by Daniel Bell
20 Bacon, New Atlantis, in Famous Utopias, ed. Charles M. Andrews (New York, n.d.),p. 171.
21 Few contemporary scientists have had such an intensely messianic vision of their role as Szilard, who, with John von Neumann, was one of the last Renaissance men of science. Physicist, biologist, a founder of information theory, he made original contributions to almost any subject that caught his restless attention.
In his fascinating memoirs, Szilard relates that while in Berlin in 1932 he read a book by H. G. Wells, The World Set Free, written in 1913, in which Wells predicts the discovery of artificial radioactivity (which he places in 1933, one year before it actually occurred), the liberation of atomic energy, the development of atomic bombs, and a world war fought by England, France, and America against Germany—in 1956—in which all the major cities of the world are destroyed by atomic bombs
A year later Szilard was a refugee in England, and a speech by Lord Rutherford pooh-poohing the possibility of liberating atomic energy on an industrial scale led Szilard to think of Wells’s predictions. The idea of a self-sustaining chain reaction so dominated his thinking that in 1934 he worked out the theoretical equations which could govern it. Having read Wells, and fearing that the knowledge would become public, Szilard assigned the documents to the British Admiralty in order to keep them secret.
When Lise Meitner reported on the Hahn-Stasseman experiment in uranium fission, Szilard was among the first to realize its possibilities. He participated in the early explorations of chain reactions at Columbia in 1939. And he initiated the letter to President Roosevelt (through the mediation of Albert Einstein and Alexander Sachs) which led to the Manhattan Project and the technology of the atom bomb. When the bomb was successfully tested, Szilard took the lead, with the Nobel laureate James Franck, in the unsuccessful effort to dissuade the government from using the atom bomb against Japan.
After the war, Szilard was active in the scientists’ effort to wrest control of atomic energy from the military, and he organized a political lobby, the Council for a Livable World, to influence public and congressional opinion. He died in 1964.
Szilard’s reminiscences, put together by his wife from taped interviews, are in The Intellectual Migration, ed. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, Mass., 1969). A remarkable memoir of Szilard by Edward Shils appeared in Encounter (December 1964), pp. 35–41.
The official account of the development of the atom bomb, the Smyth Report, is revealing on the initial innocence of American science. Smyth writes:
The announcement of the hypothesis of fission and its experimental confirmation took place in January 1939.... At that time American-born nuclear physicists were so unaccustomed to the idea of using their science for military purposes that they hardly realized what needed to be done. Consequently the early efforts both at restricting publication and at getting government support were stimulated largely by a small group of foreign-born physicists centering on L. Szilard and including E. Wigner, E. Teller, V. F. Weisskopf, and E. Fermi. (Henry D. Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes [Princeton, 1946] , p. 45.)
22 Wallace Sayre, “Scientists and American Science Policy,” Science (March 24, 1962).
23 The organization of science for the war effort was centralized in the Office of Scientific Research and Development, headed by Vannevar Bush, a former professor of electrical engineering who was known for his work in applied mathematics, particularly the differential analyzer which became one of the foundations of the electronic computer. Bush had been vice-president of MIT, and when the war broke out, was president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the prestigious research institution.
Under Bush there was a National Defense Research Committee which included K. T. Compton, president of MIT, James B. Conant, president of Harvard (both scientists), Richard C. Tolman, dean of the graduate school of the California Institute of Technology, Frank B. Jewett, president of the National Academy of Science, C. P. Coe, U.S. Commissioner of Patents, and several others. The aforementioned five each became the head of a division dealing with a class of problems. Thus Conant became the chairman of Division B, bombs, fuels, gases, and chemical problems, and became the effective liaison between the laboratories working on the atom bomb and Washington.
