On the Jasons, see Aaserud (1995, 185–240); Finkbeiner (2006). 28. Garwin interview, July 18, 1992. It made the headlines in the late 1990s when Teller publicly acknowledged Garwin’s role in the development of the H-bomb. See, for example, William J. Broad, “Who Built the H-Bomb? Debate Revives,” New York Times, April 24, 2001, F1. 29. Long to Piore, April 2, 1962, and Brooks to Piore, April 4, 1962, OST, box 856, “Pres. Science Adv. Comm.—Title Folder 1961.” 30. Weinberg, the only government scientist on the committee, also resented the domination of academic scientists on PSAC and shared Wigner’s criticism of PSAC’s support of high-energy physics, which he called a “Big Science” without much benefit to other scientific fields. Weinberg to Wiesner, December 7, 1961, OST, box 856, “Pres. Science Adv. Comm.—Title Folder 1961.” Weinberg told his version of his PSAC experiences in Weinberg (1994).

378

Notes to Pages 187–191

31. T. F. Walkowicz to Kistiakowsky, June 6, 1962, and attached, in Kistiakowsky Papers, box 4, folder “PSAC, 1971- Members”; Harold Brown interview (“Oral History #1”), undated, in DDRS. 32. Quoted in Wiesner (1965, 3–12). 33. Kennedy to Wiesner, January 23, 1961, in JFK/POF/DAS, box 86, folder “PSAC 1/61–4/61.” The letter was most likely drafted by Wiesner. 34. Wiesner (1965, 4); “Seaborg on JFK,” Oak Ridger, February 3, 1964. 35. Kennedy to Wiesner, November 28, 1962, in JFK/POF, Part 2, reel 9, frame 730. 36. Kennedy, “Remarks at Dinner . . . , April 29, 1962,” in PPP 1962, 347. 37. Seaborg diary of February 10, 1961, in Seaborg (1989, v. 1, 11–13). In 1962, the antiICBM (AICBM) panel under Panofsky recommended against the building of the NikeZeus. See Daniel E. Dustin, of MIT and the AICBM panel, to Panofsky, October 31, 1962, and other documents in OST, box 115, folder “AICBM 1962.” 38. Kennedy, “Remarks before the National Academy of Sciences,” April 25, 1961, in PPP 1961. 39. Wiesner (1965, 3–12), on 6. 40. Chester Bowles interview by Denis O’Brien, February 2, 1965, p. 62, Kennedy Library. 41. Wiesner to Kennedy, September 27, 1961, in JFK/POF/SM, box 67, “Wiesner, Jerome B., 1961.” 42. “Report by the PSAC Panel on Civil Defense,” July 16, 1962, in JFK/NSF, box 295, folder 14. 43. For a political analysis of the civil defense program during the 1950s, see Grossman (2001). 44. Bundy (1988, 355–356). 45. Wiesner, “Kennedy,” 282. 46. Seaborg diaries in Seaborg (1989): March 17, 1961, v. 1, 103, 108, 110, on 108; March 22, 1961, 115, 122–123; McNamara and Bell to Kennedy, March 10, 1961, in FRUS 1961–1963, v. 8, document no. 20; Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on the Defense Budget,” March 28, 1961, in PPP 1961; Lambright (1967, 29–30). 47. On Skybolt, see Richard Neustadt’s top secret report to Kennedy on “Skybolt and Nassau: American Policy-Making and Anglo-American Relations,” November 15, 1963, in DDRS. On PSAC’s evaluation of Rover, see “Report of the Ad Hoc Panel (II) on Project Rover,” November 20, 1962, in DDRS. Brown interview (“Oral History #1”), undated, p. 51, in DDRS. 48. Price, “Statement on Cutback in Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Project (ANP),” March 28, 1961, in OST, box 21, folder “Aircraft Nuclear Power—T. F. 1961.” The quote of Price is from Price, “Nuclear Frontier in the 1960s,” Congressional Record 107 (March 22, 1961): 4601. 49. Seaborg diary on February 16, 1961, in Seaborg (1989, v. 1, 25).

Notes to Pages 191–193

379

50. Bell to Kennedy, “Stanford Linear Electron Accelerator,” March 9, 1961, in OST, box 86, folder “High Energy Physics—Title Folder 1961.” 51. Seaborg diary on March 9, 1961, in Seaborg (1989, v. 1, 74). 52. Seaborg diary on March 20, 1961, in Seaborg (1989, v. 1, 111, 115). 53. Seaborg diary on March 23, 1961, in Seaborg (1989, v. 1, 125, 130–131). 54. JCAE, “Authorizing Appropriations for the Atomic Energy Commission,” June 21, 1961, in U.S. Congress, Senate Report, 87th Congress, 1st session, serial volume 12323 (USGPO, 1961), report no. 441. Panofsky retired as director in 1984. “Panofsky to Retire; Richter to Succeed,” Science News 124 (1983): 406. 55. Seaborg (1989, v. 2, 334–337). 56. Seaborg diary on April 29, 1962, in Seaborg (1989, v. 3, 455); Betty Beale, “Historic White House Dinner,” The Evening Star (Washington, DC), April 30, 1962, B-6; John W. Finney, “US Citing Oppenheimer in Move to Clear His Name,” New York Times, April 5, 1963, 1, 26, on 26. 57. Seaborg diary entry on March 22, 1963, in Seaborg (1989, v. 5, 311). 58. Wiesner, “Kennedy,” 291–292, on 292. 59. Seaborg diaries on March 29 and 30, 1963, in Seaborg (1989, v. 5, 311). 60. Seaborg diary on April 5, 1963, in Seaborg (1989, v. 5, 370); Finney, “US Citing Oppenheimer.” 61. Hickenlooper did succeed in reducing the monetary portion of subsequent Fermi Awards to $25,000. Seaborg (1993, chapter 2); Major (1971, 291–294); John W. Finney, “A.E.C. Prize Going to Oppenheimer,” New York Times, April 5, 1963, 1. 62. Seaborg diary on April 4, 1963, in Seaborg (1989, v. 5, 368). 63. Seaborg diary on February 10, 1961. The proposal for such a joint project originated in an official bilateral scientific conference at the American Institute of Physics in New York on September 16, 1960. See “Very High Energy Accelerators,” in OST, box 86, folder “High Energy Physics—Title Folder.” See also Westwick (2003, 169–172). 64. PSAC, “Major Activities of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, January 20, 1961—Date,” February 24, 1961, and April 19, 1961, both in JFK/POF/DAS, box 86, folder “PSAC 1/61–4/61.” 65. Howard Margolis, “ . . . The Internal Security Committee Studies Disarmament,” Science 133 (May 26, 1961): 1693–1695. “Conferences on Science and World Aff airs,” Science 134 (October 6, 1961): 984–991, especially 989. 66. PSAC (1961); Daniel Lang, “Profiles: A Scientist’s [Wiesner] Advice—II,” New Yorker, 40 (April 18, 1964): 68–74, on 61–62; International Committee of the Federal Council for Science and Technology, “Minutes of Meeting on June 8, 1961,” in OST, box 84, folder “Federal Council for S&T—Internt’l 1961”; Interview with Wiesner by Skolnikoff, August 8, 1967; Wiesner, “Kennedy,” 286–292. 67. Z. Wang (1999). Wiesner saw Zhou Peiyuan, physicist and head of the Chinese delegation at the Moscow Pugwash, again fourteen years later when Zhou hosted Wiesner in

380

Notes to Pages 193–195

Beijing in the aftermath of President Nixon’s 1972 trip to China. Wiesner, “Up the Ladder to the White House,” in Rosenblith (2003, 261–263). 68. Seaborg diary on February 10, 1961. See also Westwick (2003, 169–172). 69. Haworth to Wiesner, May 18, 1961, in OST, box 86, folder “High Energy Physics—Title Folder.” 70. Haworth to Wiesner, May 18, 1961. “Notes on International Cooperation in Science,” March 15, 1961, p. 8, in OST, box 87, folder “International—T.F. 1961.” 71. Wiesner to Haworth, August 4, 1961, in OST, box 87, folder “High Energy Physics—International, 1961.” 72. See Seaborg diary entries and a letter in Seaborg (1989): June 27, 1961 (v. 1, 397), August 11, 1961 (v. 2, 114), Seaborg to Kennedy, August 11, 1961 (v. 2, 116), and September 13, 1961 (v. 2, 157). 73. Henry Smyth of Princeton was one of these critics. See Smyth to Skolnikoff, August 3, 1961, in OST, box 86, folder “High Energy Physics—Title Folder.” 74. See, for example, John Turkevich to Wiesner, May 10, 1962, and attached Pravda report on the Soviet seventy Bev machine, in OST, box 141, folder “High Energy Physics—T. F. 1962.” 75. Panofsky memo for the files, July 16, 1962, in OST, box 141, folder “High Energy Physics—T. F. 1962.” 76. Beckler to Wiesner, September 13, 1961, OST, box 97, folder “International—Visa.” 77. Frank G. Sisco to William Paul, August 16, 1961, in OST, box 94, folder “International—Panel on International Science, 1961.” 78. Brooks to Wiesner, August 30, 1961, and attached, OST, box 94, folder “International—Panel on International Science, 1961.” 79. Bardeen to Dean Rusk, September 7, 1961, in OST, box 97, folder “International— Visa.” Emphasis added. On others who shared Bardeen’s views, see Krige (2006, 13). 80. Bardeen to Rusk, September 7, 1961. 81. Beckler to Wiesner, September 13, 1961, OST, box 97, folder “International—Visa;” Jan Tauc e-mail to Zuoyue Wang, January 22, 2005. 82. Tauc e-mail to Z. Wang, January 22, 2005. “APS Establishes Adler Lectureship,” Physics Today 41 ( June 1988): 114–115. 83. Seaborg diary on February 10, 1961. PSAC panel report, “Water Resources— Saline Water Conversion,” March 6, 1961, in JFK/POF/DAS, box 86, folder “PSAC 1/61–4/61.” See also PSAC, “Status Report . . . ,” June 30, 1961, in OST, box 627, folder “PSAC—Reports.” 84. Galbraith and Wiesner to Kennedy, March 22, 1961, in JFK/POF/DAS, box 85, folder “Office of Science and Technology 1963.” See also Galbraith (1969). 85. Luther H. Hodges, Walter W. Heller, and Wiesner, “Technology and Economic Prosperity: Report to the President,” December 3, 1962; Milton Harris to panel on

Notes to Pages 195–199

381

civilian technology and guests, on “Conference on ‘Spillover,’” September 11, 1962; Wiesner to Kennedy, April 10, 1963, all in JFK/POF/DAS, box 85, folder “Office of Science and Technology 1963.” 86. Wiesner to Kennedy, February 27, 1962, in JFK/POF/DAS, box 85, folder “Office of Science and Technology 1963.” Greenberg, “Civilian Technology: Program . . . ,” Science 140 ( June 28, 1963): 1380–1382; Greenberg, “Civilian Technology: Opposition . . . ,” Science 143 (February 14, 1964): 660–661. In the 1990s President Bill Clinton partially revived this scheme with his proposal for “industrial extension stations.” Clinton and Gore (1993), 4, 10, 32. See also O. Graham (1992, 232). 87. “Conference on ‘Spillover,” September 11, 1962. 88. Dryden to Wiesner, October 16, 1961, in OST, box 91, folder “International—United Kingdom.” 89. Kennedy to Walter G. Whitman, November 8, 1961, in OST, box 91, folder “International—United Kingdom.” 90. Layton (1971). 91. National Science Foundation (1971, 3, 212). 92. Margolis, “Inauguration Week,” Science 133 ( January 27, 1961): 263–264, on 264. 93. John W. Finney, “Science Aid Asked for White House,” New York Times, June 19, 1961, 27. 94. Neustadt to Kennedy, January 4, 1961, reprinted in Neustadt (2000, 94–96), on 95. 95. Wiesner to Kennedy, March 21, 1962, JFK/POF/DAS, box 85, folder “Office of Science and Technology 1962.” 96. Baker and others, “Organization of the Government for Science and Technology,” January 1962, in OST, box 140, folder “Government—Science Organ., 1962”; Baker interview, June 10, 1992. 97. “Deputy Director for OST,” Science 141 (August 23, 1963): 702. 98. Wiesner to Kennedy, March 21, 1962. 99. H. Brooks (1968, 103–104). 100. Wiesner to Kennedy, March 21, 1962. 101. Interview with Wiesner by Skolnikoff, August 8, 1967.

Chapter 12 — Responding to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring , 1962–1963 1. “The President’s News Conference of August 29th, 1962,” PPP 1963. See also F. Graham (1970, 51). 2. R. Carson (1962); P. Brooks (1972, 293); F. Graham (1970, 3). 3. William J. Darby, “Silence, Miss Carson,” Chemical and Engineering News 40 (October 1, 1962): 60–63. 4. Lear (1992, 151–170), on 152. See also Lear (1997).

382

Notes to Pages 200–202

5. “She Started It All—Here’s Her Reaction,” New York Herald Tribune, May 19, 1963. A copy of the article reprinted in another paper is in OST, box 364, folder “Life Sciences— Pesticides, 1964.” 6. See Kistiakowsky diaries in Kistiakowsky (1976): 83 (September 24, 1959), 100 (September 29, 1959), 146 (November 9, 1959), and 361 ( June 30, 1960). 7. PSAC, “Report of the Panel on Food Additives,” May 9, 1960, in Eisenhower Library. 8. Kistiakowsky diary on March 27, 1960, in Kistiakowsky (1976, 283). 9. On Argus, see Panofsky interview, March 5, 1992, and Panofsky to PSAC, February 22, 1958, in DDRS. On West Ford, see Purcell interview, June 5, 1992; Purcell, “The Case for the ‘Needles’ Experiment,” New Scientist 13 (February 1, 1962): 245–247; and Levin (1998). On James Van Allen’s criticism of PSAC’s handling of the Starfish test in 1962, see Walter Sullivan, “Van Allen Sees Science ‘Clique,’” New York Times, December 31, 1962, 1. 10. See Lutts (1985); Russell (2001). 11. R. Carson (1962, 8). 12. “Major Activities of [PSAC], January 20, 1961—Date,” April 19, 1961, OST, box 627, folder “PSAC—Reports.” 13. Wiesner to Kennedy, March 21, 1962, in JFK/POF/DAS, box 85, folder “Office of Science and Technology, 1962”; Library of Congress (1967). 14. See correspondence and documents in OST, box 100, folder “Life Sciences—Environmental Health Center, 1961.” See also Elinor Langer, “Environmental Health Center . . . ,” Science 147 ( January 15, 1965): 276–277; “NIH Institute outside Bethesda,” Science 163 ( January 31, 1969): 459. 15. Edward Wenk, Jr., “Background Memorandum Concerning Agenda for July 24, 1962 Meeting [of the FCST],” July 18, 1962, in OST, box 152, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides”; Wenk, “Minutes and Records of Actions,” in OST, FCST series, box 3, folder “FCST meeting July 24, 1962.” 16. Garwin interview, July 18, 1992. 17. Wenk, “FCST Meeting July 24, 1962,” OST, FCST series, box 3, folder “FCST Meeting July 24, 1962”; “Minutes of Meeting Held 3pm, 30 July 1962 on Pesticides,” August 1, 1962; and Bing to A. M. Boyce, August 9, 1962, both in OST, box 152, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides.” 18. “Minutes . . . ,” August 1, 1962. 19. Merrill B. Wallenstein to Bing, August 29, 1962, in OST, box 152, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides.” 20. “Minutes . . . ,” August 1, 1962, and attachment. 21. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Natural Resources,” February 23, 1961, in PPP 1961, document no. 49. 22. “Minutes . . . ,” August 1, 1962, and attachment. 23. F. Graham (1970, 36–47). For an expose of the NAS and the pesticides controversy, see Boffey (1975, 199–226).

Notes to Pages 203–205

383

24. Jukes to Wiesner, August 31, 1962, and Jukes to Hartgering, October 22, 1962, both in OST, box 152, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides.” 25. On MacLeod, see Walsh McDermot, “Colin Munro MacLeod,” Biographical Memoirs [of the] National Academy of Sciences 54 (1983): 182–219. On Horsfall’s views on pesticides, see Horsfall to Hartgering, July 23, 1962, in OST, box 152, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides.” On Drury, see Hartgering to Irston Barnes, April 9, 1963, in OST, box 250, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides, vol. II, 1963.” 26. The membership of the panel shifted during the investigation. For an initial list, see “Minutes of the Pesticides Meeting with the Life Sciences Panel,” October 1, 1962, in OST, box 152, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides.” The final list is in PSAC (1963, 24). Watson, who was sympathetic to Carson’s warning, wrote about his experience on this and other PSAC panels in Watson (2007), 155-173. 27. MacLeod to Alexander Hollaender, September 12, 1962, in OST, box 152, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides.” 28. “Minutes of the Pesticides Meeting with the Life Sciences Panel [on October 1, 1962],” undated, in OST, box 152, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides.” 29. See Peter S. Bing to Raymond P. Seven, June 28, 1963, in JFK/WHCF, box 264, folder “FG 726 President’s Science Advisory Committee.” Much of the material used during the PSAC study of pesticides was later furnished to Congress and published at the request of Senator Abraham Ribicoff. See Ribicoff hearings, Appendix I-V to part 1. On Boyce, see Bing to Boyce, August 9, 1962, and Boyce to Bing, August 16, 1962, in OST, box 152, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides.” 30. “Dangers from Toxic Chemicals,” Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords, Official Report 247, no. 58 (March 20, 1963): 17, E 13, in OST, box 364, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides 1964.” 31. Bing to Robert N. Kreidler, October 22, 1962, in OST, box 152, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides.” 32. Carson to Dorothy Freeman, January 23, 1963, in Freeman (1995, 429–430), on 429. 33. Primack and von Hippel (1974, 43). 34. F. Graham (1970, 76). 35. Beckler memo for PSAC members, February 8, 1963, and attached “Life Sciences Panel Working Paper on Pesticides,” February 8, 1963, in OST, box 251, folder “Pesticides, OST Repts, vol. 1, April 1, 1963.” 36. Freeman to Wiesner, March 1, 1963, in OST, box 153, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides 1962–1963.” 37. “Comments of the USDA Task Force on the Life Sciences Panel Working Paper on Pesticides,” February 27, 1963, in OST, box 253, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides 1962–1963.” 38. T. C. Byers to Orville Freeman, February 28, 1963, in OST, box 253, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides 1962–1963.”

384

Notes to Pages 205–207

39. J. E. Hull to Wiesner, March 29, 1963, in OST, box 253, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides 1962–1963.” 40. William H. Stewart to Hartgering, March 5, 1963, in OST, box 253, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides 1962–1963.” 41. Donald L. McKernan to commissioner of Fish and Wildlife Service of the Department of Interior, March 1, 1963, in OST, box 253, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides 1962–1963.” 42. Alfred Boyce to Hartgering, March 5, 1963, and attached R. L. Metcalf, “Comments on Life Sciences Panel Working Paper on Pesticides,” undated, in OST, box 253, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides 1962–1963.” Ironically, Metcalf, who had served as president of the Entomological Society of America in 1958, later became a strong defender of Carson and her work himself after the publication of the PSAC report. See Philip M. Boffey, “20 Years after ‘Silent Spring’: Still a Troubled Landscape,” New York Times, May 25, 1982, C1, C7. May Berenbaum and Richard Lampman, “Robert Lee Metcalf,” Biographical Memoirs [of the] National Academy of Sciences 80 (2001): 2–16. 43. “Comments of the U.S. Department of Agriculture on the Life Science Panel Working Paper on Pesticides,” undated, and marginal notes, in OST, box 250, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides, 1963.” 44. Hartgering to R. C. McGregor of the Bureau of Budget, March 4, 1963, in OST, box 253, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides 1962–1963.” 45. Pesticides Meeting Notes, March 7–8, 1963, in OST, box 253, folder “Life Sciences— Pesticides 1962–1963.” The quotations are from p. 11 of the notes of the March 8, 1963 meeting. 46. PSAC Life Sciences Panel to Wiesner, March 11, 1963, in OST, box 253, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides 1962–1963.” 47. PSAC Life Science Panel, “Hazards of Pesticides,” March 15, 1963, OST, box 251, folder “Pesticides, OST Reports, vol. 1, April 1, 1963.” 48. Roger A. Barnes to Wiesner, March 19, 1963, in OST, box 253, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides 1962–1963.” 49. Staats to Wiesner, March 8, 1963, in OST, box 253, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides 1962–1963.” 50. Harold Seidman to the director of BOB, May 22, 1963, in OST, box 250, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides, vol. II, 1963.”. 51. Carson to Freeman, March 28, 1963, in Freeman (1995, 447–448). 52. Hartgering to panel members, April 5, 1963, Hartgering to Wiesner, May 8, 1963, both in OST, box 252, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides.” 53. Seidman to the director of BOB, May 22, 1963. 54. Wiesner to Udall, April 24, 1963, and attached “The Use of Pesticides” (identical letters to Freeman and HEW secretary Anthony Celebrezze), OST, box 252, untitled folder. 55. Freeman to Wiesner, May 1, 1963, and attached; “Comments on ‘The Use of Pesticides,” by the HEW, May 1, 1963, all in OST, box 252, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides.”

