Fear Itself (71 page)

This had by no means been the only possibility. Famously, Robert Oppenheimer was deeply skeptical. Already in 1949, he had expressed ethical reservations, writing that “the use of this weapon will bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives,” adding that this was “not a weapon which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi-military purposes. Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations.” He also had practical qualms. The H-bomb project faced formidable technological hurdles, and, he thought, had limited wartime purposes because it simply was too big for any strategic targets.
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David Lilienthal and some other members of the Atomic Energy Commission thought that a decision to build a “Super” bomb either should be delayed until its strategic utility could be better assessed or the United States should opt for renunciation as a way to halt an accelerating nuclear competition, test anew the possibility of international agreements, and gain moral prestige in the cultural Cold War.
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Truman rejected this course. During a January 31, 1950, meeting with Chairman Lilienthal, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson that lasted just seven minutes, the president accepted the recommendation the AEC, the Joint Chiefs, the Defense Department, and the State Department had made, and he directed the AEC “to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or super-bomb.” By late February, Secretary of Defense Johnson received the “most urgent” appeal by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who requested that the AEC move toward the “immediate implementation of an all-out development of hydrogen bombs and means for their production and delivery.” On March 10, President Truman approved a National Security Council special committee report declaring that “the thermonuclear weapon program is regarded as a matter of the highest urgency.”
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II.

D
URING THE
most confrontational moment of the Cold War, when the fate of the planet seemed literally to hang in the balance, the role of U.S. scientists as researchers and as citizens moved front and center. At stake was the control and funding of their research, and the certification of their loyalty. Both were adjudicated in an atmosphere suffused by nuclear fear.

At the very moment in 1945 when the original May-Johnson bill, which would have placed atomic energy under military control, was being resisted successfully by the organized scientific community, the Senate’s Military Affairs Committee took up the closely related question of how to organize scientific research. The debate about the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission was a dispute about whether civilians or military officers would be in charge of an inherently guarded process. When a West Virginia Senator, Harley Kilgore, proposed during World War II that the federal government should create a National Science Foundation to actively plan priorities and provide oversight, he provoked conflict about the degree to which civilian government should direct research programs. His plan envisioned a director, to be appointed by the president, who would command a board composed of eight presidential nominees from American society, and nine from cabinet departments, including the Department of the Navy and the Department of War.

His explicit goal was that of linking research to social as well as military needs; to this end, he included a division for the social sciences. Kilgore’s bill further ordered that funding be divided equally among the forty-eight states, plus some 15 percent to be distributed on the basis of each state’s population, and that patents that resulted from federal funding remain in the public realm. In all, this approach combined populism with planning, an orientation that drew on early New Deal traditions and the left-of-center side of southern preferences. Over the course of the half decade of discussion that followed, his viewpoint was supported most ardently by some other southern members, including Claude Pepper and J. William Fulbright, who resisted what they believed to be elite control of science and sought instead to harness research in the spirit of their understanding of democracy.
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Other southerners, by contrast, resisted strong federal planning capacity, including the control of patents, and thus often sided with Republicans during the various episodes in which this legislation was considered. For here was an issue in which the South’s representatives were caught between their growing suspicion of federal bureaucracies in domestic affairs and their support for a strong federal role in national security.

Scientists lined up on both sides.
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A minority, who backed progressive, popular-front organizations such as the American Association of Scientific Workers (AASW), which was founded in 1937, supported the Kilgore initiative. The leaders of the AASW first articulated this position in
Science,
the widely circulated and respected magazine, when Kilgore had first proposed a “Science Mobilization Bill” in 1943.”
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Many other scientists, a considerable majority, demurred. Leading the opposition was Vannevar Bush, the director of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). His landmark report of July 1945,
Science: The Endless Frontier,
also called for a National Science Foundation, but of a rather different kind. He outlined principles and a program that called for assured long-term funding for basic research by an NSF to be “composed of citizens selected only on the basis of their interest in and capacity to promote the work of the agency.” He called on government to provide the funding for research that would proceed “through contracts or grants to organizations outside the Federal Government,” which “should not operate any laboratories of its own.” Further, he argued, “support of basic research in the public and private colleges, universities, and research institutes must leave the internal control of policy, personnel, and the method and scope of the research to the institutions themselves.” But this was more than just a plan for the autonomy of science. Bush, who persuaded Wilbur Mills, an Arkansas House member in his fourth term, to sponsor a bill to his liking, also made clear that research was “absolutely essential for national security” and thus too important to leave entirely in military hands. As “modern war requires the use of the most advanced scientific techniques,” he wrote, “a professional partnership between the officers in the Services and civilian scientists is needed.”
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When such legislation passed in 1946, President Truman vetoed it on the grounds that it took science out of the public realm and control by the president and Congress.