In the first experimental efforts at producing fissionalbe material, the physicists were grouped under three program chiefs, Arthur H. Compton, Ernest O. Lawrence, and Harold C. Urey, all Nobel Prize winners. The work on a sustained chain reaction was carried out at the University of Chicago by Enrico Fermi. The final assembly of the bomb was done at Los Alamos under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer with a group that included such men as Hans Bethe, George Kistiakowsky, Robert F. Bacher, and Edward Teller, with advice and help from such luminaries as Niels Bohr, Eugene Wigner, I. I. Rabi and others.
For a brief, official history of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, see James Phinney Baxter 3rd, Scientists Against Time (Boston, 1946).
24 Clearly the struggle was not simply a matter of “the” scientists versus “the” military. The scientists were not a monolithic block, and as the cold war developed, a number of prestigious figures like von Neumann, Wigner, and Teller took a hard political line which often allied them with the military. But as the ensuing discussion argues, what counted—and this was recognized by all—was that the debates—on control of atomic energy, on the internationalization of control, on the H-bomb, and on civilian defense versus SAC—symbolically pitted science (particularly in some of its messianic conceptions) against the military, representing traditional political control, even though there was no unanimity of opinion.
25 The release is reprinted as appendix 6 of the Smyth Report, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, by Henry De Wolf Smyth, the official report of the Manhattan District Project (Princeton, 1946), p. 247.
26 “Ten Years That Changed the World,” by Eugene Rabinowitch, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (January 1956; emphasis in the original). The Bulletin was launched largely through efforts of that early group at the University of Chicago to provide a public platform for the scientists’ views.
27 The Franck Committee memorandum, “A Report to the Secretary of War, June 1945,” was printed in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (May 1, 1946). The primary political-military aim of the United States in the postwar world, the authors went on, should be the prevention of an atomic-arms race, which could be brought about only through the international control of atomic energy. To this end, if international control were deemed possible, the United States should use the bomb only for demonstration effect; but if this seemed unlikely, the United States should renounce any advantage to be gained by the “immediate use of the first and comparatively inefficient bombs” in order to prevent a postwar nuclear-arms race.
28 The campaign was carried out on two “levels.” A number of organizations (the Federation of Atomic Scientists, the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, and the National Committee on Atomic Education) were formed under the leadership of younger project scientists from Los Alamos and Chicago to lobby in Congress and to educate the public. The leaders of the scientific community who had been the “directorate” of the wartime research—Oppenheimer, Rabi, Du Bridge, Conant, and others—had assumed important policy roles within the administration and they were voices within the executive branch.
It was not, in fact, a coordinated campaign. An uneasy sense had developed among the younger scientists that the “directorate” was too close to the administration and unwilling to confront the military overtly. This produced an amorphous division among the politically active scientists between those who were “out” as against those who were “in,” a distinction in part generational, in part between those who had worked primarily at Chicago, as against those in Cambridge, Los Alamos, and Washington, who had quickly become the establishment. As is so often the case, those who did not participate in the decisions felt themselves to be more “principled” than those on the inside, while the
directorate used the arguments of “realism” and “responsibleness” to justify the accommodations and compromises with the other contending forces within the administration.
On the first issue, the future of atomic energy, the initiative was taken by the younger outside scientists. The administration had submitted a bill, prepared mainly by the War Department, which would have reduced the government’s role in the peaceful development of atomic energy, turning it over, in great measure, to private industry and concentrating largely on military purposes. This bill, the May-Johnson bill, became the target of a frenetic campaign by scientists, led largely by the Chicago group, who “with missionary fervor’ flocked to Washington to lobby in Congress, join “the voices of doom on radio,” and present capsule courses in nuclear physics to mass magazine readers. In the end, the administration bill was defeated and the McMachon Act was passed instead. It set up an independent Atomic Energy Commission which was charged with the dual responsibility of weapons development and peaceful uses of atomic energy.
The history of this campaign is told in detail in Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America 1945–47 (Chicago, 1965).