Notes to Pages 207–212

385

56. Hartgering to Wiesner, May 8, 1963 in OST, box 252, folder “Life Sciences— Pesticides.” 57. “U.S.D.A. Proposed Revision with Attached Additional Comments [on Use of Pesticides],” undated but most likely May 1, 1963, in OST, box 252, untitled folder. Horsfall joined the USDA in opposing the mention of Carson’s name. See Horsfall to Hartgering, May 6, 1963, in OST, box 250, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides, vol. II, 1963.” 58. Hartgering to Wiesner, May 8, 1963, in OST, box 252, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides.” Also see PSAC (1963, 23). 59. Udall to Wiesner, April 26, 1963, in OST, box 252, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides.” 60. Drury to Hartgering, May 1, 1963, in OST, box 250, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides, vol. II, 1963.” 61. Horsfall to Hartgering, May 6, 1963, in OST, box 250, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides, vol. II, 1963.” 62. After the report was published, the staff thanked Horsfall for his help in making it a balanced one. Bing to Horsfall, May 21, 1963, in OST, box 250, folder “Life Sciences— Pesticides, vol. II, 1963.” 63. Wiesner to Kennedy, April 3, 1963, JFK/POF/SM, box 67, folder “Wiesner, Jerome B., 1963”: “Fred Friendly has done a documentary film on pesticide problems, reviewing much of the ground that Rachel Carson covered in her book, ‘Silent Spring.’ It will be shown at 7:30 tonight (Wednesday) on Channel 2.” 64. This and the following account of the program is based on transcript of “The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson,” April 3, 1963, Sevareid Papers, box II: 42. 65. See also Lear (1992, 23–48). For a cultural analysis of the CBS Reports program, see Kroll (2001, 403–420). 66. On the redrafting before publication, see Bing to Horsfall, May 21, 1963, in OST, box 250, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides, vol. II, 1963.” 67. PSAC (1963, 4). 68. Ibid., 2. 69. R. Carson (1962, 13). 70. PSAC (1963, 6). 71. Ibid., 17. 72. Ibid., 18. 73. Ibid., 17. 74. Ibid., 19. 75. Ibid., 19, 22. A crucial change is that the EIR requires such studies before the start of the project. 76. Ibid., 23. 77. Ibid., 18, 20.

386

Notes to Pages 212–215

78. See, for example, Freeman’s testimony in Ribicoff hearings, part 1, 117–118; and testimony of William J. Darby, in ibid., part 3, 659. 79. R. Carson (1962, 197). 80. R. Carson (1962, 152); PSAC (1963, 19, 22). 81. R. Carson (1962, 278). 82. Robert C. Toth, “Scientists Urge Wider Controls over Pesticides,” New York Times, May 16, 1963, 1. 83. F. Graham (1970, 79). 84. Quoted in F. Graham (1970, 79). 85. William Q. Hull to Bing, May 17, 1963, in OST, box 250, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides, vol. II, 1963.” 86. PSAC (1963, iii). 87. Indeed, many pesticide proponents, focusing on the portion of the report dealing with the benefits of pesticides, found in the report a “lack of alarm.” “Aroused Spring,” Time, May 24, 1963, 81. 88. Lear (1997, 452). 89. F. Graham (1970, 79). 90. Hartgering to Carson, May 16, 1963, in OST, box 250, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides, vol. II, 1963.” 91. “She Started It All—Here’s Her Reaction,” New York Herald Tribune, May 19, 1963. 92. “Pesticide Danger May Exceed that of Fallout, Wiesner Says,” New York Times, May 17, 1963, 13. See also Ribicoff hearings, part 1, p. 62. 93. Margaret Mead to Bing, May 7, 1963, in OST, box 250, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides, vol. II, 1963.” To avoid public panic, Mead suggested that PSAC exude a determined optimism on the issue: the negative effects of pesticides could be controlled without sacrificing their benefits. She added that this approach “can also help prevent an increased irrational hostility to science and scientists.” 94. Ribicoff hearings, part 1, pp. 69–82. 95. Stewart L. Udall Oral History Interview, part 5, December 16, 1969, by Joe B. Frantz, p. 2, available at Johnson Library’s Web site at www.lbjlib.utexas.edu. 96. Ribicoff hearings, part 1, 84–124. 97. For the USDA’s expanded educational activities on pesticides, see Ribicoff hearings, part 3, 723. For PHS’s request for budget increase, see Ribicoff hearings, appendix V, p. 1000. See also Freeman to Kermit Gordon, BOB director, June 18, 1963, in OST, box 252, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides.” 98. Ribicoff hearings, part 1, 216–219. 99. Bocking (2004, 25–26). 100. Hynes (1989, 45). 101. Jukes, “Use of Pesticides—A Report of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, May 15, 1963,” in OST, box 250, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides, vol. II 1963.”

Notes to Pages 215–219

387

102. Ribicoff hearings, part 1, 327. 103. Jukes, “Use of Pesticides.” 104. McElroy to Jukes, June 4, 1963, in OST, box 251, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides, vol. III, 1963.” 105. Ribicoff hearings, part 4, 947; also see Darby testimony in Ribicoff hearings, part 3, 659. 106. See, for example, Raymond P. Seven of Morton Chemical Company to Kennedy, June 12, 1963, and Senator Jack Miller to Wiesner, July 12, 1963, both in folder JFK/WHCF, box 264, “FG 726 President’s Science Advisory Committee.” 107. See, for example, Ribicoff hearings, Part 4, 910–911. Also see Bing to Seven, June 28, 1963, in JFK/WHCF, box 264, folder “FG 726 President’s Science Advisory Committee.” 108. On the history of ecology, see Worster (1994), Hagen (1992), and Golley (1993). 109. See Dorothy Nelkin, “Scientists and Professional Responsibility: The Experience of American Ecologists,” Social Studies of Science 7, no. 1 (February 1977): 75–95. 110. F. R. Fosberg, “Pesticides and Ecology,” Ecology 44 ( July 1963): 624. 111. See agency reports on the implementation of the PSAC report in OST, box 252, folder “Life Sciences—Pesticides.” The USDA reduced the dosage of DDT from 1 pound per acre to 1/2 pound per acre in response to Carson and PSAC. See Dunlap (1981); Ribicoff hearings, appendix V, p. 1011. On the formation of the Federal Committee, see Ribicoff hearings, appendix 5, p. 1025. 112. “The Public Needs to Be Alarmed,” Consumer Reports, July 28, 1963, 321–327. 113. Shirley A. Briggs, “Silent Spring: The View from 1990,” The Ecologist 20, no. 2 (1990): 54–60. 114. For a recent study of herbicides in the Vietnam War, see Jeanne Mager Stellman and others, “The Extent and Patterns of Usage of Agent Orange and Other Herbicides in Vietnam,” Nature 422 (April 17, 2003): 681–687. PSAC eventually did study the problem of herbicides in Vietnam in PSAC (1971). 115. Darby, “Silence, Miss Carson.” 116. For a discussion of the role of scientific evidence in environmental policy, see Oreskes (2004). See also Jasanoff (1990, 250). 117. Wiesner highlighted the pesticide study in his argument for a resurrection of PSAC in 1989. See Wiesner, “On Science Advice to the President,” Scientific American 260, no. 1 ( January 1989): 34–39. 118. Hays (1998, 371). 119. See Pursell (1993).

Chapter 13 — Testing the Limits, 1961–1963 1. Wiesner, “Kennedy,” in Rosenblith (2003, 278). 2. The report was declassified in 1988 and can be found in “Report to the Presidentelect of the Ad Hoc Committee on Space,” January 10, 1961, in OST, box 167, folder

388

Notes to Pages 219–223

“Space-Man-in-Space 1962”; W. H. Lawrence, “Kennedy Warned of Space Setback,” New York Times, January 12, 1961, 1, 14. 3. “Report . . . on Space,” on 12; Logston et al. (1995, 416–423). See also Wiesner to Kennedy, February 20, 1961, in Rosenblith (2003, 461–463). 4. Wiesner to Sorensen, December 19, 1960, in Rosenblith (2003, 457–460), on 459. 5. McDougall (1985, 312–313). 6. Wiesner to Sorensen, December 19, 1960, in Rosenblith (2003, 458). 7. Seaborg diary for April 19, 1961, in Seaborg (1989, v. 1, 205). 8. A copy of the Space Science Board report, “Man’s Role in the National Space Program,” was sent to Wiesner, March 27, 1961, in OST, box 157, “National Academy of Sciences-T. F. 1961.” See also Needell (2000, 359–361); McDougall (1985, 315–316). 9. Webb and McNamara to Johnson, May 8, 1961, and attached, in Logston et al. (1995, 439–452), on 444, emphasis in original. 10. “Notes [on] Interview of Jerome Wiesner Conducted on July 24 1974,” p. 3, NASA History Office, Wiesner Biographical Files. 11. Ibid. See also McDougall (1985, 322). 12. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,” May 25, 1961, in PPP 1961. 13. See Logsdon (1970). Another thoughtful discussion is by Eugene M. Emme, NASA’s first chief historian, “Presidents and Space,” in Durant (1981, 5–138), especially 37–83. 14. A number of other prominent scientists such as Harold Urey and Frederick Seitz, however, supported the Apollo project. Greenberg, “Space Controversy,” Science 140 ( June 7, 1963): 1078; Greenberg, “Scientists on Space,” Science 140 ( June 14, 1963): 1195–1196; U.S. Congress (1963). 15. Seaborg diary for April 25, 1961, in Seaborg (1989, v. 1, 220–221, 224). 16. Wiesner, “Science and Technology,” in Golden (1980, 33–40), on 35; Sorensen (1965, 264–265); McDougall (1985, 309–310); Interview with Hugh L. Dryden, March 24, 1964, in Kennedy Library; Logsdon (1970, 147). 17. “Moon Spat,” Time 80 (September 21, 1962): 22; McDougall (1985, 378); Zuckerman (1987, 155–156); C. G. Brooks et al. (1979, 100–107); Seaborg diary of July 16, 1962, in Seaborg (1989, v. 4, 42); Emme, “Presidents,” 68; Dryden interview, March 24, 1964, in Kennedy Library. NASA choice probably did limit the expendability of the Apollo project. See W. D. Compton (1989, 269). On Golovin in NASA and PSAC, see, for example, C. G. Brooks et al. (1979), especially chapter 4. 18. This account of the meeting is based on the transcript of Kennedy’s meeting with Webb, Wiesner, and others on November 21, 1962, in Marc Selverstone, “Kennedy and the Space Race,” available online at http://www.whitehousetapes.org/exhibits/space/#, accessed in 2004. 19. See Lambright (1995), especially 115–116; Logsdon (1995, 381–382).

Notes to Pages 223–226

389

20. Howard Margolis, “A Few Headaches,” Science 133 (February 3, 1961): 317–319; Meg Greenfield, “Science Goes to Washington,” Science 142 (October 18, 1963): 361–367, on 367. 21. Kistiakowsky to Hornig, June 25, 1963, Kistiakowsky Papers, PSAC File, box 5, folder “PSAC, 1971—Members and Consultants.” 22. Greenberg, “Wiesner Successor,” Science 142 (November 15, 1963): 939–940. 23. Wiesner interview by Skolnikoff, August 8, 1967, NASA History Office. 24. White House press release, “Fisk Panel,” January 25, 1961, in OST, box 77, folder “Disarm*NT*Fisk Panel.” 25. “Fisk Panel Report to the United States Disarmament Administration: Technical Considerations Bearing upon the Conclusions of an Agreement for the Discontinuance of Nuclear Weapons Tests,” undated, in OST, box 77, folder “Disarm*NT*Fisk Panel.” 26. Press to Wiesner, January 23, 1961, in OST, box 77, folder “Disarm*NT*Fisk Panel.” 27. Seaborg (1981, 45–48), on 46. 28. Ibid., 54–74. 29. Panofsky panel report, in FRUS 1961–63 v. 7, 106–109, on 108–109. 30. Seaborg to Wiesner, August 4, 1961, and Kennedy memo for Maxwell D. Taylor, August 7, 1961, both in JFK/NSF, open box 302, folder “Nuclear Weapons Panofsky Panel 8/4/61—9/5/61.” 31. At his August 10, 1961 press conference, Kennedy cited the Panofsky report in support of a test ban: “This report has made me feel more urgently than ever” that without a test ban with inspections, no one could be sure “that a nation with a closed society is not conducting secret nuclear tests.” “The President’s News Conference of August 10, 1961,” in PPP 1961, 553–561, on 554. 32. Schlesinger (1965, 449). 33. Ibid., 461, 482–483. 34. Kennedy to McMillan, September 5, 1961, in FRUS 1961–63 v. 7, 164–165, on 164. 35. See, for example, Seaborg diary on September 12, 1961, Seaborg (1989, v. 2, 146). 36. Wiesner to Bundy, September 29, 1961, in FRUS 1961–63 v. 7, 188–191, on 188. 37. “Test Decision Due . . . ,” New York Times, December 1, 1961, 8. Notably, Kennedy, through briefings from Wiesner and Harold Brown, actually came to understand some of the technical issues involved (e.g., ABMs) better than Teller did. Interview with Harold Brown (“Oral History #1”), undated, in DDRS. 38. Wiesner to Kennedy, December 19, 1961, in FRUS 1961–63 v. 7, 268–271, on 268. 39. “Memorandum of Conversation,” November 22, 1961, in FRUS 1961–63 v. 7, 237–241, on 240. 40. Harold Brown interview (“Oral History #1”), undated, p. 37, in DDRS. 41. The report remains classified. See FRUS 1961–63 v. 7, 230, 236–237; Seaborg (1981, 119– 120); Schlesinger (1965, 495). A year later, Wiesner reported to Kennedy that a new analysis

390

Notes to Pages 226–228

by the Bethe panel found that they had overestimated the Soviet progress through testing in 1961. Wiesner to Kennedy, October 6, 1962, in FRUS 1961–63 v. 7, 584. 42. Bundy to Kennedy, January 17, 1962, in FRUS 1961–63 v. 7, 306. See also Bethe, “Disarmament and Strategy,” first published in BAS in September 1962, reprinted in Bethe (1991, 54–70). 43. Lee Edson, “Scientific Man for All Seasons,” New York Times, March 10, 1968, SM28–36, on 34. 44. John W. Finney, “Soviet Gains Led to Atom Decision,” New York Times, April 27, 1962, 3. 45. Bethe, “Disarmament and Strategy.” 46. Bundy to Kennedy, December 30, 1961, in FRUS 1961–63 v. 7, 286–287, quote on 287. 47. Seaborg (1981, 138–139). Kennedy’s “thoughtful and factual” explanation of his decision won appreciation from the Federation of the American Scientists, as Wiesner told him. Wiesner to Kennedy, April 6, 1962, and attached March 1962 F.A.S. Newsletter, in JFK/POF/SM, box 67, folder “Wiesner, Jerome, 1962.” 48. See, for example, the following entries in Seaborg (1989): May 14, 1962 (v. 3, 501), July 16, 1962 (v. 4, 41–42), October 15, 1962 (v. 4, 340), January 14, 1963 (v. 5, 52), April 15, 1961 (v. 5, 410); Herken (1992, 136–142). 49. Wiesner and PSAC played only a very minor role in the crisis: Frustrated when his own phone line to Guantanamo Bay was seized by the military, Kennedy asked Wiesner to head a subcommittee of Executive Committee (Excomm) to study the government’s global communications system. See Frank Sieverts, “The Cuban Crisis, 1962,” pp. 137, 176, in DDRS. Wiesner, “Kennedy,” in Rosenblith (2003, 286). 50. Kennedy to Khrushchev, October 28, 1962, in FRUS, 1961–1963, v. 6. 51. “Telegram from the Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State,” July 18, 1963, in FRUS, 1961–63, v. 7, 808–809. 52. “Telegram from the Department of State to the Embassy in the Soviet Union,” July 15, 1963, in FRUS, 1961–63, v. 7, 801. 53. See Herken (1992, 268, footnote 84). 54. Seaborg (1981, chapters 14–18); Bundy (1988, 460–461). 55. Wiesner to Kennedy, August 19, 1963, and attached “Draft Statement by PSAC on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,” August 17, 1963, in JFK/POF/DAS, box 85, folder “Office of Science and Technology, 1963.” 56. Robert C. Toth, “Teller Opposed Test Ban Treaty . . . ,” New York Times, August 15, 1963, 10. Four years later, Teller publicly acknowledged that the treaty had not been as restrictive to his lab as he had initially feared. Harold M. Schmeck, Jr., “Teller Lauds Gains . . . ,” New York Times, April 28, 1967, 22. 57. Greenfield, “Science Goes to Washington,” 366–367. 58. Dyson, “Death of a Project,” Science 149 ( July 9, 1965): 141–144, on 143; Dyson (1979, 127–131, 138–139).

Notes to Pages 228–231

391

59. “The President’s News Conference of August 20, 1963,” in PPP 1963, 629–637, on 635. 60. “Draft Statement by PSAC on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,” August 17, 1963, quote on p. 3. Bundy sent the statement to Senator Hubert Humphrey as evidence that Teller did not speak for the scientific community. Bundy to Humphrey, September 10, 1963, in JFK/WHCF, box 204, folder “FG 726 President’s Science Advisory Committee.” 61. Tape recording of Kennedy phone conversation with Fulbright, August 23, 1963, item no. 26B.5*, in JFK/POF/PR, accessed at www.whitehousetapes.org in 2004. 62. Seaborg diary on July 30, 1963, Seaborg (1989, v. 6, 119). 63. “Statement by Nobel Laureates,” August 14, 1963, and related files, in Rabi Papers, box 42, folder “Nuclear Test Ban Treaty”; Seaborg (1981, 266–269). Seaborg’s testimony is reprinted in Seaborg (1989, v. 6, 162–226). 64. Kusch to Lee, August 9, 1963, in Rabi Papers, box 42, folder “Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.” 65. Robert C. Toth, “Teller Opposed Test Ban Treaty . . . ,” New York Times, August 15, 1963, 10. 66. Kennedy to Rabi, August 15, 1963, in Rabi Papers, box 42, folder “Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.” 67. “Bethe Approves Treaty,” New York Times, September 13, 1963, 13. 68. Seaborg (1981, 280–282); Herken (1992, 145). 69. E. W. Kenworthy, “Eisenhower for Test Ban . . . ,” New York Times, August 27, 1963, 1. 70. John S. D. Eisenhower, “Memorandum of Conference with Former President Eisenhower,” July 24, 1963, in Eisenhower PPF, Special Names, box 12, folder “McCone, John, 1963–1966 [4].” 71. “Text of Eisenhower’s Letter,” New York Times, August 27, 1963, 10, and “Eisenhower View on Pact Clarified,” New York Times, September 8, 1963, 7. 72. PSAC, “Draft Briefing Paper, November 15, 1961,” in JFK/POF/DAS, box 86, folder “PSAC 1/61–4/61.” 73. Margolis, “Kennedy’s Program for Education . . . ,” Science 133 (February 14, 1961): 567; Margolis, “The Missile Gap; Overhead for Federal Research Grants . . . ,” Science 133 (February 17, 1961): 449; Margolis “Educating the Public . . . ,” Science 133 (March 17, 1961): 742–744, on 743. 74. Greenberg, “Science, Engineering Manpower Uncertainties Cloud Nation’s Future Needs,” Science 135 ( January 26, 1962): 301–303. 75. PSAC (1962); Greenberg, “Manpower Race,” Science 138 (December 21, 1962): 1314– 1316; John Walsh, “Budget,” Science 139 (February 1, 1963): 394–395. 76. NSF (1971, 220). According to this source, the rates of annual increases in federal obligations for basic research at universities were: 46 percent for 1958–1959, 31 percent for 1959–1960, 20 percent for 1960–1961, 30 percent for 1961–1962, 25 percent for 1962–1963, 18 percent for 1963–1964.

392

Notes to Pages 231–233

77. Eugene B. Skolnikoff to Killian, June 15, 1959 and June 22, 1959, both in OST, box 94, folder “International—Research Support.” On U.S.–European interactions in science, see also Krige (2006). 78. U.S. Congress (1962); Kennedy to department and agency heads, April 30, 1962, in OST, box 139, folder “Government Science—Research and Development 1962.” David Bell was director of the BOB. 79. Library of Congress (1967). On oceanography, see Wenk (1972), especially 66–72; Walsh, “Oceanography,” Science 141 (August 9, 1963): 506–507. 80. See “Report of the Panel on High Energy Accelerator Physics,” May 20, 1963, printed in U.S. Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (1965). 81. Wiesner to Kennedy, May 8, 1963, in JFK/POF/DAS, box 85, folder “Office of Science and Technology 1963.” 82. Snow (1961, 1964). On Snow’s connections with Rabi, see M. Day (2004). 83. See, for example, Seaborg, “A Scientific Society—the Beginnings,” Science 135 (February 16, 1952): 505–509. 84. Greenberg, “Science and Congress,” Science 138 (October 19, 1962): 417–418; Hechler (1980, 105, 130); Louise Campell, “National Academy of Sciences,” Science 142 (November 1, 1963): 561–563, on 561. 85. As Albert Thomas of the House Appropriations Committee demanded, “what is the value to the national economy of a Ph.D. in math and science? . . . The more we spend for national defense, the more Cal Tech gets.” Greenberg, “Congress and Science,” Science 142 (October 12, 1963): 368–370. 86. Walsh, “Mixed Band of Sponsors Propose Investigation of Federal Research,” Science 141 (August 23, 1963): 702–703; Greenberg, “House Unanimously Approves Comprehensive Inquiry into Federal Support of Research,” Science 141 (September 20, 1963): 1161–1164; Philip H. Abelson, “Changing Attitudes toward Research,” Science 141 (September 27, 1963): 1245; Greenberg, “Investigation,” Science 141 (September 27, 1963): 1261–1264. 87. Forman (1997, 185). 88. Greenberg, “The Big Picture,” Science 142 (November 8, 1963): 650–653. 89. Wenk (1972, 62–72); Greenberg, “Fellowship Jungle . . . ,” Science 136 (April 27, 1962): 305–307; Greenberg, “NASA,” Science 139 ( January 4, 1963): 23–24; Greenberg, “Fellowships,” Science 139 (March 1, 1963): 818; Greenberg, “Fellowship Expansion,” Science 139 (February 21, 1963): 392–393; Abelson, “Manpower or Mind Power,” Science 139 ( January 11, 1963): 79. 90. See, for example, Alvin Weinberg, “Impact of Large-Scale Science on the United States,” Science 133 ( July 21, 1961): 161–164. 91. Wolfle, “Tightening Federal Budgets,” Science 142 (November 1, 1963): 543; Greenberg, “The Big Picture.” 92. See Beckler to Wiesner, July 24, 1961, in OST, box 24, folder “CongressionalComm. on Govt Operations 1961.”

