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

This trend toward unification of defense R&D continued throughout the Eisenhower administration. In 1953, the Defense Department established the offices of Research and Development and of Applications Engineering, both headed by civilians at the Assistant Secretary level, and abolished the part-time civilian Joint Research and Development Board. For its part, SAC/ODM demonstrated its potential to contribute significantly to defense analysis, if not to policy formulation more broadly, through the work of its Technology Capabilities Panel, established in 1954 under the chairmanship of MIT president James Killian. Two years later, the Defense Department established a separate, independent Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), to provide continuing advice on advanced R&D to the department’s policy-level officials.

By the spring of 1951, Science—the Endless Frontier ’s proposed unitary solution to the problem of linking scientific research with government was a dead letter. The infant NSF had been excluded from mainstream national defense research and preempted by default from medical- and nuclear-oriented research by the National Institutes of Health and the Atomic Energy Commission. As a result, Waterman decided that the most feasible survival strategy for the foundation would be to become the principal federal patron for university basic research and graduate education in the natural science disciplines. NSF was explicitly mandated (some would say ordered) to support the social sciences as a result of hearings held in 1960 before a committee of the House of Representatives which led to amendments to the NSF Act of 1950. Thus began the retreat of the National Science Foundation and the National Science Board from the policy responsibilities and prerogatives envisioned by Science—the Endless Frontier , authorized by the National Science Foundation Act of 1950 and reiterated by Eisenhower in his 1954 executive order.

Science and international relations

A clear example of the use of science for international diplomacy was the Atoms for Peace program, announced by President Eisenhower in a speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 8, 1953. (External Link) “December_8”. The president stated, “I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new—one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare.” He went on to state that advances in the field of nuclear energy could yield significant benefits and that the United States proposed to make use of them as a means to foster world peace. The program supplied equipment and information to schools, hospitals, and research institutions within the United States and throughout the world.

American participation in the International Geophysical Year was charged to a U.S. National Committee (USNC) appointed in March 1953. The core USNC was made up of sixteen members; its five working groups and thirteen technical panels eventually drew in nearly two hundred additional scientists. The technical panels pursued work in aurora and airglow, cosmic rays, geomagnetism, glaciology, gravity, ionospheric physics, longitude and latitude determination, meteorology, oceanography, rocketry, seismology, and solar activity. In addition, a technical panel was set up to attempt to launch an artificial satellite into orbit around the earth.

A fading vision

The late Truman and early Eisenhower years were characterized by a divergence of responsibilities for science policy formulation and implementation on the one hand, and the support and facilitation of scientific research on the other. Science policy was taken seriously by the White House and Congress primarily because of its national defense implications, with a concomitant though often only dimly understood acceptance of the need to provide modest levels of support to the university basic research system, in the event that its services would again be required in a time of national crisis. The launching of Sputnik I by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, widely perceived as just such a crisis, ushered in a period now regarded as the golden age of U.S. science policy.