29 Oppenheimer, in addition to presenting some of the ideas, functioned also as “scientific coach” for the panel. As he related at one point: “... my job was that of teacher. I would go to the blackboard and say you can make energy this way in a periodic table and that way and that way. This is the way bombs are made and reactors are made. I gave in other words a course. I gave parts of this course also to Mr. Acheson and Mr. McCloy at night informally.” In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Transcript of Hearing before Personnel Security Board, United States Atomic Energy Commission, 1954. This volume, almost a thousand pages long, is an invaluable source for the politics of science during this early period and is basic to understanding the bureaucratic battle between the scientists and the military which is discussed later in this section.
30 As Robert Gilpin has pointed out: “... the Baruch Plan also provided for an open scientific world in that all the research laboratories under the Authority, wherever they were located, would be open to the scientists of all nations and scientists in nuclear physics would be free to communicate with other scientists. The political significance of such freedom of communication would be that nations would be prevented from taking secret advantage of new knowledge. Scientific breakthroughs which would enable a nation to infringe on the control system established under this plan would be known to all and the control system could be improved as fast as knowledge developed. Every nation would thus be assured that no other was secretly advancing its nuclear weapon technology.” Robert Gilpin, American Scientists and Nuclear Weapons Policy (Princeton, 1962), p. 54.
31 During the work on the nuclear bomb at Los Alamos, a number of scientists had speculated on the possibility of a thermonuclear weapon, a so-called fusion bomb based on the heat generated by the fission of small atomic bombs. Hans Bethel the head of the theoretical-physics division, had written some studies of solar explosions as the prototype of thermonuclear reactions, and Edward Teller had initiated studies at Los Alamos on the possibility of a fusion bomb. Now Teller, supported by a number of physicists at Berkeley, principally Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez, began to press for a crash program to develop an H-bomb.
32 Fermi and Rabi, in a minority statement, opposed the bomb “on fundamental ethical principles,” warning that it would be a “danger to humanity as a whole.” (In this they were influenced by Hans Bethe, who had warned that the H-bomb had a special radiation hazard because of the long half-life of Carbon-14.) But they also added that if the cold war could not be halted, there was no recourse but to go ahead with the H-bomb.
33 Ironically, these strategic positions were completely reversed in subsequent years. In 1963, the Kennedy administration proposal to strengthen civil defense was held to be the hallmark of a “tough” policy, i.e. giving the public a false sense of security against Soviet missiles and thus encouraging a hard response to Soviet policy. In 1969, the Nixon administration proposal to build an Anti-Ballistics Missile (ABM) was attacked on the ground that such actions simply escalated the arms race. Yet in the early 1950s, civil defense had been the rallying point for the opponents of “big bomb” doctrine.
34 It was a strategy which peculiarly matched the temperament of the new regime, reflecting the “admonitory” manner of the new secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, and reinforcing the illusion of omnipotence that had been so characteristic of the American national style. It fitted the demand for economy and the reduction of military expenditures, voiced by the new secretary of treasury, George Humphrey, who promised, with characteristic American buncombe, “a bigger bang for a buck.”
35 At the meeting were President Eisenhower, Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson, Attorney General Herberr Brownell, Director of Defense Mobilization Arthur S. Flemming, White House special assistant for national security Robert Curler, and Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. For the background of this discussion see Lewis L. Strauss, Men and Decisions (New York, 1962), chap. 14.
36 The tipoff was an article in Fortune of August 1953 written by Charles J. V. Murphy, a Fortune editor but also a colonel in the Air Force Reserve and former assistant to Air Force General Hoyt Vandenberg. The article hinted for the first time in public print at Oppenheimer’s pre-war communist associations and attacked the scientists active in the Lincoln summer study group and Project Vista, implying that a cabal known as ZORC (from the initials of Jerrold Zacharias, Oppenheimer, Rabi, and Charles Lauristen) had masterminded a plot to subvert the Strategic Air Command. The source of the charge, it was revealed later, was David Griggs, chief scientist for the air force, who told the AFC Security Board that he had seen Zacharias write these initials on a blackboard during a meeting of the Lincoln summer study group in 1952. Under oath, Zacharias denied the charge. See In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, pp. 750, 922. A detailed account of these episodes, with much useful background material, can be found in Philip Rieff’s essay “The Case of Dr. Oppenheimer,” in On Intellectuals, ed. Philip Rieff (New York, 1959).
