The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

by Daniel Bell

  But the Baruch Plan became mired in the complex negotiations with the Soviet Union, which offered one objection after another to the pooling of weapons. In October 1949, the United States announced that the Soviet Union had exploded its first atomic bomb. That single shot shattered the hopes for the international control of atomic energy. It was a signal that the cold war, which had been rumbling since 1947 when the United States began to confront the Soviet Union on such questions as the guerilla war in Greece, the Soviet pressure on Turkey, and the stalemate on the unification of Germany, had become an open reality.

  The unity of scientific opinion was also shattered. Fear of Russia on the part of many scientists (notably Teller, Wigner, and Lawrence), and the rising power of the Strategic Air Command, began to pose many different kinds of problems. The division of opinion among scientists was no longer derived solely from “technical” assessments. Scientists who were taking strategic stands now had to justify themselves in political terms as well.

  The explosion of the Soviet A-bomb transferred the discussion of policy issues from the public realm to the private arena required by military security. Thus from 1949 to 1955, the political role of the scientists was played out in secret, and participation was restricted to the elites in advisory or administrative positions in the government. During those years a number of savage “guerilla wars” were fought in Washington, but little reached the public at that time.

  Three issues were involved: the decision to build the hydrogen bomb, the creation of tactical nuclear weapons for “limited war” instead of relying on “massive retaliation,” and the possibility of an extended continental air defense. Among the scientific elite then in government, there was no real disagreement about the need to confront the Soviet Union. The question was how to do it. The issues were primarily strategic and political, though technical matters were inextricably linked with policy, as the scientists emphasized, while the military sought to make the issue almost entirely political and strategic.

  At the center was the doctrine of “massive retaliation” developed by the Strategic Air Command, which flew long-range bombers such as the B-36 and later the B-52. The Strategic Air Command argued that in a future war it would be increasingly difficult for bombers to penetrate enemy air defenses, and it would thus be better to gamble on delivering a few large bombs with overwhelming power to kill rather than many small bombs. When the Soviet shot was revealed in October 1949, the air force began pressing for the development of a super-bomb, and on this proposal a radical cleavage developed within the administration.31

  The issue was referred to the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, which was composed of the leading scientists who had been the organizers of wartime research, including Conant, Du Bridge, Rabi, Fermi, and Oppenheimer, who was chairman. After considerable debate the committee voted 6–3 that it would be unwise to undertake such a program. Oppenheimer opposed the H-bomb largely on the grounds of wastefulness and danger, and supported George Kennan’s view that the country was placing undue reliance on strategic air power and that a containment policy, based on the capability of waging a limited war, would be politically more effective.32

  After protracted debate in high government circles, President Truman in January 1951 ordered a crash program to develop an H-bomb. (The decision, as was noted later, was made against the background of the announcement that Klaus Fuchs, a physicist who had worked at Los Alamos, had confessed in Great Britain to turning over secret information to the Soviet Union.) The strategic debate now shifted to different grounds. Oppenheimer sought to show that Europe could be defended by small-scale tactical nuclear weapons and, with the support of the National Security Council, set up Project Vista at the California Institute of Technology, under the direction of Lee Du Bridge, to assess the feasibility of this argument. At MIT, Zacharias and Wiesner argued that the United States should set up a distant early warning system and an adequate civil defense, on the theory that if we could be made impregnable to Soviet attack, negotiations could be then opened to halt the arms race.33 Subsequently Project East River was set up at Brookhaven to study the practical possibilities of civil defense and Project Lincoln at MIT to study continental air defense.

  In 1953, the new Eisenhower administration endorsed the policy of massive retaliation as official strategic doctrine.34 The Strategic Air Command, as the striking arm of the air force, now became the dominant voice in military policy. But the reports emerging from the science study groups continued to challenge its doctrine. The Vista report declared that Western Europe could be best defended by tactical atomic weapons, rather than an all-or-none strategy which might allow the Russians to nibble away at small pockets. A summer study group of Project Lincoln suggested not only that a continental air defense was feasible but that a distant early warning line was a matter of highest priority. Moreover, the scientists, now excluded from policy decisions, began to urge public discussion of these issues. In a direct challenge, Oppenheimer wrote an article for Foreign Affairs in July 1953 calling for a public debate on the new weapons policy. With that challenge, the die was cast.

  When theurgic springs are touched—and what other event in the recorded history of man is comparable to the diremption of matter itself?—men need some personifications of these frightening powers in order to make them bearable. Because he was the genie who had conjured up the bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer had become for the world the Janus-faced symbol of science as creator and destroyer. And it was as the symbol of science that the military now moved against him.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer was a gnostic figure about whom legends gathered for the reason that he seemed to have stepped more from the world of thaumaturgy than of science, or because his very presence hinted at the magical springs which join the two when one intends to tamper with the forces of the universe. A physicist and a poet, his mind was seemingly focused upon that far-distant zero point where mathematics and mysticism merge to dissolve the cosmos into the numerological void of oneness. A slim man, head carried high, his bony features and translucent eyes were set in a face that seemed to have been etched by inner anguish. On the surface, he was a strange choice for directing the refractory task of making the bomb.