Notes to Pages 233–237

393

93. See Kreidler’s notes of the Brooks panel meetings in 1961; Beckler, “Science Organization (Based in Part on Discussion in the Brooks Panel),” June 15, 1961; Brooks, “Problems of Science Management,” July 15, 1961; Kreidler to Wiesner and Brooks, re: “Special Meeting on Basic Research, November 15, 1961,” November 20, 1961; all in OST, box 85, folder “Government Science—R&D 1961.” See also H. Brooks (1968). 94. Colonel Lawrence J. Legere to Taylor, May 3, 1962, and Colonel Julian J. Ewell to Taylor, April 16, 1962, quoted in FRUS, 1961–1963, v. 8, available online at http://www. state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/kennedyjf/viii/33840.htm, accessed in 2004. 95. Wiesner, “Kennedy.” 96. Ibid., 284–285. Also Edward Kennedy, “Foreword,” in Rosenblith (2003, xiii–xv), on xiii; Sorensen, “A View from the White House,” 40–41, ibid. See also Herken (1992, 142). 97. Wiesner, “Living with Science,” in Wiesner (1965, 41–53), on 45. 98. Quoted in Edward Kennedy, “Foreword,” xiv. 99. Abelson, “The President’s Science Adviser,” Science 142 (November 22, 1963): 1025. Ralph E. Lapp, a popular science writer, likewise, sharply questioned the secrecy surrounding the operations of PSAC and its panels. Lapp (1965), especially 196–201. For views of Wiesner’s supporters, see J. Herbert Hollomon, “Government and Science,” letter to the editor, Science 143 ( January 1964): 427–429; Leo Goldberg, “Wiesner’s Public Service,” letter to the editor, Science 143 ( January 1964): 429. 100. Don K. Price, “President’s Science Adviser,” letter to the editor, Science 142 (December 6, 1963): 1257. 101. Wiesner, “Science and Technology,” in Golden (1980, 33–40), on 35. 102. Greenberg, “Science and Government,” Science 141 ( July 26, 1963): 338–340; COSPUP, Basic Research and National Goals, a report to the Committee on Science and Astronautics, U.S. House of Representatives (1965). 103. “Federal Grant Policy,” Science 140 (May 17, 1963): 795; Greenberg, “National Academy,” Science 141 ( July 5, 1963): 27–28; Robert C. Toth, “Scientists Decry World Birth Rise,” New York Times, April 18, 1963, 1. The COSPUP study might have helped to change Eisenhower’s mind on birth control in 1964. See Farnsworth Fowle, “Eisenhower Backs Birth-Curb Aids,” New York Times, November 10, 1964, 19. 104. Kennedy, “Address at the Anniversary Convocation of the National Academy of Sciences,” October 22, 1963, PPP, 1963, accessed on the Web at http://www.presidency. ucsb.edu/pppus.php?admin=035&year=1963&id=430 in 2004.

Chapter 14 — “Scientists for Johnson,” 1964 1. Wiesner (1965, 3–12), on 3. 2. Garwin to Wiesner, November 26, 1963, in OST, box 856, folder “PSAC-T.F. 1963.” 3. “Wiesner Leaving White House Post,” Science 142 (November 8, 1963): 651; Greenberg, “Wiesner Successor,” Science 142 (November 15, 1963): 939–940. 4. Hornig to Johnson, November 25, 1963, in OST, box 842, folder “White HousePresident 11/63-.”

394

Notes to Pages 237–240

5. Wiesner to Johnson, December 3, 1963, in OST, box 842, folder “White House-President 11/63-.” Wiesner told Johnson that he had made a list of candidates after consulting with “senior members and former members” of PSAC. It included James Fisk, Harvey Brooks, Herbert York, Harold Brown, Glenn Seaborg, Norman Ramsey, Edward Purcell, William O. Baker, and Emanuel Piore, all of whom, except Ramsey, were past or present PSAC members. Kennedy first considered Fisk, but personal problems prevented him from accepting the post. 6. Bundy to Johnson, December 5, 1963, in Bundy Memos, reel 1, frame 20. 7. Johnson phone call to Albert Thomas, December 5, 1963, Johnson Library, tape item no. K6312.03, PNO 26, audio available at www.whitehousetapes.org. Walter Jenkins to Wiesner, December 5, 1963, in OST, box 842, folder “White House-President 11/63-.” 8. Interview with Hornig by David G. McComb, December 4, 1968, p. 9, in Johnson Library. 9. Hornig to Wiesner, February 20, 1962, in OST, box 856, folder “PSAC-T.F., 1963.” 10. Hornig interview, March 14–15, 1991. Other members of the group included Wolfgang Panofsky, Sydney Drell, and Charles Townes, all future PSAC members. See also Townes (1999, 129–131). 11. Previous historical accounts of the Sidewinder have failed to consider the role of the Hornig group and have attributed the missile’s success entirely to the flexibility of the Naval R&D structure. See, for example, Allison (1987), Westrum and Wilcox (1989), and Westrum (1999). 12. Interview with Hornig by McComb, pp. 18–19. Herken (1992, 147). 13. Hornig, “The President’s Need for Science Advice: Past and Future,” in Golden (1980, 41–59), on 47. 14. Beschloss (2001, 145). 15. Seaborg (2001, 199–203). 16. Johnson call to Myer “Mike” Feldman, March 13, 1964, Johnson Library, tape item no. WH6403.10, audio available at www.whitehousetapes.org (author’s transcription). It is not clear what matter Johnson was referring to. 17. See drafts of Johnson to Hornig, January 24, 1964, in Johnson Library, WHCF, EX FG 11–9/A, box 123, folder “Office of Science and Technology/Appointment.” Johnson justified the deletions on his preference for one-page memos. 18. Hornig to Johnson, January 18, 1965, in Bundy Memos, reel 2, 308. See also Zuckerman (1987, 175). 19. Seaborg diaries in Seaborg (1989): November 9, 1963, v. 6, 510, 514, on 514, November 19, 1963, v. 6, 542; Wiesner, “Kennedy,” in Rosenblith (2003, 292). 20. Johnson, “Remarks upon Presenting the Fermi Award to Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer,” December 2, 1963, in PPP 1963–1964. See also Major (1971, 293). 21. Hornig interview by McComb, 22–23.

Notes to Pages 240–242

395

22. Greenberg (1967, 263–265); Wiesner to Johnson on MURA, December 19, 1963, in OST, box 842, folder “White House-President 11/63-”; Max Dresden interview, March 12, 1992. 23. Hornig to Johnson, March 27, 1964, OST, box 844, folder “White House President Vol. II.” 24. Bundy to Johnson, March 28, 1964, in DDRS. Italics added. 25. Lederman to Tape, September 27, 1966, in OST, box 564, folder “High Energy Physics 1966.” 26. See Seaborg (1993, chapter 7). See also Westfall (1989). 27. Greenberg, “Venture into Politics . . . (I),” Science 146 (December 11, 1964): 1440–1144; “ . . . (II),” 146 (December 18, 1964): 1561–1563; Hornig interview, March 14, 1991. 28. George S. Baldwin, “Scientists Urged to Back Johnson,” The Albuquerque Tribune, August 26, 1964. 29. “Scientists and Engineers Organize for Johnson,” press release, August 13, 1964, in LBJ/WHCF, box 157, folder “Scientif.” On the Scientists for Johnson movement, see also Kuznick (2004). 30. “ . . . Scientists Sponsor Hard-Hitting Political Telecast Sunday,” October 29, 1964, in MacArthur Collection, box 2, folder “Press Releases.” See also Greenberg, “Venture into Politics” (I) and (II). 31. A copy of an ad for “Scientists and Engineers for Goldwater-Miller” is in MacArthur Collection, box 2, folder “Press Releases.” 32. “Leading Members of the Nation’s Scientific, Engineering and Medical Professions Offer Support to President Johnson,” October 6, 1964, in MacArthur Collection, box 2, folder “Press Releases.” 33. Donald MacArthur to Bronk, November 16, 1964, Bronk Papers, series 303U, box 20 folder 26; Johnson, “Remarks at a Meeting of ‘Scientists and Engineers for Johnson-Humphrey,’” October 6, 1964, PPP 1964, doc. no. 629. 34. Ibid. 35. Daisy Cleland, “Mrs. Johnson’s Niece Undertakes Big Task,” The Washington Star, October 4, 1964; Greenberg, “Politics,” Science 146 (October 23, 1964): 509, 576. 36. The Nobel statement was widely advertised, including, for example, in Rocky Mountain News, November 2, 1964, paid for by the Colorado chapter of Scientists for Johnson. The Democrats also produced a TV program on “Science and the Great Society,” featuring Seaborg and three other Nobel winners. See Seaborg diary on October 11, 1964, in Seaborg (1989, v. 9, 233). 37. A transcript of the show is in MacArthur Collection, box 2, folder “Press releases.” On Urey’s support of the H-bomb, see Hewlett and Duncan (1990, 405). 38. In a preview of the tape by Hornig, Harold Brown, and Bill Moyers, they all singled out this comment by Kistiakowsky as a “potent political endorsement.” Rodney W. Nichols to Kistiakowsky, October 21, 1964, in Kistiakowsky Papers, box 36, folder “Scientists and Engineers for LBJ.”

396

Notes to Pages 242–245

39. Transcript of “Sorry, Senator Goldwater,” 16. 40. Johnson to MacArthur, August 20, 1964, in LBJ/WHCF, box 157, folder “Scientif.” 41. Greenberg, “Venture into Politics . . . (II),” 1562. 42. The Johnsons to Kistiakowsky, November 2, 1964, in Kistiakowsky Papers, box 33, folder “President Johnson.” 43. Interview with Spock by Ted Gittinger, October 23, 1982, Johnson Library. 44. Greenberg, “Venture into Politics” (I), 1440. 45. Elliot Maraniss, “Urey Says Politics Must Solve Peace,” The Capital News (Madison, WI), October 14, 1964. 46. The statement, dated October 1, 1964, is in Kistiakowsky Papers, box 36, folder “Scientists and Engineers for LBJ [2 of 2].” 47. “Noted Scientist Hails President Johnson’s Remarks,” October 9, 1964, MacArthur Collection, box 2, folder “Press Releases.” 48. Wiesner and York, “National Security and the Nuclear Test Ban,” Scientific American 211 (October 1964), reprinted in Wiesner (1965, 279–296), and York (1995, 29–43). On Teller’s defense of Goldwater’s policy, see Teller, “The Case for Goldwater,” Science 146 (October 16, 1964): 380–382. 49. Maraniss, “Urey Says. . . .” 50. Marquis Childs, “Scientists Join Politicians in Battle for Presidency,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 8, 1964. 51. Elinor Langer, “After the Pentagon Papers,” Science 174 (November 26, 1971): 923–928. For an insightful study of Johnson’s road to the Vietnam War, see Logevall (1999). 52. A copy in Kistiakowsky Papers, box 36, folder “Scientists and Engineers for LBJ [2 of 2].” 53. Kistiakowsky, “The Case for Johnson,” Science 146 (October 16, 1964): 380–382. 54. Horace Busby to Hornig, March 30, 1965, in Busby Papers, box 19, folder “Memos for: Dr. Hornig.” 55. Beckler, “PSAC Meeting with the President, July 20, 1964,” July 22, 1964, in OST, box 844, folder “White House—President—Vol II.” 56. York (1987, 226). 57. Beckler, “PSAC Meeting with the President, July 20, 1964.” 58. The trio recommended William Hewlett, president of Hewlett-Packard, Murray Gell-Mann (“quick and thoughtful” and familiar with military-government matters), and Charles Townes (“brilliant and ingenious”). Hewlett and Townes became members in 1966 and Gell-Mann in 1969 under Nixon. Garwin to Beckler, November 11, 1964, in Bronk Papers, series 303U, box 15, folder 7. 59. PSAC had first nominated Carl Kaysen, the Harvard economist who had served as a presidential aide to Kennedy and who just succeeded Oppenheimer as director of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, but the White House vetoed him. LBJ/OSTH,

Notes to Pages 245–247

397

“President’s Science Advisory Committee,” 7–8. Beckler to Hornig, January 4, 1967, OST, box 855, folder PSAC—Title Folder vol. III.” On Simon, see Simon (1991, 295); Beckler interview, June 5, 1991. 60. Besides Garwin, Townes, and York, these included Lewis Branscomb of the National Bureau of Standards, Marvin Goldberger of Princeton University, Gordon MacDonald of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Sidney Drell of Stanford. See “Present and Past Members of the President’s Science Advisory Committee,” in OST History, and the list of Jason members in Brown et al. (1972). 61. Seaborg (2001, 203). 62. Seaborg diaries in Seaborg (1989): July 8, 1966, v. 13, 18–19; August 24, 1966, v. 13, 188, 202. 63. See http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/members/former.htm, accessed in 2006. 64. Cunningham (1991, 550). 65. Kitaj (2002, 43–44). On Rabi, see Rigden (1987, 116). 66. On education, see PSAC (1964); John Walsh, “Education . . . ,” Science 144 (April 24, 1964): 394–395. On housing, see Lambright (1985, 91–94). See Library of Congress (1967, chapter V). 67. LBJ/OSTH, v. 2, “Introduction.” 68. Beckler, “Resume of PSAC Meeting, July 19, 20, 1965,” in OST, box 855, folder “PSAC-Title Folder 1965.” 69. Lambright (1985, 26–27). 70. PSAC (1966). 71. PSAC (1966). See also Lambright (1985, 30–37). 72. Greenberg, “Oceanography . . . ,” Science 153 ( July 22, 1966): 391–393; Sierra Club resolution on “Marine Conservation,” October 10, 1966, available at its Web site: http:// www.sierraclub.org/policy/conservation/marine.asp, accessed in 2005. Supporters of a large-scale marine development program, however, found PSAC and the PSAC panel report too conservative. See Wenk (1972, 65–100). 73. On this episode, see Lambright (1985, 84–91). 74. York to Hornig, January 22, 1965, and attached, in OST, box 855, folder “PSAC-Title Folder 1965.” 75. Keeny to Hornig, February 1, 1965, in OST, box 855, folder “PSAC-Title Folder 1965.” 76. Seaborg, “Women and the Year 2000,” February 6, 1967, reprinted in Seaborg (1996, 211–220); Seaborg diary on February 7, 1967, in Seaborg (1989, v. 14, 168); Seaborg conversation with Wang, December 11, 1990. To his credit, Seaborg advocated science education and professional development of women, but that message was largely drowned out by the public fascination with his predictions of new gadgets. 77. David Allison, “The Science Brain Trust,” International Science and Technology, January 1965: 61–68, on 62.

398

Notes to Pages 247–251

78. John B. Clinton to Jack Valenti, March 3, 1966, in Johnson Library, Office File of John Macy, Box 270, folder “Hornig, Donald F. Hornig.” 79. Hornig to Johnson, January 16, 1969, in OST, box 846, folder “White House Pres. Vol. X 1968.” Hornig to McGeorge Bundy, October 16, 1966, and attached, in Hornig Papers, box 4, folder “Donald Hornig Chronological File September 1966.” 80. “Report by the Anti-Submarine Warfare Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, April 28, 1966,” in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10, document no. 124. See also “Editorial Notes,” ibid., document no. 99; Hornig to Johnson, December 14, 1965, and attached Hornig to McNamara, October 23, 1965, and March 13, 1964, all in DDRS. Clinton to Valenti, March 3, 1966. 81. See Seaborg (1987b). 82. PSAC to Johnson, May 16, 1967, in LBJ/WHCF, FG 721, box 40, folder “FG726 President’s Science Advisory Committee.” On the NPT, see Seaborg (1987b). 83. “President’s Science Advisory Committee,” p. 13, in LBJ/OSTH. 84. Bundy to Rusk, December 1, 1965, in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 33, document no. 158. 85. Lambright (1995, 146–147). 86. Hornig to Johnson, September 26, 1968, Hornig Papers, box 6, folder “Donald Hornig Chronological Files, July–September 1968”; Johnson to Hornig, October 11, 1968, LBJ/WHCF, box 85, folder “FG-11–8–1/H”; Divine, “Lyndon B. Johnson and the Politics of Space,” in Divine (1987, 246). See also Lambright (1985, 149–151); Lambright (1995, 203). 87. PSAC, “The Apollo Program,” January 10, 1966, reprinted as Appendix E in PSAC (1967a, 89–99); Purcell interview, June 9, 1992. 88. Goldberger comment in Franklin Institute (1978, 151). 89. PSAC, “Status Report . . . ,” September 10, 1965, DDRS; Purcell interview, June 9, 1992. 90. Hornig to Johnson, December 19, 1964, OST, box 844, folder “White House—Pres. vol III.” 91. PSAC (1967a, 5). 92. PSAC (1967a); Lambright (1985, 104–108, 141–151); Purcell interview, June 9, 1992. 93. Townes (1999, 147–151). 94. Lambright (1985, 146). 95. Purcell, for example, saw it as simply a fantastic engineering and organizational feat that came many years before its time. Purcell interview, June 9, 1992. 96. “Support of Basic and University Research,” LBJ/OSTH. 97. For a brief summary of the initiative, see Lambright (1985, 80–84). 98. David Z. Robinson interview, June 5, 1991. Robinson was a PSAC and OST staff member on science policy in the early 1960s who supported the initiative. Hornig to Johnson, December 19, 1964, in OST, box 844, folder “White House—Pres. Vol III”; Lambright (1985, 80–84).

Notes to Pages 251–255

399

99. Brooks interview, June 9, 1992. 100. Johnson to Hornig, January 18, 1967, in OST, box 845, folder “White House-President Vol. VIII.” 101. See Melosi (1987, 113–149). 102. Hornig to Moyers, May 29, 1964, in LBJ/OSTH, (2) of Reference Documents; Lambright (1985, 44–45). 103. Tukey to Johnson, November 9, 1964, and attached, in LBJ/OSTH, (2) of Reference Documents. 104. Johnson, “Special Message to Congress on Conservation and the Restoration of Natural Beauty,” February 8, 1965, accessed at www.presidency.ucsb.edu. 105. PSAC (1965); John Walsh, “Pollution . . . ,” Science 150 (November 19, 1965): 1006–1008. 106. PSAC (1965, 9). 107. Johnson, “Special Message . . . ,” February 8, 1965. 108. See, for example, Evert Clark, “Johnson Panel Urges ‘Polluter Tax,’” New York Times, November 7, 1965, 79. For a history of the debate over global warming, see Weart (2004) and its online version at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/. In 2006, amidst rising public concern about global warming, historian of science Naomi Oreskes brought PSAC’s 1965 report to the attention of the U.S. Congress. See Oreskes (2006). 109. Tukey interview, June 12, 1962. 110. Lambright (1985, 47); Melosi (1987, 127); Zuckerman (1987, 166–190), on 175. 111. PSAC (1967b); Luther J. Carter, “World Food Supply . . . ,” Science 156 ( June 23, 1967): 1578–1579. 112. NAS press release, March 3, 1967, in OST, box 655, folder “FCST—Quality of the Environment 1967.” 113. See Lambright (1985, 44–48). On the problems frustrating the ambitions of social scientists involved in the Great Society, see J. A. Smith (1991, 122–126). 114. Harold M. Schmeck, Jr., “Teller Lauds Gains . . . ,” New York Times, April 28, 1967, 22. 115. Stewart L. Udall Oral History Interview V by Joe B. Frantz, December 16, 1969, Internet Copy, p. 14, Johnson Library, at its Web site, www.lbjlib.utexas.edu. 116. Udall Oral History Interview V. 117. Johnson, “Remarks at the Smithson Bicentennial Celebration,” September 16, 1965, in PPP 1965, document no. 519. 118. Hornig, “Official Visit of Donald F. Hornig to the USSR, November 5–20, 1964,” December 9, 1964, in DDRS. 119. Piore, “Electronics Research and Technology in the USSR,” November 24, 1964, in DDRS. 120. Hornig, “Official Visit.”