37 The literature on the Oppenheimer case is vast. The best source is still the transcript of the hearings themselves. A comprehensive review, favorable to Oppenheimer, can be found in Philip M. Stern, with Harold Green, The Oppenheimer Case: Security on Trial (New York, 1969). A biographical account of Oppenheimer, contrasting him with Ernest O. Lawrence, can be found in Nuel Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer (New York, 1959). There is also a useful review article on the issue by Sanford Lakoff, “Science and Conscience,” International Journal (Autumn 1970).
38 Paul Doty, “Can Investigations Improve Scientific Advice? The Case of the ABM,” Minerva (London), vol. X, no. 2 (April 1972).
39 In 1958, the American Association for the Advancement of Science—a loose body with a membership of 135,000 and two hundred and eighty-seven affiliated scientific societies—sought to assert its leadership as the spokesman for science by convening a Parliament of Science to consider the proposal of a federal cabinet department of science. Nothing came of the move.
40 See J. Bronowski, “The Disestablishment of Science,” Encounter (July 1971).
41 Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty (London, 1951), p. 6. As Professor Polanyi writes further:
What technical inventions were the discoveries of the Nobel Laureates Planck, Einstein, Perrin, Millikan, Michaelson, Rutherford, Aston, Chadwick, Barkla, Heisenberg, Compton, Franck, G. Hertz, Rubens, Laue, Joliot, Fermi. Urey, Anderson, W. H. and W. L. Bragg, Schrödinger, Dirac, etc., unconsciously intended to produce? No one can tell—so the new theory of science must pass them over.
One wonders how the great physicists in the list above would have fared if, before embarking on their investigation, they had to get a certificate of its social usefulness from a scientific directorate, as contemplated by Marxist scientists and their friends. To what confli
cts may not have led their “arrogant pretence” to be the sole judges of their own preference! (Pp. 82-83.)
42 On the history of the Soviet biology issue, see David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). The book by Zhores Medvedev was published by Columbia University Press in 1970 and The Medvedev Papers by Macmillan in 1971. The TLS quotation is from November 5, 1971, p. 1,388. Sakharov’s book was published in 1968, with an introduction and notes by Harrison Salisbury. The quotation is from p. 26.
43 Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-1033 (London, 1958).
44 A theoretician of the Technicians party. Professor Eagle, had argued that marriage partners, in the national interest, should consult the intelligence register, for a high-IQ man who mates with a low-IQ woman is wasting his genes. The activist women, on the other hand, took romance as their banner and beauty as their flag, arguing that marriage should be based on attraction. Their favorite slogan was “Beauty is achievable by all.”
45 Gary S. Becker, Human Capital (New York, 1964), p. 112. Later writers have suggested this figure may be too high; the point remains that a college degree does provide an investment “yield.”
46 For a comprehensive discussion of this major social change, see Jencks and Riesman. The Academic Revolution (New York, 1968). For a survey of the reaction, see Stephen Graubard and Geno Ballotti, eds., The Embattled University (New York, 1970).
47 As Michael Young describes the rationale in his fable:
The proportion of people with IQs over 130 could not be raised—the task was rather to prevent a fall—but the proportion of such people in work which called upon their full capacities was steadily raised.... Civilization does not depend upon the stolid mass, the homme moyen sensuel, but upon creative minority, the innovator who with one stroke can save the labour of 10,000, the brilliant few who cannot look without wonder, the restless elite who have made mutation a social, as well as a biological, fact. The ranks of the scientists and technologists, the artists and the teachers, have been swelled, their education shaped to their high genetic destiny, their power for good increased. Progress is their triumph; the modern world their monument. (Pelican edition, 1961, p. 15.)