  Yet in any gathering of scientists his intellectual authority was quickly apparent. And with his brilliance he could systematically and coldly drive the scientific teams along the single track toward solving all the difficult equations which led to the final assembly of the bomb itself. At the end, when the mushroom cloud rose ever higher over Alamogordo, its blinding light enveloping the skies, other men could only fumble for words, but a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita, the words of Sri Krishna, lord of the fate of mortals, came to Oppenheimer’s lips: “I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.”

  The man himself was of softer clay. Though rarely polite to fools, he could be swayed by tougher characters of the world of power, which led him in the late 1930s to contribute to communist causes and, during the war, to crumble before some of the security officers who demanded that he name former associates who had been communists. Power tempted him and, as it often does, in some ways corrupted him. Though he sometimes spoke like a prophet, he had become a priest; he spoke for power, rather than to power. On the specific moral and political issues that confronted scientists in the early postwar years, Oppenheimer had not sided with the crusaders, such as Szilard and the younger scientists at Chicago; in fact, he had often disappointed them. He had not opposed dropping the atom bomb; he had not opposed the May-Johnson bill; and even though he had opposed the H-bomb he later withdrew his opposition. When the curtains on policy were drawn after 1949, he had entered the corridors of power rather than remain outside, and the issues for which he fought were primarily political. A troubled man, he had committed himself to an “ethic of responsibility” and on this he took his moral stand.

  In December 1953, after the meeting of a small White House committee,35 President Eisenhower issued an order directing that a
“blank wall” be placed between Robert Oppenheimer and any secret information until a security hearing had been held. The basis of the action against Oppenheimer was a letter written in November 1953 to J. Edgar Hoover by William L. Borden, a former air force pilot who, until July of that year, had served as executive director of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. In that letter, Borden declared that “more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.” Hoover then assembled a file on Oppenheimer and turned it over to the White House.

  The basis of the charges against Oppenheimer—that in the late 1930s he had been sympathetic to communist causes—had long been known to security agencies and to General Groves, Oppenheimer’s superior in the Manhattan District Project. Not one new item of evidence was presented at the 1954 hearings that had not been known in 1943, when Oppenheimer had taken charge of the bomb-construction project. But what was clear from the testimony was that the real inspiration for the action was the air force, which feared Oppenheimer’s influence and drew sinister conclusions from his political positions.36 Thus, Major General Roscoe C. Wilson, the former chief of the Air War College, testified that he once “felt compelled to go to the Director of Intelligence to express concern over what I felt was a pattern of action ... not helpful to the national defense.” The items cited included Oppenheimer’s interest in the “internationalizing of atomic energy” and his insistence that it was technically premature to build a nuclear-powered aircraft. David Griggs, the chief scientist of the air force, also testified to a “pattern of activities,” in which he included support for Project Vista and a belief attributed to Oppenheimer that it was necessary “to give up ... the strategic part of our total air power” in order to achieve world peace, which led him “to a serious question as to [Oppenheimer’s] loyalty.” In the final decision of the AEC, Oppenheimer’s loyalty was reaffirmed, but in the light of his past associations and his opposition to the hydrogen bomb he was judged a “security risk” and denied access to classified material.37

  The Oppenheimer case is now long past, a shameful instance of national folly. The specific strategic issues are now obsolete. The rise of missile technology has brought the engineer and the political scientist as well as the theoretical physicist into the arena of weapons policy and has given a new complexity to the meaning of strategy. In recent years, scientists have continued to play important roles in connection with technical questions about arms control. But what the Oppenheimer case signified was that the messianic role of the scientists—as conceived by themselves and feared by their opponents—was finished, and different questions had come to the fore.

  The ever-increasing growth of science and the introduction of scientists into the administrative and policy levels of government have raised questions to which we still have few answers. It is doubtful whether we shall find recapitulated the story told by C. P. Snow of the intense personal feud between Henry Tizard and F. A. Lindemann, which dominated the British scene during World War II, or the duel between Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer, which captured some of that flavor in the mid-1950s, simply because the arena of science politics has widened so considerably. It is no longer a question of personalities—though dominant figures and highly placed cliques will always play decisive roles—but of institutional arrangements and divisions of responsibility. There is a federal council of science and technology, made up of policy officials of government agencies which include science as a principal operating function. There is a National Science Foundation, charged with the funding of basic science and research. And there are the many agencies which together disburse the billions of dollars for research and development.

