0.7 The early cold war: 1950-57  (Page 5/7)

The BoB seems to have hoped to enhance the status and impact of the NSF by transferring some basic research projects to there from the ONR and the AEC. But Waterman himself had opposed such transfers when he’d been chief scientist at ONR. Reporting on a November 29, 1950, meeting, Golden noted that: “As to the NSF, he [Waterman] feels it should, by policy, not engage in any military work.... There would be a few projects which ONR might turn over to the NSF but these would probably be less than 10 percent of its total and it would want to take on other projects in their stead.... His remarks were remarkably similar to those expressed by Ken Pitzer, the AEC Director of Research, when I asked him essentially the same question.” Blanpied, op. cit. , 24.

One month after nominating Waterman as NSF Director, Truman announced formation of SAC/ODM under the chairmanship of Oliver Buckley, Chairman of the Board of Bell Telephone Laboratories. Ibid., xxix. SAC/ODM’s membership included non-government scientists and the heads of several civilian government agencies, including Waterman as director of NSF. By that time, it was reasonably clear that the Korean War was unlikely to escalate into a larger military crisis. But it was also clear to all but a few optimists (first and foremost General Douglas MacArthur) that the war itself would drag on for some time, with inconclusive results.

Perhaps more significant was the war’s effect on the American public, which became preoccupied with what it saw as a worldwide Communist menace. J. Robert Oppenheimer was the most prominent—but by no means the only—scientist punished for perceived Communist leanings when his security clearance was revoked because of pre-World-War-II associations. Other scientists were driven from positions in universities, government, and industry because of similar allegations regarding former political ideals or allegiances. The inhibiting effects of this brief episode of national paranoia on scientists who might have participated in the national science debate have yet to be thoroughly understood.

In any event, the Oppenheimer scandal, the Korean War, the successful tests of thermonuclear devices by the United States in 1952 and the Soviet Union in 1953, and the 1957 Sputnik launch kept science policymakers focused almost entirely on national defense. Thus the 1950s saw only a fraction of the interest and growth in non-defense–related science policy-making that was seen in the postwar 1940s. Moreover, by mid-1951 all the principal government line agencies (or their predecessors) that today provide the institutional structure for U.S. science policy had been established, with the exception of NASA and such technically-oriented regulatory agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The impact of the advisory structures to these new agencies, which included both social and natural scientists, has been described by Shiela Jasanoff in The Fifth Branch : Science Advisers as Policy Makers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).