400

Notes to Pages 255–258

121. Interview with Hornig by McComb, 35; Johnson, “Remarks to the Members of a Delegation . . . ,” December 15, 1964, PPP 1964, document no. 804. 122. Hornig interview, March 14, 1991. The program is currently administered by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. See http://www3.niaid.nih.gov/ about/organization/odoffices/oga/usjapan/, accessed in 2005. 123. Hornig to Johnson, May 18, 1965, in Busby Papers, box 19, folder “Memos for: Dr. Hornig”; Interview with Hornig by McComb, 35–36. 124. At Johnson’s request, Korea agreed to send a combat division to South Vietnam. See “Memorandum of Conversation,” May 17, 1965, in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 24, document no. 48, and “Editorial Notes,” ibid., document no. 58. See also Kim and Leslie (1998, 159–160). 125. Hornig to Johnson, June 29, 1965, and White House press release, in Johnson Library, LBJ Diary Backup, box 19, folder “July 1, 1965”; Hornig to Johnson, August 4, 1965, in OST, box 642, folder “WH Pres”; Hornig interview, March 14–15, 1991; Philip Boffey, “Korean Science Institute,” Science 167 (March 6, 1970): 1354–1357; Lambright (1985, 95–99). 126. Kim and Leslie (1998). For a discussion of the politics of development and technology transfer, see also Moon (1998). 127. Busby to Hornig, July 30, 1965, in Busby Papers, box 19, folder “Memos for: Dr. Hornig.” 128. Hornig to Johnson, August 23, 1967, in OST, box 845, folder “White House—President, vol. VIII”; John Walsh, “Taiwan . . . ,” Science 170 (November 20, 1970): 835–839. 129. Hornig to Walt Rostow, October 21, 1966, and attached, “Memorandum of Conversation, September 8, 1966,” in LBJ/NSF, box 42, folder “Off. Science and Technology v. 1 [1966].” 130. On the history of the committee, see Kathlin Smith, “The Role of Scientists in Normalizing U.S.–China Relations, 1965–1979,” in de Cerreño and Keynan (1998, 114–136); and Z. Wang (1999). 131. Hornig, “The President’s Need for Science Advice,” 49; Hornig interview, March 14–15, 1991.

Chapter 15 — PSAC, the Vietnam War, and the ABM Debate, 1964–1968 1. Hornig, “The President’s Need for Science Advice,” 51. See also Elinor Langer, “Scientists and Engineers for L.B.J.: A War and Three Years Later,” Science 157 (September 27, 1967): 1533–1536. 2. Hornig interview, March 14, 1991. 3. Langer, “National Teach-in . . . ,” Science 148 (May 21, 1965): 1075–1077. 4. Langer, “After the Pentagon Papers: Talk with Kistiakowsky and Wiesner,” Science 174 (November 26, 1971): 923–928, on 924; Goldstein (1992, 239–240).

Notes to Pages 259–262

401

5. Kistiakowsky to Johnson, January 13, 1966, in Kistiakowsky Papers, Vietnam series, folder “Vietnam, 1963–1968 [2 of 2].” 6. Ibid. 7. Langer, “After the Pentagon Papers,” 926. 8. The Pentagon Papers, Gravel edition (Boston: Beacon Press, n.d.), v. 4, 112–115. See also Herken (1992, 151–156). 9. OST, “Activities Related to Vietnam,” undated, in LBJ/OSTH. 10. Garwin interview, July 18, 1992. See also Johnson (2000, 256–257). 11. Herken (1992, 152–153). 12. Langer, “After the Pentagon Papers,” 926. 13. Pentagon Papers, v. 4, 116. 14. Sheehan et al. (1971, 494–496); Pentagon Papers, v. 4, 112–124; Goldstein (1992, 243– 244). See also P. Dickson (1976). 15. Pentagon Papers, v. 4, 222. 16. Ibid., 130. 17. Robert N. Ginzburgh to Rostow, January 13, 1968, and attached memo on “Jason Study,” same date, in DDRS. 18. Pentagon Papers, v. 4, 127–129; Twomey (1999, 253–254). 19. Zachariasen to Kistiakowsky, June 7, 1968, in Kistiakowsky Papers, Vietnam Series, HUGFP 94.18 “Defense Communications Planning Group.” See also Twomey (1999, 254). Twomey mistook Zachariasen for Zacharias. 20. Langer, “After the Pentagon Papers,” 926. 21. Interview with Spock by Gittinger. 22. Kistiakowsky interview with Eugene Skolnikoff, April 28, 1967, in NASA History Office collection. 23. “Vietnam . . . ,” Science 151 ( January 7, 1966): 55. 24. Szent-Györgyi, “Scientist Opposes War,” New York Times, March 31, 1965, 38. 25. “Scientists Protest Viet Crop Destruction,” Science 151 ( January 21, 1966): 309. 26. “22 Scientists Bid Johnson Bar Chemical Weapons in Vietnam,” New York Times, September 20, 1967, 1; Langer, “CBW, Vietnam Evoke Scientists’ Concern,” Science 155 ( January 20, 1967): 302. 27. Szent-Györgyi, “Vietnam,” Science 157 (October 6, 1967): 47. 28. “Points of View,” Science 158 (October 20, 1967): 358. 29. S. P. R. Rose, “Visa Barriers,” Science 154 (December 16, 1966): 1396, 1398, on 1396. 30. Hornig to Johnson, May 1, 1968, in LBJ/NSF, box 42, folder “Office of Science and Technology, vol. 1 [1968].” 31. OST, “President’s Science Advisory Committee,” undated, 5, in LBJ/OSTH; Beckler to Hornig, January 4, 1967, in OST, box 856, folder “PSAC—Title Folder Vol. III.”

402

Notes to Pages 262–264

32. “Memorandum for the Record,” May 27, 1966, in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10, document no. 129. 33. Greenberg, “LBJ at Princeton . . . ,” Science 152 (May 27, 1967): 1223–1225, on 1224. On LBJ and Vietnam in 1964, see, for example, Beschloss (1997, 363–370); Logevall (1999, 297–299). 34. FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10, document no. 129. 35. Nelson, “LBJ Meets Professors on Vietnam,” Science 158 (October 13, 1967): 231; Pound (2000). 36. McPherson to Johnson, May 4, 1967 and May 17, 1967, both in Johnson Library, LBJ Diary Backup collection, box 65, folder “May 16, 1967”; Bryce Nelson, “Communication Gap . . . ,” Science 157 ( July 14, 1967): 173–176; Max Frankel, “Intellectuals to Johnson: War’s the Rub,” New York Times, May 21, 1967, 1, 15. 37. Hornig to Johnson, May 29, 1967, in LBJ/WHCF, EX FG 11–9, box 122, folder “FG11–9 2/1/67–12/31/67.” 38. See, for example, Seaborg’s diary entries on December 10, 1965, in Seaborg (1989, v. 11, 677–681), and on December 27, 1966, in Seaborg (1989, v. 13, 674–680). 39. Hornig, “The President’s Need for Science Advice,” 47; Hornig to Johnson, March 23, 1967, in LBJ/WHCF, FG 11–8–1/H, box 85, folder “FG 11–8–1/H”; Hornig interview with Wang. 40. Langer, “Vietnam . . . ,” Science 150 (December 17, 1965): 1567–1570; Hornig to Califano, December 6, 1967, in LBJ/WHCF, EX FG 11–9, box 122, folder “FG 11–9 2/1/67–12/31/67.” 41. Greenberg, “Advisory Unit Drops War Protestor,” Science 157 ( July 28, 1967): 409; Hornig to Jim Jones, April 25, 1968, and Hornig to Larry Temple, May 2, 1968, OST, box 826, folder “White House—Title Folder Vol. IV 1968.” 42. Hornig to Johnson, December 9, 1966, and attached Hornig to Johnson, December 8, 1966, both in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10, document no. 154. On the Joint Chiefs of Staff view, see McNamara to Rusk, November 17, 1966, in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10. document no. 145. 43. Harold Schmeck, Jr., “U.S. Review Urged on Chemical War,” New York Times, February 15, 1967, 1. 44. Bromley Smith to Johnson, February 25, 1967, in DDRS. 45. Hornig to Johnson, February 14, 1967, in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10. document no. 170; “Editorial Note,” ibid., document no. 173; McNamara to Johnson, May 3, 1967, ibid., document no. 178. See also Herken (1992, 157). 46. Primack and von Hippel (1974, chapter 11). On the ecologists, see Kwa (1987, 416). 47. Hornig to Johnson, February 2, 1967, in OST, box 845, folder “White House—President vol. VIII.” See Townes (1999, 157–158). 48. Johnson, “Remarks to Members of the American Physical Society,” April 26, 1967, PPP 1967, document no. 192. See also “Johnson Affirms Desire for Peace,” New York Times, April 27, 1967, 1; Townes (1999, 158).

Notes to Pages 264–269

403

49. Johnson to Hornig, May 1, 1967, LBJ/WHCF, EX FG 11–9, box 122, folder “FG 11–9 2/1/67–12/31/67”; “The ‘No-Strategy’ War,” New York Times, April 30, 1967, 198. 50. See Raymond Bowers to Hornig, April 27, 1967, in OST, box 709, folder “Science Policy 1967.” 51. “Johnson Affirms Desire for Peace,” New York Times, April 27, 1967, 1; Townes (1999, 158). 52. Marti Mueller, “APS to Stay Aloof from Politics,” Science 161 ( July 26, 1968): 340. 53. Nelson, “Micro-Revolt of the Microbiologists over Detrick Ties,” Science 160 (May 24, 1968): 862. 54. “Scientists’ Views on Vietnam,” Science 158 (October 27, 1967): 438, 440–441. 55. York (1995, 22). 56. Hornig to Johnson, March 12, 1965, and attached “Status Report . . . ,” March 8, 1965, in DDRS. Chaired first by Richard Garwin and later by Charles Slichter, the panel had as its technical assistant Vincent McRae, the only African American scientist working on the OST staff. It also had William McLean of Sidewinder fame among its members. On McRae, see “Breadth of Experience Is Hallmark of OST Staff,” Chemical and Engineering News, October 19, 1964, 85–87, on 86. 57. OST, “Activities Related to Vietnam,” undated, in LBJ/OSTH, pp. 5–10, and PSAC Ad Hoc Vietnam Group to Hornig, undated but ca. early 1968, in DDRS. 58. Herring (1996, 194). 59. OST, “Activities Related to Vietnam,” 7. 60. Hornig to Johnson on “Night Vision Equipment for Vietnam,” January 3, 1966, and PSAC Ad Hoc Vietnam Group to Hornig, undated. 61. Quoted in Herken (1992, 156). 62. “Excerpts from Letter from Dr. Drell to Dr. Hornig, December 30, 1967,” Kistiakowsky Papers, box 5, folder “PSAC -1971 Members.” 63. Quoted in Herken (1992, 156–157). 64. “Excerpt from Letter from Dr. Drell.” 65. PSAC Ad Hoc Vietnam Group to Hornig, undated. 66. Ibid., p. 22. About forty years later, as the United States suffered considerable casualties from “improvised explosive devices” in the war in Iraq, it was clear that such problems were far from being solved. 67. McNamara, “Draft Memorandum from Secretary of Defense to President Johnson,” December 1, 1967, in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10, document no. 195. 68. Interview with Baldeschwieler by David C. Brock and Arthur Daemmrich, June 13, 2003, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia. 69. Panofsky to Hornig, February 26, 1968, in Panofsky Papers, box G026. 70. Ibid. 71. Panofsky interview, March 5, 1992.

404

Notes to Pages 269–274

72. Transcript of a conference on December 16, 1983, p. 35, attached to Jack Goldstein to Rabi, January 17, 1984, in Rabi Papers, box 71, folder “Scientists and Citizens.” 73. Greenberg, “Kistiakowsky Cuts Defense Department Ties over Vietnam,” Science 159 (February 16, 1968): 958; Evert Clark, “Top Scientist Cuts All Links to War,” New York Times, March 1, 1968, 2. 74. Langer, “After the Pentagon Papers,” 927. 75. See, for example, Brown et al. (1972) and Charles Schwartz, “The Corporate Connection,” BAS 31 (October 1975): 15–19. 76. “Scientists Organize to Advise McCarthy,” New York Times, May 13, 1968, 40. 77. Langer, “After the Pentagon Papers,” 926. The text of the telegram is printed in Killian (1977, 240). An earlier Jason study had sounded a similar warning. See Freeman Dyson et al., Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Southeast Asia, Study S-266, Jason Division, Institute for Defense Analysis, March 1967, released at the Freedom of Information Act request of Nautilus Institute and available online at http://www.nautilus.org/VietnamFOIA/report/dyson67.pdf. See also Hayes and Tannenwald (2003). 78. Hornig, “The President’s Need for Science Advice,” 49; Kevles (1997, 405–406). 79. Hornig to Johnson, September 16, 1966 and May 20, 1967, and to Rostow, May 23, 1967, all in DDRS. 80. Rostow to Johnson, September 17, 1966, DDRS; Prados (1998, 221–223). 81. Sullivan to Rusk, May 29, 1967, in DDRS. See also Prados (1998, 221). 82. Foster to Hornig, December 7, 1967, in LBJ/NSF, box 42, folder “Office of Science and Technology vol. 1 [1967].” 83. “Status Report on Activities of the Office of Science and Technology and Its Staff, July 12, 1966,” in DDRS. 84. Hornig to Johnson, March 7, 1968, in LBJ/NSF, box 42, folder “Office of Science and Technology, vol. 1 [1968].” 85. OST, “Activities Related to Vietnam”; Herken (1992, 156–159). 86. Hornig interview, March 14–15, 1991. 87. Hornig to Johnson, May 6, 1968, and May 18, 1968, both in DDRS. 88. Rostow to Johnson, May 6, 1968, in LBJ/NSF, box 42, folder “Office of Science and Technology, vol. 1 [1968].” 89. Seitz interview, June 4, 1991. 90. PSAC Strategic Military Panel, “Report on the Proposed Army-BTL Ballistic Missile Defense System,” October 29, 1965, in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10, document no. 101. The other panel members were Lewis Branscomb, Sidney Drell, Jack Ruina, Kenneth Watson, and Keeny. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 93. Editor’s note to document no. 101, in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10.

Notes to Pages 274–278

405

94. See Luther J. Carter, “Anti-Missile Defense . . . ,” Science 150 (December 24, 1965): 1696–1699. 95. Editor’s note to document no. 101, in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10; Joint Chiefs of Staff to McNamara, November 6, 1965, in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10, document no. 104. 96. Jackson quoted in B. T. Feld, “To Deploy: An Editorial Opinion,” BAS 23, no. 10 (December 1967): 19. 97. McNamara to Foster, October 22, 1965, in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10, document no. 100. 98. Draft Memorandum from McNamara to Johnson, November 1, 1965, in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10, document no. 103. 99. Robert B. Semples Jr., “McNamara Hints Soviets Deploy Antimissile Net,” New York Times, November 11, 1966, 1. 100. Luther J. Carter, “Anti-Missile Missile . . . ,” Science 154 (November 25, 1966): 985–987. 101. “Draft Notes of Meeting,” December 6, 1966, in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10, document no. 150. 102. Footnote 8 to Rostow, “Record of Meeting with the President, January 4, 1967,” January 6, 1967, in DDRS. 103. The following account of the meeting is based on Rostow, “Record of Meeting with the President, January 4, 1967.” McNamara also invited Seaborg, but Seaborg could not attend because of a prescheduled foreign trip. See Seaborg diary note of December 22, 1966, in Seaborg (1989, v. 13, 664), and of January 3, 1967 (v. 14, 14). See also Cahn (1974). 104. Hornig had earlier expressed these views in a memorandum to Rostow, December 10, 1966, in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10, document no. 156. Knowing of Hornig’s views, McNamara had sent an Air Force jet to pick up the science adviser from Puerto Rico, where he was vacationing, for the White House meeting. Hornig to Wang, February 11, 2008. 105. On York’s public critique of the “fallacy of the last move,” see York (1970, 210–212). Herken (1992, 161–162) gives a slightly different version of the meeting. 106. On the science advisers’ reactions to the meeting, see Herken (1992, 162). 107. “Antinuclear Unit Assailed by Twining,” New York Times, February 23, 1967, 28. 108. Oral history interview with McNamara by Rostow, January 8, 1975, in Johnson Library, available online at www.lbjl.utexas.edu, accessed in 2005. 109. Luther J. Carter, “Anti-Missile Missile . . . ,” Science 154 (November 25, 1966): 987. 110. The following account is based on the transcript of the telephone conversation in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10, document no. 167, “Editorial Note.” 111. For example, in 1964–1965, Johnson and McNamara, with Hornig’s support, were able to reduce the Navy’s request for attack submarines from six to four, but Congress restored the other two. Hornig to Johnson, December 14, 1965, in DDRS online database. 112. On Glassboro, see Shapley (1993, 392–394), and Seaborg (1987a, 423–430). 113. Now commercially marketed as Mao’s Little Red Video, MPI Home Video, 1995, available at www.amazon.com.

406

Notes to Pages 278–282

114. Interview with McNamara by Rostow, January 8, 1975, Johnson Library, available at its website www.lbjlibutexas.edu; Newhouse (1989, 205). 115. See, for example, Hornig, “Memorandum of Conversation, October 5, 1967 with Senator Joseph Clark,” October 5, 1967, in LBJ/NSF, box 42, folder “Office of Science and Technology, vol. 1 [1967].” 116. Joint Chiefs of Staff to McNamara, July 27, 1967, in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10, document no. 184. 117. Rostow to Johnson, August 2, 1967, in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10, document no. 185. 118. Rostow to Johnson, August 9, 1967, in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10, document no. 187. 119. On the debate over McNamara’s speech, see “Editorial Note,” in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10, document no. 192. 120. For excerpts of memoranda that Keeny sent to Rostow in this period, see “Editorial Note,” in FRUS, 1964–1968, v. 10, document no. 192. 121. “Text of McNamara Speech on Anti-Chinese Missile Defense and U.S. Nuclear Strategy,” New York Times, September 19, 1967, 18–19, on 18. 122. Ibid., 19. 123. “U.S. Missile Defense Is Renamed Sentinel,” New York Times, November 5, 1967, 84. 124. “Genie out of the Bottle,” New York Times, September 20, 1967, 46; Herken (1992, 160–164). 125. “Eisenhower Gives Antimissile View,” New York Times, January 16, 1968, 13. 126. Cahn (1974, 50). 127. Wiesner, “ABM,” in Rosenblith (2003, 299–300). 128. Cahn (1974, 50–51). 129. Bethe, “The Case for Ending Nuclear Test” (1960), and “Science and Morality” (1962), reprinted in Bethe (1991, 37–53, 175–182). 130. Wiesner, “The Case against an Antiballistic Missile System,” Look 31 (November 28, 1967): 25–27. See also his “ABM,” 300–304. 131. David Bird, “Nuclear Scientists Disagree on Missile Defense,” New York Times, November 15, 1967, 24. See also Weinberg (1994, 258–259). 132. Wiesner, “The Case against an Antiballistic Missile System,” 26. 133. Garwin and Bethe, “Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems,” Scientific American 218, no. 3 (March 1968): 21–31, reprinted in Bethe (1991, 71–86). 134. Ibid. 135. Cahn (1974, 71). 136. Quoted in Cahn (1974, 73). See also Nelson, “ABM,” Science 162 (December 20, 1968): 1374–1375. 137. Cahn (1974, 49–51); Hornig interview, March 14–15, 1991. 138. “A Point of View,” Science 161 ( July 19, 1968): 248. 139. “Support of Basic and University Research,” LBJ/OSTH.

Notes to Pages 282–285

407

140. Greenberg, “Money for Science . . . ,” Science 146 (October 23, 1964): 508–509. 141. National Science Foundation (1971, 212, 218). 142. McNamara’s statement is excerpted in “A Point of View,” Science 159 (February 9, 1968): 609. 143. John Walsh, “Defense Research . . . ,” Science 161 (September 20, 1968): 1225–1226. 144. “Pentagon Policy on War Dissent,” Science 161 (September 27, 1968): 1330. 145. Nelson, “Defense Funds . . . ,” Science 162 (October 18, 1968): 337–340. 146. Hornig to Mansfield, September 25, 1968, in Hornig Papers, box 6, folder “Donald F. Hornig Chronological File July—September, 1968.” 147. Nelson, “Defense Funds.” 148. Hornig to Johnson, and to Charles Zwick, BOB director, both dated October 3, 1968, in Hornig Papers, box 6, folder “Donald Hornig Chronological File, October— December 1968”; Hornig to Johnson, December 2, 1968, and attached PSAC statement, in OST, box 846, folder “White House—Pres. Vol. X 1968.” 149. Boffey, “NSF Budget . . . ,” Science 163 ( January 24, 1969): 369; Greenberg, “The Hornig Years . . . ,” Science 163 ( January 31, 1969): 453–458. 150. Price, “Purist and Politicians,” Science 163 ( January 3, 1969): 25–31. 151. Hornig, “Remarks . . . at the Symposium on Review of U.S. Science Policy, Meeting of the [AAAS],” December 29, 1968, in Hornig Papers, box 8, folder “Address and remarks by Donald Hornig 1968.” Another advocate for a Department of Science so that all civilian sciences were represented and coordinated in the government was science writer Ralph Lapp. See Lapp (1965, 203–210). 152. Philip M. Boffey, “Scientists and Engineers for McCarthy,” Science 158 (December 22, 1967): 1554. 153. Boffey, “McCarthy Takes Lead in Lining up Support of Scientists,” Science 160 (May 24, 1968): 867. 154. Wiesner, “ABM,” 307–308, in Rosenblith (2003). The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, however, derailed the talks. Ibid. 155. Greenberg, “Scientists in Politics . . . ,” Science 161 ( July 12, 1968): 145–146. 156. Nelson, “Humphrey . . . ,” Science 162 (October 4, 1968): 100–104. 157. Philip M. Boffey, “Scientists in Politics . . . ,” Science 162 (October 11, 1968): 244–245. Besides Bethe and Wiesner, former and current PSAC members in the Humphrey camp included Detlev Bronk, Marvin Goldberger, Gordon MacDonald, William McElroy, Colin MacLeod, Wolfgang Panofsky, E. R. Piore, Frank Press, Charles Townes, and Jerold Zacharias. Even though Garwin was listed as a Humphrey supporter in this report, he actually voted for Nixon because he believed in Nixon’s promise to end the war in Vietnam. It’s not clear whether he changed his mind, the Humphrey staff made a mistake, or, as Wiesner explained, Garwin was one of those who agreed to provide advice to Humphrey not on a partisan basis but because they believed that “experts should make their advice freely available when asked.” Wiesner, “Candidates’ Experts,” New York Times, August 28, 1968, 46.

