0.5 Science and security: national defense perspectives through 1  (Page 5/5)

As World War II neared its end, Bush built on this foundation by working to ensure that science-government relations wouldremain strong—perhaps even stronger—in peacetime. Hence his “invitation” to Roosevelt’s senior advisers to request the report that would become Science—the Endless Frontier .

Organizational arrangements

The OSRD came to be so highly regarded by the military that it commenced an effort to ensure continued access to civilianscience when Bush announced his intention to begin liquidating the Office in 1944. Most of those arrangements rested on the assumption that adequate linkscould be maintained through part-time committees composed of eminent scientists. The Research Board for National Security (RBNS) was established in 1944 andhoused (presumably as a temporary expedient) within the National Research Council. Daniel J. Kevles, “The National Science Foundation and the Debate Over Postwar Research Policy, 1942-45,” Isis 68, No. 1 (March 1977), 4-26 Composed of equal numbers of civilian scientists and military officers, the RBNSwas to have both advisory responsibilities and budgetary authority to support research projects outside of government, mainly in university laboratories. Whenthe Bureau of the Budget killed the RBNS in 1946, it was replaced by the Research and Development Board (RDB) after consolidation of the armed servicesinto the Department of Defense in 1947.

Chaired successively by Bush, Karl Compton, and William Webster, the RDB consisted of civilian scientists serving part-time in apurely advisory capacity. Dissatisfaction with that arrangement led to the 1951 establishment of the Scientific Advisory Committee in the White House's Officeof Defense Mobilization.

After 1940, the concept of a defense-oriented science policy was advanced independently of the debates about a morecomprehensive, unitary science policy, and the imperative for such a defense- oriented policy may have hindered realization of the more comprehensive vision.However, the conceptual divergence between those policies may not have been so clear-cut in the late 1940s. At least until 1950, few clear distinctions weremade between the military benefits and the broader social benefits presumed to be derivable from science. If, as was widely acknowledged by 1945, the abilityof the United States to develop the military technologies that had helped turn the tide in Europe had been critically dependent on access to civilian science,then continued access would be essential to national defense in the postwar era. That is, in the wake of Hitler's impending defeat, national defense was regardedas one of the paramount social benefits that science could confer.

The central policy problem faced by Bush after World War II was how to assure government access to non-government science within aframework that would preserve the constitutional imperatives for presidential control and accountability while allowing science to flourish unhampered by whatmost scientists perceived as a heavy-handed federal bureaucracy.

The korean war

When North Korean army crossed the line of demarcation between North and South Korea in June 1950, the possibility ofdirect confrontation between the United States and either the Soviet Union or the People’s Republic of China led the White House to engage William T. Golden,a New York City financier and philanthropist, to study whether the OSRD should be reconstituted. Golden spent seven months interviewing military experts andprominent civilian scientists, Blanpied, op. cit. , xvii-xx. and concluded that the nation’s leading scientists were opposed to creation of anOSRD-type organization. Instead, he proposed a presidential science advisory system, recommending to Truman that he appoint a full-time science advisor.

However, General Lucius Clay, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Defense Mobilization, objected, and Truman followedhis advice in creating a Scientific Advisory Committee to the Office of Defense Mobilization (SAC/ODM), with the promise that its director would enjoy access tothe president. This installation made it clear that national defense would henceforth be one of the leading determinants of U.S. science policy, andsignaled to American scientists and engineers that an effective U.S. science policy depended upon direct access to the president.

The five-year struggle to create a NationalScience Foundation ended on May 10, 1950, when Truman signed the National Science Act of 1950 into law. North Korean troops crossed the 38 ^th parallel barely six weeks later. In November, the National Science Board—thegoverning body of the NSF—disavowed any intention to engage in military research, although a few of its members seemed to have had second thoughts inJanuary 1951. Congressional appropriations for the new agency for fiscal year 1952, the first full year of its existence, amounted to $3.5 million, slightlymore than a quarter of what the Bureau of the Budget had requested. With a military crisis at hand, the promise of basic research that led to the creationof the NSF seemed a secondary priority, at best.