Following the creation of the other key institutions of the national security state, President Truman, in his budget message of January 1949, called on Congress to enact NSF legislation. After a circuitous process, the foundation was created in the spring of 1950, broadly along the lines that had been advocated by Bush, not Kilgore.
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It was, finally, the combination of the acceleration of Cold War conflict and especially the explosion of the Soviet bomb that overcame the divisions that had prevented the adoption of a civilian federal science initiative ever since the war. As Oklahoma’s George Howard Wilson emphasized in the House, the creation of the NSF no longer was a subject for debate about government planning versus civilian society, but about the ability of the United States to find “the slim margin of victory in a shooting or cold war.”
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Between 1945 and 1950, the funding vacuum for basic research in the physical sciences had been filled by military and AEC patronage. “In the absence of a research foundation,” Bush’s biographer has observed, “the armed services would fill the breach, spawning a new breed of military technocrats that would dominate science funding for the next twenty years.”
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By 1949, fully 96 percent of federal funds for university-based research in physics, chemistry, and related fields came from the air force, the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the army, and the Atomic Energy Commission. The ONR was particularly attentive to the task of pursuing and recruiting talented academic scientists. As early as 1946, the navy spent $10 million on academic research and planned an expenditure of another $25 million for 1947.
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When Truman was asking Congress to finally create an NSF, these sources were supporting more than thirteen thousand projects.
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In short, without a well-funded alternative to military sponsorship, American science developed an intimate relationship with military planners during the half decade following World War II, with little or no resistance by the scientific community. In 1946, General Eisenhower called on the Department of War to bring scientists into military planning, and create organizationally distinct units for research and development.
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By the time the NSF finally appeared on the scene, its budget was tiny: $250,000 for start-up in the first year; $300,000, despite a request for $14 million, in the second. By contrast, “big science” basic research was amply funded by the national security state at a level approaching twenty-five times the federal government’s investment on the eve of the European war in 1939.
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During the course of the Korean War, NSF’s funding was raised to $6.3 million, for fiscal 1952, but “the military remained the primary source for postwar funding for basic research in the physical sciences.”
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Some scientists grew afraid as planning for scientific knowledge commanded the driver’s seat under the closed and sheltered national security state auspices. Speaking to a rapt audience in April 1952 at Columbia University, the distinguished chemist and long-standing president of Harvard University, James Conant, remarked how “one must ponder on the consequences of the vast sums of money now being spent on secret military research and development undertakings.” At stake, he believed, were “the traditions that have made science possible.”
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The mobilization of physics in particular made the discipline an adjunct of the military planning state that undergirded U.S. global policy, policy that combined a focus on defense in the face of vulnerability with an ideological offensive in the cause of liberal democracy.

It was this crusading aspect that Henry Stimson promoted in an influential article entitled “The Challenge to America,” whom he wrote for
Foreign Affairs
in October 1947. Arguably more than any other figure, he symbolized the quest for a national consensus at a time of spiraling anxiety. Having served nearly four decades before as secretary of war for President Howard Taft from 1911 to 1913, as secretary of state for President Herbert Hoover from 1929 to 1933, and, in his mid-seventies, as secretary of war for President Roosevelt from July 1940 to September 1945, he stood above the political fray. Disappointed after having been “very patient with the Soviet Government, and very hopeful of its good intentions,” he articulated a desire to orient U.S. global policy to “make freedom and prosperity real in the present world. If we can, Communism is no threat. If not, with or without Communism, our own civilization would ultimately fail.”
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III.

A
S SCIENTIFIC
endeavor became increasingly defined in terms of its value to national security, America’s crusading agenda raised concerns for the nation’s principles of liberty. In his
Foreign Affairs
article, Stimson further advised that “those who now choose to travel in company with American Communists are very clearly either knaves or fools.”
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But he did not promote any policies or actions that would limit constitutional freedom. He was certainly aware of the spirited debate already under way about the character and range of civil liberty after the war. He had surely heard the increasingly full-bodied demands by many Republicans and southern Democrats in Congress to confront subversion, and he knew of the decision by President Truman to announce a “Federal Security-Loyalty Program” in March 1947, which created what the political scientist Andrew Grossman has called a “Ministry of Fear.”
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Robert Cushman, a Cornell professor, had devoted his January 1944 presidential address to the American Political Science Association to ruminations about “civil liberty after the war.” Worried that the United States might find itself confronted by a ruthless totalitarian enemy in peacetime that, like the Nazis, would be “bent upon destroying constitutional democracy as a system of government and replacing it by a brutal totalitarianism,” he predicted that “peace will bring in its wake an unprecedented temptation to abridge some of our basic civil liberties.” At home, it would be necessary to decide whether “to extend the full measure of our civil liberties to those who will seek to use them to destroy civil liberty.” He was particularly concerned that Congress, in reflecting public anxiety, would take the lead in pressing for the removal of suspect government employees, and would define “un-American” so broadly as to take in a wide range of views that are “politically and economically unconventional.”
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Three years later, Cushman returned to the subject. More than anything else, he argued, it was the bomb, and fears about the bomb, that had made it possible for anti-Communism to take the form of persecution. Writing in an urgent tone in January 1947, Cushman focused on the “revival of witch-hunting,” the widening criteria of disloyalty, and a heightened willingness to proclaim guilt by association both in Congress, especially HUAC, and the wider society. Having “brought us fear,” he concluded, “one of the questions the bomb poses for us is whether our security is more important to us than our freedom.”
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On March 21 of that year, President Truman signed Executive Order 9835, which obligated every federal agency to use the FBI to investigate the trustworthiness and allegiance of all its employees.
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This deed—described by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., then one of the key leaders of the new anti-Communist organization Americans for Democratic Action, as a “shocking action” that had been “motivated in great part by a desire to head off more extreme action from Congress”
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—announced its purpose as that of producing “maximum protection” to “the United States against the infiltration of disloyal persons into the ranks of its employees.” The core ideas, it declared, were, first, that every government employee “is endowed with a measure of trusteeship over the democratic processes which are the heart and sinew of the United States,” and, second, that the presence within the Government service of any disloyal or subversive person constitutes a threat to our democratic processes.”
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