408

Notes to Pages 285–289

158. Boffey, “Committee of Scientists and Engineers Will Back Nixon,” Science 162 (October 4, 1968): 103. 159. Boffey, “Scientists in Politics,” 245. 160. Ibid., 244–245. 161. On counterculture’s criticism of science, see, for example, Roszak (1973). For discussions of its impact on science, see essays in Holton (1976).

Chapter 16 — The Politics of Technological Dissent under Nixon, 1969–1973 1. John Walsh, “Richard M. Nixon,” Science 162 (October 18, 1968): 335–337; Philip Abelson, “Lee DuBridge,” editorial, Science 162 (December 27, 1968): 1435; Nelson, “Science Adviser DuBridge . . . ,” Science 163 (February 21, 1969): 794–795. 2. “Security System Hit,” Science 126 (December 20, 1957): 1280; J. Wang (1992, 266); “Committees of Scholars Support Candidates,” Science 132 (October 28, 1960): 1238. 3. Seaborg (1993, 6). 4. Kistiakowsky (1976, 369). 5. Victor McElheny, “Adviser’s Role for Libby Is Opposed by Scientists,” Washington Post, November 17, 1968; Victor Cohn, “Libby Seems Sure of Science Post,” Washington Post, November 26, 1968; Cohn, “DuBridge to Advise on Science,” Washington Post, December 3, 1968. 6. Carroll Kilpatrick, “4 Aides Appointed by Nixon,” Washington Post, December 4, 1968. 7. Haldeman Notes, fiche 1, 43 ( January 24, 1969). 8. Seaborg (1993, 17). 9. Walsh, “NSF,” Science 163 (February 14, 1969): 660; Nelson, “Science Adviser DuBridge.” 10. On Nixon and the EPA, see Hoff (1994, 21–27). On Meselson and chemical and biological warfare, see Primack and von Hippel (1974, 143–164); Nixon, “Statement on Chemical and Biological Defense Policies and Programs,” November 25, 1969, PPP 1969, document no. 461. 11. Nelson, “Lee DuBridge Passes Senate Test,” Science 163 (February 14, 1969): 657. 12. For a quick overview of the Santa Barbara oil spill, see Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network, “Santa Barbara’s Oil Spill of 1969,” available at http://www.silcom. com/~sbwcn/spill.shtml. 13. Stewart L. Udall Oral History Interview III, April 18, 1969, by Joe B. Frantz, Internet Copy, p. 26, Johnson Library, available at http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives. hom/oralhistory.hom/UDALL/Uda1103.pdf. 14. Nixon, “Statement Announcing the Creation of the Environmental Quality Council and the Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Environmental Quality,” May 29, 1969, PPP 1969, document no. 221.

Notes to Pages 289–292

409

15. Nelson, “Science Adviser DuBridge Makes His Press Debut.” 16. Ibid. 17. White House news conference transcript, March 17, 1969, in OST, box 917, folder “Missiles (ABM) 1969”; DuBridge to Nixon, April 2, 1969, in Nixon FG 6–9, box 1, folder “[EX] FG 6–9 Office of Science and Technology.” 18. See Herken (1992, 168–170). 19. Walsh, “ABM,” Science 163 (March 21, 1969): 1309–1311; Walsh, “Arms and the Scientists,” Science 163 (March 28, 1969): 1436–1438; Anne Hessing Cahn, “American Scientists and the ABM: A Case Study in Controversy,” in Teich (1974, 41–120). 20. See U.S. Congress (1969). 21. Walter Sullivan, “Physicists Enter Debate over ABM,” New York Times, April 30, 1969, 13. Nelson, “ABM,” Science 164 (May 9, 1969): 654–656. 22. Nelson, “Scientists Plan Research Strike at MIT on 4 March,” Science 163 ( January 24, 1969): 373; Nelson, “M.I.T.’s March 4,” Science 163 (March 14, 1969): 1175–1178. 23. York (1970, 199). 24. Nelson, “ABM,” 654–656. 25. York (1987, 237–243). 26. U.S. Congress (1969, part I, 307, 325–347); Newhouse (1973, 155–156). The episode of airport science advice later found its way into a column of the syndicated political satirist Art Buchwald, “Pentagon Has a Winner,” Los Angeles Times, April 3, 1969, B7. 27. U.S. Congress (1969, part II, 561). 28. Elliot Carlson, “Classified Research Comes under Criticism at More Universities,” Wall Street Journal, October 25, 1967, 1; Eisenhower to Alfred Gruenther, November 6, 1967, in Eisenhower PPF, Special Names, box 6, folder “Gruenther, Alfred, march 1967 (1).” 29. Andrew Hamilton, “Basic Research,” Science 166 (November 14, 1969): 849; Walsh, “Pentagon Promises to Observe Congressional Curbs on Research,” Science 166 (December 12, 1969): 1386–1388. 30. Stine (1986, 62–63). 31. See Seaborg diary of December 9, 1969, in Seaborg (1989, v. 20, 626). 32. Haldeman Notes. 33. Ibid., fiche 2, 47 (March 11, 1969). 34. Ezrahi (1990, 266). 35. Haldeman diary for March 13, 1969, in Haldeman (1994, 39–40), on 39. 36. Haldeman Notes, fiche 2, 63 (March 19, 1969). 37. DuBridge to Nixon, March 17, 1969; White House news conference, March 17, 1969, both in OST, box 917, folder “Missiles (ABM), 1969”; Herken (1992, 169). Seaborg at the AEC ignored White House pressure for a formal statement for Safeguard, but had to say he supported it in the context of arms control when cornered by a reporter. See Seaborg (1993, 34), and Seaborg diary for June 14, 1969, in Seaborg (1989, v. 19, 278–281), on 280.

410

Notes to Pages 292–295

38. Long, “Strategic Balance and the ABM,” BAS 24, no. 10 (December 1968): 2–5, on 4. 39. Philip Boffey, “Nixon and NSF,” Science 164 (April 18, 1969): 283–284. 40. Robert Semple, Jr., “White House Reported to Reject ABM Opponent as Science Head,” New York Times, April 17, 1969, 1, 22; “The President’s News Conference,” April 18, 1969, in PPP 1969, document no. 156. 41. Boffey and Nelson, “NSF Director,” Science 164 (April 25, 1969): 406–411. 42. “Other Reactions in the Scientific Community,” BAS 25, no. 6 ( June 1969): 47–48. 43. Boffey and Nelson, “NSF Director”; Harold M. Schmeck, Jr., “Science Foundation Board Indicates Nixon Decision on Director Hurt Morale and Lessened Prestige,” New York Times, April 22, 1969, 13. 44. Schmeck, “Science Foundation”; Boffey and Nelson, “NSF Director.” DuBridge, however, credited Nixon’s national security adviser Henry Kissinger for convincing Nixon to reverse his position on Long. See Seaborg diary entry of April 30, 1969, in Seaborg (1989, v. 18, 544). 45. Boffey and Nelson, “NSF Director,” Science 164 (May 2, 1969): 532–534. 46. Rabinowitch, “Political Criteria for Non-Political Jobs,” BAS 25, no. 6 ( June 1969): 2–3, 46, on 2. 47. Haldeman Notes, fiche 3, 46 (April 23, 1969). 48. Merle A. Tuve, “National Academy of Sciences Annual Meeting 1969,” April 29, 1969, in Haworth Papers, box 31, folder “NAS Minutes of Meetings ’69-’71.” Seaborg diary note of April 29, 1969, in Seaborg (1989, v. 18, 523). 49. Haldeman Notes, fiche 3, 36 (April 21, 1969). 50. Wiesner, “ABM,” in Rosenblith (2003, 293–326), on 310. 51. Newhouse (1973, 157); York (1987, 242–243); Yanarella (1977, 185–186). 52. Wiesner, “ABM,” 326. 53. Poster in author’s collection, courtesy of Lawrence Badash. See also Wittner (1997, 52–53). 54. Haldeman diary for May 14, 1969, Haldeman (1994, 166). 55. Ambrose (1989, 271). 56. Haldeman Notes, fiche 3, 33 (April 21, 1969). 57. Ibid., fiche 6, 87–88 ( July 21, 1969). 58. Ibid., fiche 15, 49 (February 9, 1970). 59. Ibid., fiche 6, 87–88 ( July 21, 1969). 60. Garwin interview, July 18, 1992, and Panofsky interview, March 5, 1992. Hersh (1983, 150–155). Seaborg also reported being denied access to Nixon and removed from arms control. Seaborg (1993, 93–97). On the uneasiness between Kissinger’s and DuBridge’s offices, see DuBridge to Kissinger, December 1, 1969, in David Files, box 33, folder “White House-PSAC-Title Folder [1969–70] [1 of 1],” and Robert M. Behr to Kissinger, January 19, 1970, Nixon FG 209, box 1, folder “[EX] FG 209 President’s Science Advisory Committee 1/1/70–12/31/70.”

Notes to Pages 295–297

411

61. Haldeman Notes, fiche 10, 8 (October 1, 1969). 62. Herken (1992, 175). 63. Ambrose (1989, 472). 64. In a visit to a class at the University of California, Santa Barbara, after he left the White House, DuBridge was asked by students whether the president had paid attention to his science advice and DuBridge replied that he did. Private conversation with Lawrence Badash, November 2004. 65. See Haldeman Notes, fiche 14, 42 ( January 15, 1970); fiche 15, 49 and 51 (February 9, 1970); fiche 18, 17 (March 16, 1970); fiche 18, 34 (March 18, 1970). 66. Roy L. Ash to Nixon, January 20, 1970, in Ehrlichman Files, box 32, folder “[Executive Office Reorganization, 1 of 5].” On December 1, 1972, Nixon asked his staff: “What have we done to clean up the government? . . . Establish a Think Tank in every Department. Put all disloyals in it. Desks—no walls. [Let them work on] monographs on longrange planning.” Ehrlichman Notes, fiche 56, F12. 67. Haldeman Notes, fiche 15, 49–51 (February 9, 1970), and Ehrlichman Notes, fiche 9, B13 ( January 10, 1970). 68. Haldeman Notes, fiche 18, 17 (March 16, 1970). 69. Ibid., fiche 18, 34 (March 18, 1970). 70. Ibid., fiche 24, 69 ( June 9, 1970); A. Hunter Dupree, “A Historian’s View of Advice to the President on Science: Retrospect and Prescription,” in Golden (1980, 188–189). 71. Haldeman Notes, fiche 25, 14 ( June 15, 1970). 72. Nixon, “Address at the Air Force Academy Commencement Exercises in Colorado Springs, Colorado, June 4, 1969,” in PPP 1969, 432–437. 73. Haldeman Notes, fiche 4, 8 (May 2, 1969). 74. See Hornig to McNamara, November 1, 1966, in OST, box 583, folder “Low Energy Physics 1966 [sic].” See also Horwitch (1982, 136–138). 75. Garwin, “Views on Science Advice for the US Government,” Technology in Society 14 (1992): 75–89. 76. “Final Report of the [OST] Ad Hoc Supersonic Transport Review Committee,” March 30, 1969, in OST, box 940, folder “Supersonic Transport 1969”; DuBridge to Nixon, April 2, 1969 in Nixon FG 6–9, box 1, folder “[EX] FG 6–9 Office of Science and Technology”; DuBridge to Nixon, April 15, 1969, in Nixon FG 209, box 1, folder “[EX] FG 209 President’s Science Advisory Committee -12/31/69.” 77. Horwitch (1982, 271). 78. Ehrlichman Notes, fiche 26, D1 ( January 19, 1971). 79. On the “War on Cancer” and Apollo, see Beckler, “Meeting of PSAC with the President, February 23, 1971,” in David Files, box 33, folder “White House-PSAC-Title Folder vol. II 1971.” 80. After the election, Garwin became disappointed by the failure of the Nixon administration to end the war. Garwin interview, July 18, 1992. See also Garwin’s two letters in Saturday Review in its October 23, 1972 and November 25, 1972 issues.

412

Notes to Pages 297–301

81. Garwin first testified in Congress against the SST on May 7, 1970. “Rep. Reuss Assails Superjet as Peril to the Environment,” New York Times, May 8, 1970, 37. See also Garwin, “Presidential Science Advising,” in Golden (1980, 115–218); Primack and von Hippel (1974, 10–29). 82. Primack and von Hippel (1974, 46); Horwitch (1982, 325). 83. See Daniel S. Greenberg, “David and Indifference,” Saturday Review / Science 55 (September 30, 1972): 41–43. 84. The quote is from Ehrlichman Notes, fiche 23, A8 (December 5, 1970). 85. Garwin interview, July 18, 1992. See also Garwin, “Presidential Science Advising”; Garwin, “Views on Science Advice for the US Government,” Technology in Society, 14 (1992): 75–89. Herken (1992, 177–180). 86. Purcell interview by Katherine R. Sopka, June 8 and 14, 1977, p. 51, in AIP-CHP. 87. Westheimer to DuBridge, May 20, 1970, in David Files, box 33, folder “White House-PSAC-Title Folder [1969–70] [3 of 3].” 88. Ibid. 89. DuBridge to Westheimer, May 28, 1970, in David Files, box 33, folder “White House-PSAC-Title Folder [1969–70] [3 of 3].” 90. Greenberg, “Nixon’s Science Adviser,” Science 170 (October 23, 1970): 417–419. 91. Peter M. Flanigan, “Addendum to Agenda and Brief for Dr. David’s Swearing-in . . . September 14, 1970,” September 11, 1970, in Nixon FG 6–9, box 1, folder “[EX] FG 6–9/A [1969–70].” 92. Haldeman Notes, fiche 31, 94 (September 15, 1970). 93. Beckler, “Notes [on] PSAC Meeting with the President, September 14, 1970,” in Rabi Papers, box 45, folder “PSAC Meetings, Agenda and Minutes, 1967–72 and Undated.” See also Simon (1991, 299–301). 94. On “analogizing” see Neustadt and May (1986). 95. Beckler, “Meeting of PSAC with the President, February 23, 1971,” in David Files, box 33, folder “White House-PSAC-Title Folder vol. II 1971.” 96. Ehrlichman Notes, fiche 54, B6 (September 20, 1972). 97. Haldeman Notes, fiche 50, 70 ( June 2, 1971). Deborah Shapley, “Wakeline to Leave,” Science 176 ( June 23, 1972): 1311. 98. Ehrlichman Notes, fiche 32, B9 (May 13, 1971). 99. Jon Huntsman to Shultz, Ehrlichman, and Kissinger, re: “MIT Subsidy Cut,” October 26, 1971, in BOB, series 69.1, 1970–72, box 119, folder “R7–1.” 100. Flanigan to the President’s Staff Secretary, re: “ . . . Dr. Teller,” September 30, 1970, in Nixon FG 209, box 1, folder “[EX] FG 209 President’s Science Advisory Committee 1/1/70–12/31/70].” 101. DuBridge to Nixon, April 9, 1969, in Nixon FG 209, box 1, folder “President’s Science Advisory Committee, 1/1/71-.”

Notes to Pages 301–304

413

102. Edward Teller, “The Future Role of the President’s Science Adviser,” in Badash (1976). 103. On technology initiatives, see Nicholas Wade, “Nixon’s New Economic Policy,” Science 173 (August 27, 1971): 794–796. On Nixon’s message, see Wells (1976, part 2, 649– 650). On David and SST, see Primack and von Hippel (1974, 21). 104. Nixon meeting with David and others, February 22, 1971, National Archives, Nixon Presidential Materials, audio tape no. E455C (122:04), available at www.white housetapes.org; Ehrlichman Notes, fiche 27, A4, A10 (February 8, 1971), fiche 28, A8–9 (February 22, 1971). 105. Nixon to Erhlichman, February 8, 1971, in Erhlichman Notes, fiche 27, A10. 106. Boffey, “Unemployment,” Science 171 (March 12, 1971): 985–987; Shapley, “Think Big,” Science 172 (March 21, 1971): 828; Constance Holden, “Aid for Jobless Scientists,” Science 172 (April 9, 1971): 142. 107. Flanigan to the President’s Staff Secretary, September 30, 1971, and David to Haldeman and Flanigan, September 30, 1971, both in Nixon FG 209, box 1, folder “[EX] FG 209 President’s Science Advisory Committee 1/1/70–12/31/70]”; David interview, June 12, 1992. 108. Haldeman to Nixon, December 11, 1970, in Nixon FG 209, box 1, folder “[EX] FG 209 President’s Science Advisory Committee 1/1/70–12/31/70].” 109. David interview, June 12, 1992. 110. See, for example, Seaborg diary of November 23, 1970, in Seaborg (1989, v. 23, 480); Herken (1992, 176). 111. David, “The Relations of Science and Technology,” Science 175 ( January 7, 1972): 13. 112. Ambrose (1989, 496). 113. Nixon, “Statement about Senate Action Disapproving Funds for the Supersonic Transport Program,” March 24, 1971, PPP 1971, document no. 114. 114. Shapley, “Magruder in White House,” Science 174 (October 22, 1971): 386–388. The proposed $2 billion technology initiative, however, largely fizzled in the end. See Shapley, “White House Presents Vapid Technology Plan,” Science 175 (March 24, 1972): 1343. 115. Ehrlichman Notes, fiche 22, C5 (November 23, 1970). Emphasis in original. 116. See, for example, Flanigan to Nixon, February 22, 1971, in Nixon FG 6–9, Box 1, folder “[EX] FG 6–9 Office of Science and Technology 1/1/71-.” 117. Z. Wang (1999, 249–277). 118. Garwin interview, July 18, 1992; Panofsky interview, January 22, 1998; Laya Wiesner, “China Notes: Jerome and Laya Wiesner’s Visit to People’s Republic of China, October 1974,” in CSCC Archives, folder “Background Information—General, 1974.” 119. Shapley, “Kisty Quits Muskie Camp,” Science 176 (May 12, 1972): 619. 120. Robert Gillette, “Scientists in Politics,” Science 178 (October 27, 1972): 375–377. 121. Ibid., 377.

414

Notes to Pages 304–308

122. On Teller’s experience, see Teller’s FBI files for 1971 and Teller (2001, 503–506). 123. Garwin interview, July 18, 1992. 124. Garwin made the statement in May 1972, which was quoted in his essay for a debate entitled “Continuing the Argument: Academic Freedom and Moral Responsibility,” Christianity and Crisis 32, no. 21 (December 11, 1972): 272–274. 125. Roszak (1969), for example, spoke of the “myth of objective consciousness.” 126. Brown et al. (1972). 127. Primack and von Hippel (1974, 202). 128. “Reminiscences of Isidor Isaac Rabi: Oral History” (interviewed by Chauncey Ollinger, Jr.), 1984, p. 1017, in Columbia Oral History Office. 129. On Nixon’s instruction to cut White House staff, see Ehrlichman Notes, fiche 54, B10 (November 14, 1972). 130. Ehrlichman Notes, fiche 58, E3 (December 18, 1972). At the same time, contrary to his earlier instruction, he directed his aides to cut the NSF budget by half, which fortunately for science was not realized. See Ehrlichman Notes, fiche 54, B10 (November 14, 1972). 131. Initially Nixon thought of appointing David to head the EPA. Ehrlichman Notes, fiche 56, F8 (November 30, 1972); fiche 58, E3 (December 18, 1972); David interview, June 12, 1992. 132. Beckler, “Abstract of Member Comments on the Organization and Work of PSAC,” December 8, 1972, in David Files, box 33, folder “White House-PSAC-Title Folder 1972.” 133. PSAC to Nixon, December 19, 1972; Bruce Kehrli to Roy Ash, December 20, 1972, both in Nixon FG 209, box 1, folder “President’s Science Advisory Committee, 1/1/71-.” 134. For insightful discussions on this issue, see Hollinger (1996), Needell (2000), and Thorpe (2006). 135. Richard D. Lyons, “Science Adviser to Nixon Leaving for Industry Job,” New York Times, January 3, 1973, 1. 136. See U.S. Congress (1973). See also Shapley, The National Science Board: A History in Highlights, 1950–2000 (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, undated), available at http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/documents/2000/nsb00215/nsb00215.pdf, accessed in 2004. 137. Stever (2002, 205–207). See also Herken (1992, 181). 138. Nixon to DuBridge (and all PSAC members), January 26, 1973, in Nixon FG 209, box 1, folder “[EX] FG 209/A [1973].” 139. Beckler to Rabi, June 15, 1973, in Rabi Papers, box 45, folder “PSAC Correspondence, 1965–73.” 140. Rabi to Beckler, June 22, 1973, in Rabi Papers, box 45, folder “PSAC Correspondence, 1965–73.” 141. Walsh, “Killian Committee,” Science 185 ( July 5, 1974): 39–41, on 39.