  Robert Gilpin has posed these questions: Does the scientist-advisor have the right to initiate advice or must he speak only when spoken to? Ought the scientist-advisor concern himself with the political, strategic, and moral implications of technical questions or must he refrain from stepping outside his technical competence? Should the science advisor be given broad policy matters on which to give advice or must he be restricted to narrowly prescribed questions?

  Such formulations, unfortunately, are still redolent of the simple days when “technical” matters were left to the expert and “policy” to the responsible political officials. But technical decision-making in all spheres is inextricably linked with policy questions. The recent debate on the Anti-Ballistics Missile is a case in point. Here scientists (physicists and political scientists) were divided on both technical and political questions. But the crucial point is that as against the period of the 1950s, when these questions were settled in closed bureaucratic labyrinths, the issue was thrashed out openly in the Congress so that all its dimensions, technical and political, could be openly explored. As Paul Doty has observed, “The debate preceding the Senate vote was a milestone in the history of scientific and technical advising related to military decision making.” In the wake of the debate, one of the proponents of the ABM system, Albert Wohlstetter, a political scientist and operations research specialist at Rand and the University of Chicago, charged his opponents with misusing quantitative data, and a special panel of the Operations Research Association (ORSA) upheld his point of view. But this report, too, has been subject to vigorous open debate, and as Doty has remarked in his essay, three different issues were involved—the assessment of the need for a defense system, the assessment of the solution, and the political value of the solution. The proponents of ABM had concentrated on the first issue and its opponents on the second, but the differences in quantitative methodology (technical issues) actually disguised a doctrinal difference—and where doctrinal differences are involved, as has long been evident in the history of the church or of university faculties, science has to adopt a self-denying ordinance regarding accusations of misconduct or bad faith lest it became a party to the imposition of orthodoxies and (as in the case of Robert Oppenheimer) the branding of dissidents as heretics who are to be either dismissed or put to death.38

  The fact is that technical issues cannot easily be separated from political ones, and scientists who come into the policy arena will necessarily be advocates as well as technical advisors. But one facet cannot be a shield for the other. And on issues which affect a nation’s security, health, economy, or way of life—be it an ABM system or a supersonic transport—any technical policy has to be arrived at only after open and informed political debate. A banal conclusion—but what is often agreed to in rhetoric is rarely achieved in practice.

  It is a truism of sociology that the initial patterns of any social system, like the first tracks through a virgin forest, shape its future modes. Traditions become established, routines are set, vested interests develop, innovations are either resisted or must conform to the adaptive patterns laid down at the start, and an aura of legitimacy surrounds the existing ways and becomes in time the conventional wisdom of the institution. In short, “structure” is not only a response to past needs but itself becomes a shaping tool of the future.

  The first organizational forms of science developed after the war were ad hoc responses to the sudden urgencies precipitated by the tensions of the cold war and the new awareness of the centrality of science and the need to support research: the expansion of the universities as research institutions, the creation of large scientific laboratories at universities supported by government (the jet propulsion lab at Cal Tech, the Argonne atomic lab at the University of Chicago, MITRE and Lincoln lab at MIT, the Riverside electronics lab at Columbia, and the like), the growth of “consortiums” such as the Brookhaven lab on Long Island managed by a half-dozen universities. After these have come the large government health-research centers, such as those at the National Institutes of Health, the major National Science Foundation-supported laboratories, the creation of a vast number of non-profit research “think tanks” such as Rand, the Institute of Defense Analysis, the Aerospace Corporation, and so on.

  As yet, no coherent science policy has emerged and, given the
huge, diverse and complex patterns that have sprouted in topsy-turvy fashion, it is unlikely that any “rationalization” will take place for a long time, if ever. In one fundamental sense, such a sprawl is an advantage. The very diversity of structures means that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to establish a single czar or impose a pattern of central direction such as exists, to a considerable extent, in the Soviet Union, where the Academy of Science is a directing agency for science. Yet the very dependency of science on government for financial aid leads to vagaries of support for different fields: at times according to the whims of fashion, or the strength of organized lobbies, or the shifting emphasis on what constitutes “national needs.” Such vagaries have played havoc with the universities, bringing about enormous expansion in the decade of the 1960s and a threatening contraction in the 1970s. Beginning with the close of the Johnson administration and carried over into the Nixon administration, the old scientific elite was kept at arm’s length from the formulation of top government policy. Nixon, in fact, abolished the Office of Science and Technology and during his administration “science policy” became a shamble. (In 1975, President Ford proposed the creation of a new science advice office.) Thus one finds, a quarter of a century after the onset of a new age, that while the interdependencies of science and government have been sealed, there is still no real structure or consistent policy in the relations between the two. Yet, given the strategic role of science for military power and of technology for economic advantage, at some point the government will have to face up to the problem of what constitutes a policy for science.