0.5 Science and security: national defense perspectives through 1  (Page 4/5)

After the crisis has passed

The federal government tended to lose interest in science after a given military crisis had passed. The NRC, for example, wascreated in 1916 on the initiative of a group of activists within the National Academy of Sciences. California Institute of Technology astronomer George ElleryHale conceived of it as a privately managed organization, composed of leading scientists from government, industry, and academia, that would place thecountry's scientific resources at the disposal of the federal government. Ibid., 309-15 Hale's proposal was accepted by President Wilson, and by the time the United Statesentered the war in April 1917, the NRC had assembled a small staff in Washington.

Because the government had no ready mechanism to support private institutions, initial funding for staff operations came fromthe Carnegie Corporation and Rockefeller Foundation. (Even by the war's end, those sources still provided more support for administrative funding than did government.) Research was funded by giving non-government NRC scientistsmilitary commissions—an expedient making it difficult for the NRC to maintain independence from the military bureaucracy. In May 1918, Hale and a group of NASleaders (including John Merriam) convinced Wilson to issue an Executive Order establishing the NRC permanently within the NAS. But a general reaction againstthe war and particularly against entanglement in foreign affairs swept the country after 1919, leading a congressional committee to reject an NRC proposalto establish a central institute of physics. Ibid., 326-30 Most of the prominent NRC scientists returned to their universities soon after the armistice, and the military scientific bureausreverted to the relative lethargy of the first years of the century. R&D budgets for military bureaus were relatively insignificant until World War II.

The OSRD’s World War II arrangement for placing civilian scientific resources at the disposal of military departments owed agreat deal to the NRC's World War I experience and to Vannevar Bush’s experience as NACA chairman. OSRD director Bush had learned that only an organizationwithin government could effectively mobilize scientific resources for national defense. The OSRD owed a great deal of its effectiveness to Bush's insistencethat priorities be established by civilian scientists within the organization rather than by the military bureaus. Another significant innovation was Bush’sdecision to permit scientists and engineers to work in familiar surroundings as far as was possible, rather than granting them temporary military commissionsand employing them in military research facilities.

The most famous example was the Manhattan Project, overseen but not managed directly by OSRD; another was the RadiationLaboratory at MIT, where scientists from throughout the country worked on highly classified projects to develop successive generations of radar.