Notes to Pages 308–312

415

142. Beckler to Killian, July 25, 1973, in Killian Papers, box 18, folder 22. Wiesner read a letter of thanks to Beckler from all the science advisers and then presented him with a camera on their behalf and that of other PSAC members. 143. See, for example, Garwin, “Toward a Nation Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise,” in Golden (1988, 145–146). 144. See, for example, Hughes (2004). For a near contemporary assessment of the challenges facing American science, see Holton and Blanpied (1976). 145. On the decline of science’s role, see Ezrahi (1990, 9, 240–241). Edward J. Burger, an OST staff member on biomedical-environmental issues in the Nixon years, saw the decline of science advising largely as the result of the clash between the political and academic/scientific cultures. See Burger (1980). 146. Shapley, “Office of Technology Assessment,” Science 175 (March 3, 1972): 970–973. 147. Shapley, “White House Science,” Science 179 (March 30, 1973): 1311. 148. On the role of trust in science and society, see Shapin (1994). 149. Killian (1977, 228). 150. Levin (1998, 53).

Epilogue 1. Ralph Vartabedian, “U.S. Funnels Billions to Science to Defend Against Terrorism,” Los Angeles Times, March 7, 2004, A1. 2. Transcript of “The First Bush-Kerry Presidential Debate,” September 30, 2004, at the Web site of the Commission on Presidential Debates, http://www.debates.org/ pages/trans2004a.html, accessed in 2005. 3. Dowd, “Gunsmoke and Mirrors,” New York Times, September 14, 2003, 4.11. 4. UCS (2004). 5. For an account of some of these episodes, see Mooney (2005). 6. UCS, “Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking,” February 18, 2004, accessed online at http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/rsi/page.cfm?pageID=1320 in 2004. On both the report and the statement, see James Glanz, “Scientists Say Administration Distorts Facts,” New York Times, February 19, 2004, A18. John Marburger, director of the OSTP, denied the charges as exaggerated: “It’s certainly not true that science is being manipulated by this administration to suit its policy.” See Glanz, “At the Center of the Storm over Bush and Science,” New York Times, March 30, 2004, F1. 7. For a list of the leading signatories, see the UCS Web site at http://www.ucsusa. org/global_environment/rsi/page.cfm?pageID=1335, accessed in 2004. 8. Branscomb, who had served on PSAC under LBJ and then as director of the National Bureau of Standards under Nixon, for example, avowed that “I’m not aware that [Nixon] ever hand-picked ideologues to serve on advisory committees, or dismissed from advisory committees very well-qualified people if he didn’t like their views. . . . What’s going on now is in many ways more insidious. It happens behind the curtain. I don’t

416

Notes to Pages 312–313

think we’ve had this kind of cynicism with respect to objective scientific advice since I’ve been watching government, which is quite a long time.” Barton Reppert, “Politics in the Lab Hits US Scientific Integrity,” Christian Science Monitor, January 6, 2004, 11. Nixon, of course, as we have seen, did try to push scientists closer to his ideology, such as Edward Teller, for PSAC, although he did not succeed. 9. Piore to Killian, January 15, 1973, and Killian to Piore, January 19, 1973, both in Killian Papers, box 8, folder 27. 10. Handler to Killian, September 26, 1973, in Killian Papers, box 16, folder 6. See also Killian (1977, 256–259) for a sketchy account of the committee’s work. 11. Piore to Killian, October 13, 1973, in Killian Papers, box 16, folder 6. 12. Nine of the thirteen members were PSAC alumni: besides Killian, these included Piore and Kenneth Pitzer as vice chairmen as well as Ivan Bennett, Harold Brown, James Fisk, Edwin Land, Franklin Long, and Charles Townes. Except for Killian, other former special assistants to the president on science and technology were conspicuously absent from the new panel, because most of them had clashed with the Nixon administration. See Beckler to Handler, September 17, 1973, in Killian Papers, box 17, folder 7. 13. Killian, “J.R.K. Remarks at Opening of . . . Meeting, Jan. 21, 1974,” in Killian Papers, box 17, folder 6. 14. “Transcript of Introduction by Dr. James Killian to Discussion by NAS Council, June 9, 1974,” p. 6, in Killian Papers, box 16, folder 16. 15. Ibid. 16. National Academy of Sciences (1974). 17. Sullivan, “A Science Council Is Urged as Agency in White House,” New York Times, June 27, 1974, 1; “Excerpts from Report Proposing a New Science Council in Office of President,” New York Times, June 27, 1974, 40; “The Science Gap,” editorial, New York Times, July 8, 1974, 28. See also “Science in the White House,” editorial, Washington Post, July 1, 1974, A18. 18. Nicholas Wade, “Vice President Ford Hears Scientists’ Concern,” Science 183 (February 8, 1974): 496; Jeremy Stone, FAS director, to Killian, August 20, 1974, in Killian Papers, box 16, folder 15. 19. Beckler, “Meetings of Messrs. J. R. Killian, Jr., Donald Rice and David Beckler on March 25, 1974,” in Killian Papers, box 16, folder 6. 20. Beckler to Members of NAS ad hoc Committee, July 1, 1974, in Killian Papers, box 16, folder 16. 21. Cole to Handler, July 17, 1974, in Killian Papers, box 16, folder 16. 22. Beckler to NAS Committee, July 1, 1974, Ash to Killian, July 8, 1974, and Ash to John McCone, August 6, 1974, all in Killian Papers, box 16, folder 16. 23. See the correspondence between Killian and William Scranton and Thomas Whitehead of Ford’s Transition Office in August 1974 in Killian Papers, box 16, folder 16. Even John McCone, a former critic of PSAC in the Eisenhower days, now lobbied

Notes to Pages 313–315

417

Ash on the scientists’ behalf. McCone to Killian, August 20, 1974, in Killian Papers, box 16, folder 16. 24. Stever (2002, 222). 25. Stever, “Science Advice—Out of and Back into the White House,” in Golden (1980, 62–63). 26. Stever, “Science Advice,” 63; Stever (2002, 222–224); Herken (1992, 182). 27. Stever (2002, 224–225). 28. Killian to Franklin Long, January 17, 1975, in Killian Papers, box 16, folder 15; Golden to Killian, April 10, 1975, Killian to Golden, April 16, 1975, in Killian Papers, box 16, folder 11; and Killian, “Science and Technology in Presidential Policymaking,” April 15, 1975, in Killian Papers, box 11, folder 15; Skolnikoff and Brooks, “Science Advice in the White House? Continuation of a Debate,” Science 187 ( January 10, 1975): 35–41. 29. In 1971, Rockefeller told the FBI that he believed that Teller “has done more to save this country than any other living American.” FBI Albany station to Chicago station, June 15, 1971, Teller FBI Files. 30. Killian to Handler, December 30, 1974, in Killian Papers, box 16, folder 15. 31. Beckler, “Meeting with the Vice President on March 11, 1975,” March 18, 1975, in Killian Papers, box 16, folder 15. 32. Rockefeller to Ford, March 3, 1975, in Ford Presidential Library, Michael RaoulDuval Collection, box 23, OSTP folder, quoted in Stever (2002, 224). 33. Beckler, “Meeting with the Vice President.” Killian also convinced Rockefeller that science advisers should be allowed to participate in national security policy. Killian to Rockefeller, March 20, 1975, and attachment; Rockefeller to Killian, April 9, 1975, in Killian Papers, box 16, folder 15. 34. “Statement of the Vice President at the White House Science Advisory Conference . . . June 6, 1975,” in Killian Papers, box 16, folder 15. 35. Ibid. 36. Stever (2002, 225). 37. Stever, “Science Advice,” 74. 38. Stever (2002, 225). Shortly after Nixon’s abolition of PSAC-OST, Killian, who had opposed a DST in the post-Sputnik days, told a visitor that “I now find myself almost wishing that the efforts back in the 1950s to establish a Department of Science had succeeded.” Lomask (1975, 271). 39. Hans Mark to Killian, September 6, 1975, and attached “Draft Summary of Meeting of Science and Technology Consultants, September 4, 1975,” in Killian Papers, box 16, folder 13; Stever (2002, 226). 40. “National Science and Technology Policy, Organization, and Priorities Act of 1976,” available online at http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/casecode/uscodes/popularnames/20. html, accessed in 2004. The act did provide for a President’s Committee on Science and Technology, but its term was set for only two years and its main function was to survey

418

Notes to Pages 315–322

the federal organization of science and technology. It was the result of a compromise to those who advocated a Department of Science and Technology and evidently never materialized. Ibid. 41. Golden (1980); Golden, “The President Needs a Science Committee—Promptly, Please,” New York Times, May 15, 1980, A27. 42. Colin Norman, “White House Science Council Formed,” Science 215 (March 5, 1982): 1214–1215. 43. Hoddeson and Daitch (2002, 267). 44. Keyworth interview by Donald R. Baucom, September 28, 1987, Reagan Library. 45. For a history of the SDI debate, see Fitzgerald (2000). 46. Hoddeson and Daitch (2002, 269). 47. Bethe and Bardeen, “Back to Science Advisers,” New York Times, May 17, 1986, L27. 48. Bethe, “The Technological Imperative,” BAS 41, no. 7 (August 1985): 34–36. 49. Golden (1988). Another notable series of lectures and essays on this subject by PSAC alumni and others is Thompson (1986–1990). 50. See Bromley (1994). 51. “Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking,” 1. 52. Eliot Marshall, “Starving Science to Feed Space Station,” editorial, Science 252 ( June 14, 1991): 1483; Marshall, “Gain for Space Station; Pain for NSF,” Science 257 (August 7, 1992): 737; Marshall, “Tilting at the Space Station,” Science 253 ( July 19, 1991): 256–258. 53. One report put the split of scientists’ donations to the Democratic and Republican parties at 85 percent to 15 percent. Kelly Field, “Scientists Appear to Tilt toward Kerry,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 1, 2004, A26. See also Mooney (2005). 54. See PCAST membership list at http://ostp.gov/pcast/membership2.html, accessed in June 2007.

Conclusion 1. B. L. R. Smith (1992, 164). 2. Herken (1992, 217). 3. Ezrahi (1990). See also Forman (2007b), where he argued for a postmodern decline of the “primacy” of science and the rise of technology after about 1980. The domination of the PCAST membership under George W. Bush by industrialists and engineers certainly fits this pattern. 4. See Marcus (1991). 5. Hodgson (1976, 69–70). On Kennedy and the liberal consensus, see also Chafe (2007, 178). 6. For one journalist’s account of the politics of science under George W. Bush, see Mooney (2005). 7. Partly for this purpose Congress passed the Federal Advisory Committee Act in 1972. See B. L. R. Smith (1992, 81–82).

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Index Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Abelson, Philip, 234 Acheson, Dean, 29 Acheson-Lilienthal report, 24 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 91, 93–96, 102–104, 116, 163 Agency for International Development (AID), 193, 266 Agnew, Spiro, 294 Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion (ANP), 2, 50, 52, 57, 59, 112–113, 119, 190 Allen, Raymond B., 40 Allison, Samuel, 23 Allison, William B., 158–159, 161 Alvarez, Luis, 46, 243 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 66, 159, 161, 234, 261, 284 American Physical Society (APS), 264, 290 Anderson, Clinton, 151, 153–154, 191 Anderson, Robert, 202 antiballistic missile (ABM), 4, 7, 94, 114, 116, 123, 228–229, 258, 273–284, 286, 287, 289– 299, 301, 308, 319, 322 anti-intercontinental ballistic missile (AICBM), 93–94, 103, 114, 116, 125, 127, 131, 236 antisatellite weapons (ASAT), 114 Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), 186, 222, 230 Ash, Roy, 296, 313, 416–417n23 atomic bomb. See Manhattan Project Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). See United States Atomic Energy Commission Bacher, Robert F., 3, 43, 45, 50, 83–85; and ANP debate, 112–113; and Geneva Conference of Experts, 130, 138 Badash, Lawrence, xi–xii Baker, William O., xii, 3, 84–85, 105, 163–164, 197, 372n23, 376n13; adviser to Nixon, 299, 303–304, 306 Baldeschwieler, John, 265, 267–268, 273 ballistic missile. See intercontinental ballistic missile; intermediate-range ballistic missile Bardeen, John, 3, 106, 169, 174, 194–195, 229, 315–316

Beadle, George, 106, 174, 229 Beams, Jesse, 146 Beckler, David Z., 43–44, 50, 174, 187, 307–308, 312, 341n7 Bell, David, 191–192 Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL), 54, 114, 116, 273 Berkner, Lloyd V., 3, 79, 84, 162, 345n102, 347n131, 349n35; and space program, 71, 91, 94, 116, 133–134, 220–221 Bethe, Hans A., 3, 21, 33, 62, 75, 77, 106, 184, 187, 239, 316, 345n102, 349n35, 351n72, 359n88; and ABM debate, 280–281, 290, 316; Bethe panel on nuclear test ban, 122–125, 127, 128, 130, 141, 389–390n41; on Fisk panel on nuclear test ban, 224, 226–229; for McGovern presidential campaign, 285, 303, 407n157; and nuclear weapons, 21–22, 24, 33, 66, 84, 130, 133, 139–140; and space program, 77, 90–92, 116, 250 Bing, Peter S., 201, 204, 216 biological warfare or weapons. See Vietnam War, chemical and biological warfare or weapons Borden, William, 44 Boyce, Alfred M., 203 Bradbury, Norris, 131, 345n102 Branscomb, Lewis, 311–322, 397n60, 404n90, 415–416n8 Breit, Gregory, 140 Bridges, Styles, 72 Briggs, Shirley A., 217 Brode, Wallace R., 86, 159 Bronk, Detlev W., 4, 36, 50, 62, 75, 79, 84, 174, 187, 245, 328, 349n35; and ABM debate, 290; and nuclear arms control, 137; politics of, 347n126, 407n157; and space program, 91, 95 Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), 137, 146, 317 Brooks, Harvey, 84, 106, 116, 174, 187, 194–195, 314–315, 328, 376n13, 394n5; and science policy, 169, 233, 251–252 Brooks, Overton, 220 Brown, Harold, 123, 128, 130, 186, 190, 224, 377n25, 389n8, 394n5, 416n12 Brucker, Wilbur, 115

443

444

Index

Buchsbaum, Solomon, 315 Buckley, John L., 204, 209 Buckley, Oliver: as chairman and member of ODM-SAC, 35–39, 43, 50, 239, 328, 339n22, 339n26, 347n126; and hydrogen bomb debate, 26, 28–29 Bundy, McGeorge: as national security adviser, 185, 192, 224, 226, 237, 239, 248, 377n14; and nuclear weapons, 119, 227, 391n60; and science policy, 170, 240 Bunting, Mary “Polly,” 245 Bush, George H. W., 7, 316–317 Bush, George W., 7, 316–318, 323 Bush, Vannevar, 18–19, 26, 32, 37–38, 43, 46– 47, 71–72, 122, 251, 337n15, 337n26, 341n5; Bush report on science policy, 8, 17–18, 25– 26, 37, 55–58, 112, 150, 161, 171–172, 178–179; on military technological enthusiasm, 27, 55; and nuclear test ban, 38, 42 Byrnes, James, 19 California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech), 44, 55; scientists associated with, 3, 36, 43, 55, 83, 84, 90, 106, 165, 186, 260 Carson, Rachel: critics of, 202–203, 209, 217, 384n42; and environmentalism, 210, 215, 217, 247; and federal pesticides policy, 199– 202, 211–215, 218, 320, 323, 387n111; and PSAC, 4, 7, 199–204, 207–208, 210–218, 320, 323, 383n26, 385n57, 387n14; Silent Spring, 199, 205, 207–214, 217–218, 289, 320, 323, 385n63; on science and technology, 212–213 CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System), 71, 208–210, 213–214, 385n65 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 52, 83, 105, 108, 117, 122–123, 129–130, 248 Challenger disaster, 316 Chance, Britton, 106 chemical warfare or weapons. See Vietnam War, chemical and biological warfare or weapons China, xi, 30, 73, 105, 219; and ABM debate in the United States, 273–276, 278–281; Chinese Communist revolution, 30, 72; Chinese Nationalist science policy in Taiwan, 256; and Korean War, 34, 38; and nuclear test ban, 123, 140, 183, 224, 227; nuclear tests in, 242, 278; scientific exchange with the United States, 185, 193, 256–257, 303, 380– 381n67; and Vietnam War, 243, 272 Clay, Lucius, 34–35, 40 Clinton, Bill, 7, 317 Columbia University, 187, 283, 304–305 Committee on Scholarly Exchange with Mainland China, 256–257 Committee on Science and Public Policy (COSPUP), 234, 393n103

Compton, Arthur, 20 Compton, Karl, 15–16, 24–25, 37 Conant, James, 19, 30, 33–36, 43, 47, 49, 66, 103, 105, 342n37; and hydrogen bomb debate, 3, 21, 26–28, 30–31, 49 Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 45 Cutler, Robert, 42–44, 57, 63–65, 77, 79, 122, 159, 272, 347n126 David, Edward, Jr., 287, 299–303, 306, 315, 342n45 DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane), 199, 206, 211–212, 216 Dean, Gordon, 29–30, 33, 48 Defense Communications Planning Group (DCPG), 260 Defense Science Board (DSB), 62, 94, 103, 245 Delano, Frederick A., 16 Department of Defense. See United States Department of Defense Department of Interior. See United States Department of Interior Department of Science and Technology (DST), 158–162, 164–165, 172–173, 196, 234, 284 Department of State. See United States Department of State Dirksen, Everett, 292 Divine, Robert, 119 Doolittle, James, 72, 83–84, 90, 94–96, 241, 359n88 Doty, Paul, 186, 189, 261, 263, 295, 311–312 Drell, Sidney, 266, 268, 269, 295, 394n10, 397n60, 404n90 Drury, William H., Jr., 203, 208 Dryden, Hugh, 36, 95–96, 196 DuBridge, Lee: and ABM debate, 298; DuBridge report on science education, 165–167, 171, 173, 177; on federal funding of basic research, 55–60, 112, 150, 166; and hydrogen bomb debate, 26, 28; as ODMSAC member and chairman, 36, 39, 42, 45, 50, 55, 63, 340n45, 340n49, 345n102; and the Oppenheimer case, 45, 47; as science adviser to Nixon, 287–289, 291–298, 410n44, 410n60, 411n64; on science advising, 35, 43, 47, 55, 63, 122, 161, 166, 282–283, 299; and SST debate, 297 Dulles, Allen, 52, 357n55 Dulles, John Foster, 107; and nuclear test ban, 124–127, 129–130, 134, 138, 140 Durham, Carl T., 113 Dyson, Freeman, 116, 228 Edsall, John, 261, 263 Ehrlichman, John, 291, 295–296 Einstein, Albert, 19, 24, 262

Index Eisenhower, Dwight D., 4, 10, 39, 50, 63, 174, 184, 186, 188, 190, 198, 219, 225, 229, 241, 244, 250, 268, 280, 286, 287, 292, 300, 301, 307, 312, 314, 318, 319, 321, 338n51, 342n37, 347n125, 352n7, 375n92; and ABM debate, 275, 279, 292; and AICBM debate, 114–115; and ANP debate, 113, 345n99; and ARPA, 91; and Atoms for Peace Conference, 120, 127, 143, 230; basic research policy, 58, 60, 75–77, 82, 87, 102, 111–112, 119, 142, 150, 171, 176–177, 291, 309, 322; on birth control, 106–107, 393n103; criticized, 139–140; disagreements with PSAC, 107, 109; and DOD reform, 103–105; farewell address, 174–177, 179, 291, 296, 376n99; and federal funding for science, 54–61, 75–77, 150, 169, 171; and Geneva Conference of Experts, 125–127, 129–131, 135, 138–139; high-energy physics policy, 144, 149–151, 154–155, 157, 292; and IGY, 89; and international cooperation in science, 77, 82, 126–127; on Kennedy’s election, 1, 174, 176–177, 185, 323n1; on militarization of science, 60, 97, 99, 104, 110–111, 135–136, 150, 160, 175–176, 291, 320; and military budgets, 110–111; on military-industrial complex, 2, 110, 135–136, 174–175, 220, 279; on missile test ban, 107; and NASA, 97–98; Nixon and, 296–297, 358n59; and nuclear arms control, 3, 65, 74–75, 78, 81, 82, 107–108, 110, 116–117, 120–122, 124, 134–135, 137, 138, 166, 179, 188, 219, 223, 226; and nuclear test ban, 79–80, 83, 120–121, 124–125, 127–129, 131–135, 138– 141, 183, 229–230, 242, 346n116; and Open Skies, 120; and Oppenheimer case, 43–50, 192, 376n99; and PSAC, 1–2, 4, 8, 13–14, 92– 93, 98, 102, 109, 111, 118, 119, 125, 128–129, 137, 189, 197, 233, 309, 319, 323; and satellites, 73–74; and science advising, 1, 2, 3, 42–43, 64, 77–78, 83, 85–87, 111, 137, 172, 186, 200, 318, 322–323, 363n47; science education policy, 82, 87, 165–167, 169, 171–172; scientists’ high opinion of, 54, 65, 347n126; and SLAC, 142, 144, 149–151, 154–155, 157, 368n49, 370n69; and space program, 3, 89–93, 97– 98, 102, 219, 223, 322; response to Sputnik, 3, 13, 53, 73–77, 80–82, 86–87, 100–101, 119, 320; and TCP report, 49–53, 64, 81, 343n68; technological skepticism of, 53–54, 107, 119; and Vietnam War, 270 Ellul, Jacques, 5 Environmental Impact Reports (EIR), 211, 385n75 Esaki, Leo, 195 Fang, Lizhi, xi Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 45, 48, 73

445

Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering, and Technology, 315. See also Federal Council for Science and Technology Federal Council for Science and Technology (FCST), 7, 162–164, 170–173, 185, 197, 201– 203, 231, 233, 246, 315 Federal Pest Control Review Board (FPCRB), 202, 204 Federation of American Scientists (FAS), 24, 192, 282, 290, 293, 303, 313 Federation of Atomic Scientists. See Federation of American Scientists Fedorov, Yevgeni K., 130–132, 135 Fermi, Enrico, 20, 26, 28–29, 187 Feynman, Richard P., 18, 21, 22, 336n52 Finan, William F., 164 First World War. See World War I Fisher, Adrian, 263–264 Fisk, James, 3, 43, 50, 79, 84–85, 129, 132, 174, 187, 267, 312, 328, 345n102, 347n132, 349n35, 377n13, 394n6, 416n12; and American international technology policy, 255–256; and nuclear test ban, 129–130, 138, 224–225; and SLAC, 144–145; and space program, 95–96; as TCP deputy director, 51, 54 Flemming, Arthur, 42–44, 49, 50, 55, 171, 340n37, 374n69 Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 200, 206, 207, 209, 217 Ford, Gerald, 313–315 Foster, John, 271, 283 Franck Committee, 19–22, 24, 26–29, 50, 110 Freeman, Orville, 204–205, 207, 209, 214 Fulbright, James William, 229, 282, 290–291 Fulton, James G., 292 Gagarin, Yuri, 220 Gaither Panel, 65–66, 81, 86, 108–109, 121, 126 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 195 Gardner, Trevor, 49, 53, 219–220, 343n51 Garwin, Richard, xii, 6, 38, 236, 238, 245, 295, 307–308, 312, 397n60; and ABM debate, 281, 301; China visit, 303; and military research and development, 187, 247–248, 265, 269, 316, 377n28, 403n56; and pesticides debate, 201–202; politics of, 407n157, 411n80; and PSAC’s demise, 298, 307, 321; and radical critics, 304–305; and SST debate, 297–298, 301–303, 313, 321, 412n81 Gates, Thomas, 100, 115 Gell-Mann, Murray, 269, 301, 396n58 General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the AEC, 41, 45, 145, 146, 149, 152, 192, 240, 245; and hydrogen bomb debate, 26–31, 33, 35– 38, 48–50, 62, 129, 141, 243, 266, 288, 340n39 Gilliland, Edwin, 186, 231

446

Index

Ginzton, Edward L., 142–143, 147 Glennan, Keith, 171, 374n69 global warming, 4, 253–254, 311, 318, 399n108 Goldberger, Marvin, 249, 397n60, 407n157; and ABM debate, 269, 273–275 Golden, William T., 338n47, 340n39; proposals for presidential science advisory system, 34–37, 39–41, 55, 75, 87, 314–316, 339n18, 339n32 Goldwater, Barry, 241–244, 261, 270, 285, 303– 304, 396n48 Goodpaster, Andrew, 1, 75–77, 97, 102, 129, 136 Gray, Gordon, 272; AEC Personnel Security Board (Gray board) and Oppenheimer case, 45–49; as national security adviser to Eisenhower, 61, 86; and nuclear test ban, 133, 135–136 Great Depression and U.S. science policy, 15– 18, 22, 25 Gunsalus, Irwin, 263–264 Haggerty, Patrick, 299–301, 303–304 Haldeman, H. R., 291, 294–296 Hall, Jane, 245 Handler, Philip, 285, 307, 312–314 Harriman, W. Averell, 227 Hartgering, James, 201, 204, 208–209, 214 Harvard University, 85, 105, 146, 156, 194, 243, 259, 262, 301; scientists associated with, 3, 19, 21, 36, 52, 83, 84, 103, 105, 106, 116, 146, 151, 167, 169, 170, 177, 186, 192, 203, 233, 234, 240, 253, 259, 261, 262, 264, 267, 288 Haskins, Caryl P., 84, 122, 345n102, 347n126, 349n35 H-bomb. See hydrogen bomb Health, Education, and Welfare Department (HEW). See United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Heffner, Hubert, 296 Hensen, W. W., 142 Hersey, John, 23 Hickenlooper, Bourke, 193, 379n61 Hill, Albert G., 77, 347n131, 349n35 Hiroshima. See Manhattan Project Hook, Sydney, 38 Hoover, Herbert, 16 Hoover, J. Edgar, 45 Hornig, Donald F., 3, 21, 104, 174, 238, 246, 250–251, 267–268, 286, 328, 405n111; and ABM debate, 275–279, 282, 290, 405n104; and environmental policy, 252, 254, 257; on federal funding of university science, 169; and funding of science, 240, 282, 284; and international cooperation in science, 238, 255–257; Johnson and, 236–239, 241, 244, 247, 257–258, 262–264, 270, 272; Kennedy and, 223, 236–238; and Manhattan Project, 238;

and nuclear arms control, 248, 282, 284; political activities of, 285, 395n38; and Sidewinder missile, 238, 394n11; and space program, 97, 219, 223, 237–238, 248–249; and Vietnam War, 258–259, 263–268, 270–272, 274–275; and weather warfare, 271 Horsfall, James G., 203, 208, 385n57, 385n62 Humphrey, Hubert, 159, 164, 241–242, 285– 286, 391n60, 407n157 hydrogen bomb, 3, 33, 38, 41, 45–49, 62; debate, 26–31, 33, 34, 38, 40, 41, 44–46, 49, 62, 64–65, 69, 74, 79, 80, 87, 120–121, 125, 127, 130, 133, 137–138, 141, 158, 243, 254, 266, 268– 269, 281, 288, 320, 337n28, 340n39, 395n37; fear of, 13, 71; scientists associated with, 26, 33, 41, 44, 187, 226, 243, 254, 268–269, 337n28; as technological fix, 31, 232, 254, 266 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), 49, 52, 71, 91, 107, 108, 125, 276, 289, 290 Interdepartmental Committee on Scientific Research and Development (ICSRD), 32– 33, 36, 162 interdisciplinary laboratories program for materials research (IDL), 163 Interim Committee (on atomic policy), 19– 20, 22, 26, 299 intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), 52, 113–114, 118 International Geophysical Year (IGY), 13, 71, 94; and U.S. satellite reconnaissance program, 53–54, 59, 73, 89 Jackson, Henry M., 72, 154, 196–197, 274 Jewett, Frank, 16–18, 26–27, 50, 118 Joffe, Abraham, 195 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 237; and ABM debate, 258, 274, 276–278, 282; anti-elitist sentiment toward scientists, 237–238, 245; basic research policy, 240–241, 251–252, 264; Eisenhower and, 270, 275; environmental policy, 252–254; Great Society programs and science, 244–245, 246; and international cooperation in science, 254–257; 1968 election, 270, 277, 284–285; and nuclear non-proliferation, 248; and presentation of Oppenheimer’s Fermi Award, 239–240; on science advising, 272; scientific support in 1964 election, 241–244, 245, 261, 285; and space program, 72, 159, 220–221, 238, 242, 248–249, 251; and Vietnam War, 243–244, 258, 261–263, 269, 270, 271–272, 282 Johnson, Roy, 96 Joint Chiefs of Staff ( JCS), 123, 129, 363 Joint Committee on Atomic Energy ( JCAE), 93, 112–113, 117, 143, 150–155, 190–192 Joint New Weapons Committee, 27

Index Jones, Boisfeuillet, 201–203 Jukes, Thomas H., 203, 215 Keeny, Spurgeon, 248, 278–279, 404n90 Kelly, Mervin, 35, 79 Kennedy, Edward, 315 Kennedy, John F., 1, 72, 109, 137, 189, 237, 244, 320; and ANP project, 190; basic research policy, 230–233, 251; civil defense policy, 189; civilian technology projects, 195–196, 198; criticism of Eisenhower administration, 72, 109; on international cooperation in science, 193–194, 198; New Frontier science policy, 183–184, 198; and nuclear arms control, 185, 307, 323; nuclear strategy, 183; and nuclear test ban, 183, 186, 187, 224–230, 310; and Oppenheimer’s Fermi Award, 192–193, 239; and OST, 197–198; and pesticides debate, 7, 199, 202–204, 209–210, 213– 214, 217, 310, 323; and presidential science advising, 186, 188, 196–197, 235; and scientists, 188; on SLAC, 190–192, 223; and space program, 183, 188, 189, 221–223, 230– 231, 248, 292, 297; on technological fixes, 187–188 Kerry, John F., 317 Keyes, Roger, 43 Keyworth, George, 315–316 Khrushchev, Nikita, 71, 125, 129, 131–132, 134– 135, 138, 225–227, 242 Kilgore, Harley, 26 Killian, James R., Jr., 2, 4, 6, 14, 36, 41, 50, 83– 86, 105, 110, 121, 159, 168, 174, 187, 248, 282– 283, 308, 328, 345n102, 349n35, 350n66, 416n12; and ABM debate, 275, 277, 279–280, 290–291; and ANP debate, 112–113; appointed Eisenhower’s presidential science adviser and elected PSAC chairman, 13, 14, 53, 74, 78–79, 82–83, 85–87, 177; and DOD reform, 103–104, 150; and DST debate, 159–160, 417n38; Eisenhower and, 75–79, 82–83, 87–88, 92, 108, 112, 126, 128– 130, 132, 135, 138, 144, 149–160, 162, 166–167, 174, 309; and federal funding of science, 62, 77, 94–95, 102, 160, 170, 173; Kennedy and, 197; Kistiakowsky and, 105–107, 138, 163, 237; and missile programs, 101–102, 107; and nuclear arms control, 80, 135–137, 150; and nuclear test ban, 121–123, 126–130, 132–135, 363n34; political activities of, 184, 263, 267, 270, 376n8; on science advising, 14, 312–315, 351n77, 417n33; and science policy, 162–163, 165, 177–178; and SLAC, 142, 144–151, 158; and space program, 88–98, 150, 251; and TCP, 51, 53–54, 63–65, 73, 78, 86, 343n68, 349n41; and U-2, 52 Kissinger, Henry, 295, 303, 410n44, 410n60

447

Kistiakowsky, George B., 3, 21, 85, 128, 174, 184–186, 197, 246, 267–268, 284, 351n72, 356n38, 357n55, 373n59, 376nn10–11, 376n13; and ABM debate, 275, 279–282, 289–290; and ANP debate, 113; appointed Eisenhower’s presidential science adviser and elected PSAC chairman, 105; basic research, 111, 153, 168, 171, 172, 177, 231, 309; and “cranberry crisis,” 200; and diversification of PSAC, 106; Eisenhower and, 1, 102, 105–107, 111, 117, 138, 139, 172, 174–177, 309, 375n92; and federal funding of science, 156, 169–171, 178–179, 315; Kennedy and, 117; Killian and, 105, 106, 107, 138, 177, 237; and Manhattan Project, 21, 83–84, 238, 350n65; and military technology policy, 102, 109–111; and missiles debate, 85, 101–102, 105, 107–109, 115–117, 125, 133; and nuclear arms control, 116–117, 229, 362n26; and nuclear test ban, 116, 135, 138–140, 242; political activities of, 184, 241–243, 270, 285– 286, 303, 305, 321, 395n38; and satellites, 85, 89; and science policy, 133, 139, 163–164, 167– 168, 170, 172, 173, 177, 184–185, 234; and SIOP, 117; and SLAC, 152–154, 156; and space program, 90–91, 94, 97, 185, 220, 223; and technological dissent, 260–261; Teller and, 140, 184; and Vietnam War, 109, 258–261, 269– 270, 281 Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), 163 Korean War, 4, 23, 30, 33, 34, 35, 38, 42, 226; science advising and, 13, 31–34, 40, 42, 307, 309 Kreidler, Robert, 164, 371n12 Land, Edwin, 4, 84, 85, 187, 301, 312, 328, 345n102, 349n37, 351n72, 376n13, 416n12; Eisenhower and, 79, 82, 130, 136, 363n47; and nuclear arms control, 133, 134–135, 136– 137; and space program, 76, 79, 82, 130, 136, 363n47; and TCP, 52–53 Larrick, George, 209 Latter, Albert, 132–133, 140 Lauritsen, Charles C., 43, 50 Lawrence, Ernest, 74, 129–130, 155, 347n131; Eisenhower and, 79, 86–87, 120–121, 129; and Geneva Conference of Experts, 130; and hydrogen bomb, 3, 31, 37, 62, 64, 80, 86–87, 120–121; and nuclear arms control, 74–75, 121; and nuclear test ban, 62, 64, 74– 75, 80, 120–121, 128; on Oppenheimer panel, 20, 22; PSAC and Teller-Lawrence group, 107, 121, 122, 126 Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, 83, 104, 131, 133; scientists associated with, 38, 78, 81, 96, 116, 123, 125, 127–128, 129, 186 Lederberg, Joshua, 92

448

Index

Lee, Tsung Dao, 73, 229 Levy, Lillian, 176 Libby, Willard, 241, 288, 303 Lilienthal, David, 24, 29, 38, 44–45, 48, 87 Loeb, Robert F., 36, 43, 106, 174 Long, Franklin A., 117, 186–187, 249, 410n44, 416n12; controversy over candidacy as NSF director, 292–294 Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory (post World War II), 48, 131, 345n103; scientists associated with, 33, 187, 245, 363n48. See also Manhattan Project (for World War II era) Luce, Clare Boothe, 159

McPherson, Harry C., Jr., 262 Mead, Margaret, 66, 214, 386n93 Medaris, John, 117 Meselson, Matthew, 261, 263, 264, 288 Metcalf, Robert, 205, 384n42 Midwestern Universities Research Association (MURA), 144, 147–148, 240 Moos, Malcolm, 291 Moyers, Bill, 252, 395n38 Moynihan, Patrick, 302 Mrak, Emil K., 215 Mumford, Lewis, 5, 17, 23–24 Murrow, Edward R., 87

MacDonald, Gordon, 246, 269, 303, 397n60, 407n157 MacLeod, Colin M., 84, 186, 197, 203, 208, 328, 407n157 Magruder, William M., 302–303 Manhattan Project, 17–19, 22, 23, 40; contribution to the prestige of science, 17–18, 71, 73, 196, 300; effects on politics of scientists, 19–24; and federal funding for science, 22– 23, 25; justifications for atomic bomb, 23, 26, 321, 336n1; as model of military technology, 30, 88, 103; scientists associated with, 3, 17, 19, 20, 21, 36, 46, 83, 84, 105, 122, 140, 238, 240, 268–269; 350n65, 356n38; as technological fix, 232; as technological push, 21 Mansfield, Mike, 159, 164, 283–284, 291 Mao, Zedong, xi Marshak, Robert E., 153–154 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 44, 54, 85, 146, 156, 251, 259; and ABM controversy, 280, 289–290, 294, 301; scientists associated with, 3, 4, 13, 15, 17, 36, 38, 43, 78–79, 81, 85, 98, 131, 186, 193, 223, 231, 233, 251, 262 McCarthy, Joseph, 44, 48, 185 McCarthyism and scientists, 42, 45, 47, 49, 54, 99, 158, 185, 193–195, 267, 287, 304, 321, 376n100 McCloy, John, 224 McCone, John, 133, 138, 145–146, 149–154, 184, 416–417n23 McCormack, John, 33, 79, 159 McElroy, Neil, 77, 97–98, 101, 103–104, 115, 124, 160 McElroy, William D., 215, 293, 407n157 McGovern, George, 303 McMillan, Edwin, 146–150 McMillan, William G., 266 McNamara, Robert: and ABM debate, 274– 280, 405n103; and funding for defense research, 267, 282–283; and PSAC, 189–190, 247–248, 405n111; and space program, 220– 221; and Vietnam War, 259–260, 269–270

Nabrit, Samuel, 245 Nagasaki. See Manhattan Project National Academy of Sciences (NAS), 15–16, 19, 22, 36, 43, 75, 85, 96, 154, 163, 172, 173, 188, 197, 202, 205, 218, 221, 231, 232, 234, 238, 250, 254, 256, 272, 282, 285, 288, 293, 299, 303, 307, 308, 312, 313, 314 National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA), 93–97 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 7, 88, 97–99, 102, 158, 159, 161, 163, 165, 167–168, 171, 184, 196, 219, 220–222, 231–232, 248–251, 303, 314. See also Challenger disaster; space program National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), 294 National Defense Education Act (NDEA), 165, 168 National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), 19 National Institutes of Health (NIH), 165, 169, 300 National Intelligence Board, 108 National Research Council (NRC), 15, 202, 205 National Resources Board (NRB), 16 National Science and Technology Council, 7 National Science Board (NSB), 35, 197, 245, 285, 287, 288, 293 National Science Foundation (NSF), 43, 172, 285, 292–293, 313, 345n90, 374n70; debate over formation of, 23, 25–26, 30, 85, 144, 154; and DST debate, 159–163; and Golden proposal, 35–36; Nixon and, 288, 291, 292– 293, 295–296, 300–301, 303, 306–307, 414n130; and PSAC, 83, 84; role in science policy, 54–56, 58–59, 61–62, 86, 143, 162–163, 167– 170, 197, 231–233, 251–252, 283–284, 287, 288; and satellite projects, 73; and SLAC, 143– 145, 148–149; and space program, 89, 94–96 national security: involvement of scientists in policymaking for, 30, 39–56, 66, 80, 102, 105, 150, 198, 314; and PSAC, 3–5; 125–126; 178–179; 186–187, 198, 224, 228, 230, 233, 243,

Index 257, 274, 286, 308, 314; role of science and technology in, 6, 22, 27, 60, 64, 81–83, 110, 112, 123, 125–126, 136, 148, 150, 156, 171–172, 219, 232, 235, 289–290, 308, 310, 321–322; scientists seek to strengthen, 66–67, 102, 105, 170, 178–179, 294–295; space program and, 88, 91, 98, 219, 223; universities and, 60, 282 Neustadt, Richard, 196–197 New Deal, 15–17, 32; infl uence on postwar science policy, 178, 183, 240 Newman, James R., 32 Nicholson, Page, 209 Nike-Zeus missile program. See antiballistic missile Nitze, Paul, 184–185, 376n10 Nixon, Richard M., 1, 45, 295–296, 299–303, 305–306, 313; and ABM debate, 4, 287, 289– 295, 296; and dissolution of presidential science advising system, 4, 287, 306–310, 312; 1960 election, 154, 184, 186; 1968 election, 285–286; 1972 election, 303–304; and Oppenheimer case, 45; relations with scientific community, 287–289; and space program, 95; and SST debate, 287, 289–299, 304; Teller and, 184, 301–302; as vice president, 101 North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), 114 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 77, 82, 122, 242 ODM-SAC (Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization), 7, 37, 38, 50, 86, 291; and DOD reform, 103, 344n71; and federal funding for science, 54– 62, 144, 178; formation of, 3, 36, 38, 85; and nuclear test ban, 62–67, 80, 346n116, 350n48; and Oppenheimer case, 44–49; policymaking goals of, 39–40, 50; political sensibilities within, 37, 78; precursor to PSAC, 74–75, 78–83; science advising approach, 39–40, 43; and science policy, 54–66, 77, 81, 144, 178; Sputnik reaction, 72–74, 77, 86; Technological Capabilities Panel (TCP), 49–54, 67; Truman and, 36–38, 40, 239, 309 Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM), 13, 34–36, 43, 56 Office of Director of Defense Research and Engineering (ODDRE), 100, 104, 110, 114, 115, 172, 271 Office of Management and Budget (OMB), 302 Office of Naval Research (ONR), 55, 84; and SLAC, 142–145, 147, 149–150, 157 Office of Science and Technology (OST), 7, 196, 197, 198, 201, 202, 204, 232–235, 239, 246,

449

263, 287–288, 296–297, 301, 303, 306–309, 312–314 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), 7, 315, 317 Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), 18–19, 25, 32–34, 36, 40, 43, 84, 266 Office of War Mobilization and Conversion, 32 Old, Bruce S., 43, 50, 328 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 24, 30, 78–79, 87, 187, 243, 273, 338n40, 396n59; basic research advocacy, 44, 61; and Fermi Award, 192– 193, 239–241; hydrogen bomb debate, 3, 27–31, 38, 41, 44, 46–47, 133, 141, 288, 338n51; and Manhattan Project, 18, 238, 240; and nuclear test ban, 30; Oppenheimer panel, 19–23, 26–27, 29; on science advising, 31, 33–37, 39, 42, 43, 46–47, 187, 299; security clearance case, 41, 43–49, 51, 53, 66, 67, 72– 73, 80, 133, 137, 141, 143, 192, 267, 269–270, 301–302, 320–321, 341nn21–22, 342n45, 376n100 Palchinsky, Peter, 9 Panofsky, Wolfgang K. H., xii–xiii, 3, 21, 106, 174, 187, 224, 379n54, 394n10; and ABM debate, 290–291; and AICBM debate, 378n37; and federal funding of science, 169–170; at Geneva Conference of Experts, 135; on international cooperation in science, 303; and nuclear arms control, 295, 305; and nuclear test ban, 152, 224–226, 389n31; Panofsky panel on nuclear testing, 133–135, 225–226, 365n73, 389n31; political activities of, 305, 407n157; on PSAC, 311– 312; and SLAC, 142, 144–145, 147–148, 152, 154–156 Pentagon. See United States Department of Defense Pfeiffer, E. W., 264 Pillion, John R., 155 Pindar, F.V.L., 146 Piore, Emanuel, 3, 50, 84–85, 106, 174, 187, 255, 328, 350n66, 371n12, 372n23, 374n70, 394n7, 407n157, 416n12; on basic research, 147; on DST, 172; Piore panels on highenergy physics, 147–149, 152–156; Piore panel on research policy, 158, 160–165, 173, 177, 309–310; on revival of presidential science advising, 312; on York panel on satellites, 89 Pitzer, Kenneth, 46, 243, 416n12 Pratt, R. W., 146 President’s Council (Committee) of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST), 7, 316, 317

450

Index

President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC): and ABM debate, 4, 114–116, 236, 258, 273–282, 287–295, 298; and ANP debate, 52, 112–114, 118, 189; and ASW program, 247–248; and civil defense program, 52, 189, 236; and civilian technology projects, 195–196, 246–247; criticism from the left, 304–305, 308–309, 312; dissension within, 4, 106, 169–170, 268–269; dissolution of, 4, 287, 305–308; and DOD reform, 103–105; and DST debate, 158–160; Eisenhower and, 86–87, 98, 100, 102, 103, 107, 109–110, 118, 135, 137, 174, 174–178; and environmental policy, 4, 36, 200, 201, 216–218, 252–254; formation of, 71, 74, 79–80, 82–83; and formation of FCST, 162–165; and formation of NASA, 7, 88, 91–98; and Geneva Conference of Experts, 130–133, 135; and IGY, 89; and international cooperation in science, 193–195, 254–257; Johnson and, 238, 244; Kennedy and, 187–189; members’ association with Manhattan Project, 3, 20–23; members’ institutional self-interest, 8, 84–85, 90, 178; and military technology policy, 9, 100, 110–112, 117, 118, 179, 247; and missile programs, 85, 101– 102, 107–109; Nixon and, 286, 287, 289, 295–297, 300–301, 305–308; and nuclear arms control, 137, 179, 186, 188, 198, 224, 287; and nuclear test ban, 9, 83, 85, 116– 117, 121–136, 138–141, 152, 186, 224–230, 234; and oceanography policy, 112, 246–247; and OST debate, 196–198; and pesticides debate, 199–218; political sympathies of members, 3, 15, 85, 109, 184, 241–243, 284– 287; and proposed birth control study, 106–107; and radar warning program, 109; and SAMOS, 114; and science education, 165–167, 186, 236, 244–246; and science policy, 8, 36, 43, 84, 90, 98, 100, 118, 146, 148, 155–158, 167–172, 186, 230–235, 251–252, 289; and SLAC, 142, 144–147, 150, 152, 154–158, 240; and space program, 36, 85, 89–99, 100, 198, 219–224, 233, 237, 248–251; and SST controversy, 4, 287, 297–298; and Vietnam War, 260–273; and the “War on Cancer,” 300 President’s Scientific Research Board, 32, 315, 317 Press, Frank, 186, 224, 315, 407n157 Price, Don K., 234, 284 Price, Melvin, 112–113, 117, 190 Princeton University, 146, 283 Purcell, Edward, 3, 262, 312, 376n13, 394n5; and nuclear test ban, 229; political activities of, 184, 270, 284–286, 303–304; Purcell panel on space science, 91–93, 96, 353n30;

and space program, 83–84, 90, 150, 219, 249–250, 398n95; and TCP, 52; and Vietnam War, 298 Quarles, Donald, 73, 96–97, 113, 123–124, 145, 149, 328 Rabi, I. I., 3, 6, 17–18, 34, 43, 50, 79, 84, 85, 174, 187, 245, 246, 293, 305, 307, 328, 335n4, 338n47, 342n37, 347n132, 349n35, 351n72, 362n26, 363n34; and ABM debate, 281; appointed chairman of ODM-SAC, 59, 345n102; on basic research, 59–61, 76, 90, 106, 144; Eisenhower and, 60–61, 63, 65, 75–80, 121, 137, 144, 346n125; and federal funding of science, 19, 55, 59–61, 65, 75–76, 90, 106, 150; and Geneva Conference of Experts, 129–130, 134; and hydrogen bomb, 28, 29, 79; on international cooperation in science, 92, 137, 193; and Manhattan Project, 21, 26, 28; and nuclear arms control, 49–50, 52, 53, 65–67, 79, 121, 127, 134, 136, 138; and nuclear test ban, 62, 80, 87, 125, 127–128, 134, 229, 346n116, 350– 351n48; and Oppenheimer case, 45–47, 64– 65, 73; political activities of, 65; Rabi-Fermi proposal on hydrogen bomb, 28, 29; on science advising, 18–19, 34, 63, 75–78, 106, 128, 161, 172, 232, 282–283; and SLAC, 147–148, 149, 152, 156; on space program, 90–91, 92, 94; Sputnik reaction, 49; Teller and, 80, 87, 121, 126, 128–129; and Vietnam War, 269–270 Rand Corporation, 51, 114, 132, 224, 265 Rayborn, William F., 242 Reagan, Ronald, 302, 315–317, 323 Research and Development Board (RDB), 32, 33, 36, 40, 42, 43 Revelle, Roger, 185, 202, 253 Ribicoff, Abraham, 214–215, 383n29 Robb, Roger, 46–47 Robertson, H. P., 3, 84, 90, 94 Rockefeller, Nelson, 42, 97, 314–315, 417n29, 417n33 Romney, George, 275 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 183, 244; and U.S. science policy, 15–16, 19, 37–38 Rostow, Walter, 272, 275, 278–280 Rowe, Hartley, 26, 28 Russell, Richard, 277, 282 Sabin, Albert B., 243 satellite and missile observation system (SAMOS), 114, 229 Schwartz, Charles, 264, 270, 305 Science Advisory Board (SAB), 15–18, 22, 25, 26, 37

Index Science for the People. See Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Actions Scientific Panel to the Interim Committee. See Oppenheimer, J. Robert, Oppenheimer panel Scientists and Engineers for Social and Political Actions (SESPA), 270, 304–305 Scientists’ Movement (for civilian and international control of atomic energy), 23–25, 26, 30, 120, 220, 290, 294 Scoville, Herbert “Pete,” 117, 123, 127, 129–130, 349n35 Seaborg, Glenn T., xii, 3, 106, 107, 168, 174, 220, 221, 263, 346n108, 351n68, 377n13, 394n6, 405n103; and ABM debate, 409n37; and ANP debate, 190; on high-energy physics, 152, 190–192; and hydrogen bomb debate, 26, 28–29; and international cooperation in science, 193–194, 303; Johnson and, 238–239, 247; Kennedy and, 186, 188, 190; Nixon and, 287, 288, 410n60; and nuclear arms control, 224, 409n37, 410n60; and nuclear test ban, 224, 225, 229; and Oppenheimer’s Fermi Award, 192–193, 240; politics of, 186, 220, 287, 395n36; Seaborg panel on basic research and graduate education, 168–173, 177, 179, 186, 231, 251, 374n70, 375n89; and SLAC, 191–192; on women and science, 245, 247, 397n76 Second World War. See World War II Seitz, Frederick, 45, 55, 272, 294–295, 388n14 semi-automatic ground environment (SAGE), 114 Serber, Robert, 148 Sevareid, Eric, 209–210, 214 Shepard, Alan, 221 Silent Spring. See Carson, Rachel Simon, Herbert A., 245 Single Integrated Operation Plan (SIOP), 117 Skolnikoff, Eugene, 194, 223–224, 314 Slichter, Charles, 265, 403n56 Smith, Cyril, 26, 28, 106 Smyth, Henry, 47, 380n73 Snow, C. P., 232 Souers, Sidney, 29, 40, 340n39 Soviet Union, 3, 29, 44, 194–195, 242, 248; and ABM debate in the United States, 115–116, 273–282, 290, 294; and ANP debate in the United States, 112–113; closed system of, 49–50, 52; and Cold War, 51–54, 65–66, 81, 117, 120, 189, 199, 219, 320, 407n154; and high-energy physics policy debate in the United States, 143–144, 147, 149–151, 153, 190–191, 240; and hydrogen bomb, 26, 30, 80, 120; missile programs, 100, 103, 107–110, 114; and nuclear test ban, 62, 120–141, 219, 224–227, 389–390n41; science and technol-

451

ogy, 62, 188, 231; and science policy debate in the United States, 160, 168, 285–286; scientific exchange with the United States, 185, 193–194, 255, and space race, 90, 91, 93, 98–99, 219–223, 248; Sputnik launch, 13, 59, 71–74, 76, 78, 82; as target of American surveillance, 52–53, 114, 358n68 space program, 73–74, 88–99, 113–114, 163, 166, 191, 193, 194, 213, 218, 219, 230–231, 233, 238, 294, 301, 308–309, 322–323; Project Apollo, 7, 183, 189, 219, 221–223, 231–233, 238, 248–251, 292, 297, 323; Project Mercury, 98, 219, 221; PSAC and space policy, 36, 85, 89–99, 100, 198, 219–224, 233, 237, 248–251. See also National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Spock, Benjamin, 241–242, 261 Sputnik: Eisenhower’s reaction to, 1, 53, 71, 74, 76, 78, 80–81, 86, 120, 158; and increased federal funding of science, 1, 3, 8, 13, 22, 35, 67–68, 73, 74–78, 90, 98, 100, 114, 117, 119, 130, 144, 150, 155–160, 172–173, 179, 191, 196, 230, 235, 251, 282; military response to, 110–112, 114, 119, 120; and nuclear arms control, 121, 188, 232, 294, 295; scientists’ reactions to, 75, 82, 87, 90, 144, 156–157, 164; U.S. reactions to, 13, 22, 71–78, 81, 82, 91, 98, 113, 159, 319 Staats, Elmer, 149–150, 206–207 Stanford accelerator or Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), 7, 8, 142–157, 169, 179, 192, 240, 266, 315, 317, 375n89 Stanford University, 85, 267–268, 305; scientists associated with, 3, 106, 133, 265, 296, 397n60. See also Stanford accelerator or Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) Stans, Maurice, 152–153, 156, 173 Starbird, Alfred D., 124 Stassen, Harold, 62, 121–123 Stauffacher, Charles, 33 Steelman, John, 32–33, 38 Stevenson, Adlai, 62 Stewart, Irwin, 32, 87 Stimson, Henry L., 20 Strategic Air Command (SAC), 114, 117 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 316, 418n45 Strauss, Lewis, 33, 62, 349–350n48; and Goldwater presidential campaign, 241, 285–286; and Oppenheimer, 46–48, 341n21; opponent of nuclear test ban, 73–75, 80, 120– 122, 124–125, 127–130; and PSAC, 133, 143, 145, 152, 184 Sup, Choi Hyung, 256 Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), 317 Supersonic Transport (SST), 4, 7, 287, 297– 299, 301, 302, 304, 308, 313, 321–322

452

Index

Szent-Györgyi, Albert, 261–262 Szilard, Leo, 19–20, 290, 366n105 Tape, Gerald, 240, 301 Tauc, Jan, 194–195 Taylor, Theodore B., 116 Taylor, William R., 263 Technical Working Group (TWG), 132; TWG I, 135; TWG II, 138–139 Technological Capabilities Panel (TCP), 49– 54, 58, 62–67, 73, 78–79, 81, 85, 86 technological enthusiasm, 8, 196; and Cold War, 3, 5, 7, 27, 78, 210, 323; of the military, 27, 271, 281, 323; of the Nixon administration, 303–304, 309; present day, 2, 5, 311, 316, 318, 324; scientists and, 57, 111, 178–179, 212, 219, 223, 250, 257, 271, 276, 281, 302–303, 309, 320; and space program, 219, 223, 250; and Sputnik, 3, 78, 210 technological fixes: limits of, 2, 104, 109, 136, 187–188, 218, 260, 318, 320–324; science advisers and, 2, 8, 27, 104, 109, 136, 187, 230, 268, 273, 300, 320–324; scientists and, 232; tendency toward, 232, 260, 320–324 technological skepticism: basic research and, 9, 30, 57, 119, 178–179, 223; of Carson, 209, 212; Cold War limits, 41, 304–305; of Eisenhower, 2, 87, 91, 98, 135, 176–179, 312, 318, 320; Franck Committee and, 20–21; and hydrogen bomb debate, 23, 26–28, 30; Johnson and, 257; Kennedy and, 235, 320; Nixon and, 287, 302, 312; of ODM-SAC, 52, 57, 66; of PSAC scientists, 2–8, 87, 91, 98, 100, 104, 107, 109, 119, 128, 135, 141, 166, 176, 189, 198, 200, 211, 218, 223, 228, 235, 251, 254, 257, 269, 272, 276, 281–282, 287, 300, 302, 305, 307, 310, 312, 316, 318, 320–321, 324; of Udall, 254 Teller, Edward, 29, 78, 87, 104, 107, 122, 183, 187, 192, 240, 254, 304, 315, 338n40, 377n14, 377n28, 389n8; and ABM debate, 290; Eisenhower and, 74–75, 87, 120–121, 128– 129, 131, 177; Goldwater and, 241, 243–244, 303–304; and hydrogen bomb, 29, 31, 45, 62, 64, 78; on military technology and the Cold War, 29, 41, 78, 120–121, 140, 254; Nixon and, 184, 285–286, 287–288, 301–302, 416n8; and Oppenheimer case, 41, 48; opponent of nuclear test ban, 79, 80, 87, 116, 120–121, 124, 127–130, 140, 187, 226–230, 366n105, 390n56, 391n60; political influence of, 4, 31, 38, 46, 72, 77–78, 80, 87, 120– 121, 184, 228–230, 314, 417n29; and PSAC, 3, 4, 126, 228–229, 254, 290, 301–302, 314, 319–321; PSAC and Teller-Lawrence

group, 107, 121, 122, 126; on role of scientists, 29 Terman, Frederick, 144 Terry, Luther, 209 Thomas, Bertram, 256 Thomas, Charles, 35–36, 103, 347n125 Toll, John S., 192 Townes, Charles, 251, 264–265, 394n10, 396n58, 397n60, 407n157, 416n12 Truman, Harry S., 26, 72–73, 159, 239, 307; and atomic bomb, 19; and Golden proposal, 34–35; and hydrogen bomb debate, 29–30, 38, 48, 309; and military research and development, 33; and nuclear arms control, 27; nuclear policy during the Korean War, 38–39; and ODM-SAC, 37–39, 41; on Oppenheimer, 29, 38; and presidential science advising, 30–41, 64, 309, 340n45; on science advisers, 38, 40, 309 Tsarapkin, Semen K., 130 Tukey, John W., 52, 106, 169, 174, 252–253 Turner, Howard S., 13, 303–304 Twining, Nathan F., 276 Udall, Stewart L., 185, 208, 214, 254, 288 Ulam, Stanislaw, 116 United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), 24, 29, 33, 36, 96, 98, 129, 163, 188, 190–191, 245, 345n99; and ANP debate, 112– 113; civilian technology projects, 247; and DST debate, 159–161; and federal funding of science, 26, 35, 55, 56, 165, 167, 169, 171, 184, 191–192, 231, 374n70; and Geneva Conference of Experts, 126, 129, 130; infl uence on science advising, 63, 79; and SLAC, 143–156, 169; and international cooperation in science, 193–194; military infl uence upon, 98, 220; Nixon and, 303, 306; and nuclear arms control, 124, 135, 141, 224; and nuclear test ban, 62, 80, 120, 122–123, 127, 129, 131, 133, 135, 138–139, 224–226, 229, 376n11; and nuclear weapons, 28, 38, 95, 133, 138; and Oppenheimer case, 45–47, 192–193, 239, 376n100; and space program, 93, 96 United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 200, 202, 204–208, 211–212, 214– 215, 217 United States Department of Defense (DOD), 32, 35–36, 55–56, 58–59, 61–63, 67, 74, 77, 79, 81, 84, 89, 91, 94–96, 100–101, 109–112, 114–119, 144, 158–161, 163, 165, 167, 171–172, 184–186, 188, 202, 231, 247–248, 251, 259–260, 267, 283–284, 289, 291, 304, 345n99, 374n70; and ABM debate, 274, 277, 290–291; and nuclear test ban, 120, 122–127, 129, 133–136,

Index 139–141, 224, 230; reorganizations, 40, 42, 102–105; and SLAC, 145, 147–151; and Vietnam War, 258–273 United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 160, 165, 168, 170–171, 184, 200–202, 205–206, 211, 214, 231 United States Department of Interior, 160, 163, 185, 254; and pesticides debate, 202, 204–205, 208, 211, 214–215 United States Department of State, 24, 36, 38, 42, 66, 92, 107, 116, 184, 194, 255, 265–266; and nuclear test ban, 122–141 University of Chicago, 106, 146 Urey, Harold, 18–19, 242–243, 388n14, 395n37 Vietnam War (1959–1975), 2, 4, 5, 7, 109, 159, 183, 217, 243–244, 252, 254–262, 264–274, 276, 280–282, 284–287, 290, 294–299, 303–310, 319–323; chemical and biological warfare or weapons (CBW), 261–264, 288; and PSAC, 258–259, 261, 264, 265–273, 281–282, 287, 295–296, 298–299, 308, 322; scientists’ views on, 244, 257–259, 261–262, 265, 280, 285–286, 295–296, 304–305 von Braun, Wernher, 87, 93, 97, 102, 177, 354n46 von Neumann, John, 18–19, 83 Wadsworth, James J., 132 Waterman, Alan, 36, 50, 61–63, 95–96, 149, 162, 168, 349n35, 373n59 Watson, James D., 203, 383n26 Watson, Kenneth, 404n93 Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG), 104 Webb, James E., 220–223, 248 Webster, William, 36, 43, 347n131 Weeks, Sinclair, 61 Weinberg, Alvin, 106–107, 170, 172–173, 174, 187, 232–233, 281, 357n44, 377n30 Weiss, Paul, 84, 351n68 Weisskopf, Victor, 131–132 Westheimer, Frank, 299 Westmoreland, William, 260, 266 White, Paul Dudley, 241 White House Science Council (WHSC), 315– 316 White-Stevens, Robert, 209 Whitman, Walter G., 43 Wiesner, Jerome, 4, 38, 84, 109, 140, 174, 189, 233, 236, 237, 250, 268, 312, 316, 328, 349n35, 351n72, 376n13, 388n8, 415n22; and ABM debate, 275, 279–282, 290, 294, 298, 301; on AICBM panel, 114–115; and ANP debate, 190–192; and federal funding of science,

453

231–232, 301; and international cooperation in science, 193–195, 220, 256, 303, 379– 380n67; Johnson and, 236, 237, 394n5; Kennedy and, 184–190, 189, 192–193, 197–198, 233–234, 236, 258n68, 390n47, 390n49; and nuclear arms control, 81, 189, 196, 219–220, 226–227, 274–276, 279, 286, 347n131; and nuclear test ban, 226–229, 234, 389–390n41; and OST, 197–198, 308; and pesticides debate, 201–208, 214, 387n117; political activities of, 241–243, 259, 261, 282, 285, 407n157; and SLAC, 190; and space program, 91, 94, 189, 196, 219–224, 238, 251 Wigner, Eugene, 107, 152, 154, 156, 187, 191, 281, 290, 303–304, 377n30 Wiley, Alexander, 167 Wilson, Charles Edward, 34, 38, 40, 340n37, 344n72 Wilson, Charles Erwin, 44, 101, 103, 160, 344n72, 345n99; and cutbacks to basic research funding, 54, 58–62, 65, 75, 158 Wilson, R. C., 44, 61 Wilson, Robert, 21, 155 Wilson, Woodrow, 15, 183 Women in Science and Engineering (WISE), 246 World War I, 15, 17 World War II, 2, 26, 38; Eisenhower and, 42, 58; impact on science in United States, 25, 71, 73, 146, 156, 299, 306, 309; military technology, 17–18, 232; science and policymaking, 7, 18–22, 23, 137–138, 266; scientists associated with projects and committees during, 3, 17, 18, 21, 27, 36, 37, 43, 87, 94, 105, 137–138, 238, 268–269, 321. See also Manhattan Project Xu, Liangying, xi–xii Yang, Chen Ning, 73 Yarborough, Ralph, 164 York, Herbert F., 3, 83, 84, 118, 247, 347n131, 393n4, 397n60; and ABM debate, 114, 115– 116, 276, 279–282; and ANP debate, 113; as ARPA chief scientist, 94, 96, 104, 353n32; as DDRE, 84, 113–114, 149, 172, 184, 186; Eisenhower and, 92, 150–152, 177, 352n7; Johnson and, 244; on military technology and national security, 104, 109, 115–116; and missile programs, 85, 101, 115–116, 119; and nuclear arms control, 81, 104, 247, 289– 290; and nuclear test ban, 116, 123, 125, 127–128, 224, 229, 230; political activities of, 242–243, 285, 303, 311–312; and SAMOS, 114; and satellites, 85, 89, 92, 114; and science advising, 125–126, 316; and SLAC, 149,

454

Index

York, Herbert F. (continued ) 150–151, 152; and space program, 90, 92, 94, 96, 150, 354n46; on Vietnam War, 265, 268, 270 Zacharias, Jerrold R., 3, 43, 50, 84, 312, 328, 349n35, 351n72, 401n19; and ANP debate, 50, 57, 112, 343n53; and Oppenheimer case, 45,

51; political activities of, 184, 270, 284–285, 407n157; and science advising, 50; and science education, 186; and TCP, 50; and Vietnam War, 259 Zachariasen, Frederik, 260, 401n19 zero-gradient synchrotron (ZGS), 191 Zinn, Walter, 106, 174 Zuckerman, Solly, 203

About the Author Zuoyue Wang is the Hixon-Riggs Visiting Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Harvey Mudd College for 2008–2009, on leave from the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where he is an associate professor of history. Born in China and originally trained in physics, he received his Ph.D. in the history of science from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was the co-recipient of the 2003 Price/Webster Prize from the History of Science Society.