An hour with The Man

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Eisenhower, scientists, and Sputnik

The Soviet launch of Sputnik shook the confidence of Americans in the country's defense and in its science. President Eisenhower convened a meeting of scientists in the Oval Office that Hans Bethe called an "unforgettable hour."

John S. Rigden
June 2007, page 47

On the evening of 4 October 1957, a Soviet SS-6 rocket lifted off from the Tyuratam range in Kazakhstan and placed a beachball-sized sphere weighing 84 kilograms into Earth orbit. It was Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. At a mean altitude of about 600 kilometers, Sputnik orbited Earth every 96 minutes. That momentous event opened a new chapter in the relationship between scientists and government in the US.

Judged by the influence scientists would have at the highest levels of government, it was a short chapter. From 1957 until the end of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's term in January 1961, scientists had direct access to him, and he actively sought their advice. As a result, scientific considerations influenced Eisenhower's policy decisions. It can be argued that never before or since have scientists had a firmer influence on the reins of power that direct national policies.

Over the past 100 years, scientists have been called upon to assist military leaders for the purpose of creating, developing, and improving weapons systems. That was certainly the case during World War I. In June 1916, at the request of President Woodrow Wilson, the National Research Council was formed "to encourage both pure and applied research for the ultimate end of the national security and welfare." Soon physicists were engaged in research directed toward, for example, the detection of German submarines. Other research efforts followed and paid dividends to the military. Military leaders, however, did not regard physicists with any affection. In his 1949 book Modern Arms and Free Men, Vannevar Bush wrote:

Military laboratories [prior to World War II] were dominated by officers who made it utterly clear that the scientists and engineers employed in these laboratories were of a lower caste of society. . . . [The] senior officers of military services everywhere did not have a ghost of an idea concerning the effects of science on the evolution of techniques and weapons.

With the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938, a discovery made in Germany, physicists quickly recognized that weapons of unprecedented destructive power were, in principle, possible. With enormous respect for the capabilities of their colleagues still in Germany, physicists in the US brought the military potential of nuclear fission to the attention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The president did not know whether nuclear fission could be harnessed for military purposes. He had no idea how to exploit the discovery of nuclear fission, nor did the members of his inner circle. No one in the government or the military could even imagine how to capitalize on this discovery.

Having brought nuclear fission to the president's attention, physicists were asked to make the American response. In September 1942 the Manhattan Project was established, and in early 1943 physicists began arriving in Los Alamos. The atomic bomb, designed and built in less than three years, brought an end to World War II. The bomb was a resounding testimony to the practical abilities of physicists.

Everyone knew that the atomic bomb ended the war. Many would say that the radar systems developed at MIT actually won the war. Both the bomb and radar were the handiwork of physicists. After World War II, physicists were celebrities. The nuclear era had begun, and it was the physicists who understood the nucleus. More than others, physicists felt in their bones the implications of the new age and the potential of nuclear energy for both war and peace. Because they understood the atomic nucleus, their skills were eagerly sought by the military. But policymakers ignored them.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the most influential physicist at the war's end, visited President Harry S Truman on 15 October 1945. The meeting was disastrous. Oppenheimer used the occasion to confess his guilt over his role in developing the devastating nuclear weapon. When Oppenheimer left the president's office, Truman told Dean Acheson, "I don't want to see that son of a ***** in this office ever again."1

Oppenheimer said things to Truman that went far beyond the merely ill-advised; he said stupid things. And Truman had every reason to be angry. It was he, not Oppenheimer, who had ordered the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, the US had now entered a new era, and Truman had the responsibility to make informed judgments. He ignored Oppenheimer in spite of his universally acclaimed brilliance. He ignored Oppenheimer in spite of his expertise in nuclear matters. In spite of Oppenheimer's influence among scientists and the general public, he was of no importance to Truman. The president ignored not only Oppenheimer but physicists in general.

The Russian bomb

The Soviet scientists' pursuit of a nuclear bomb demonstrated the advantages of having access to political leaders. They detonated their first atomic bomb in August 1949. That came as a surprise to both civilian and military leaders in the US, but not to the scientists, who had repeatedly predicted that the Russians would have the bomb within five years after the Trinity test. "The Soviets," recalled I. I. Rabi in 1986, "were better positioned to approach top management than we were. Soviet scientists made direct approaches to Stalin. No one here had access to Roosevelt or Truman."2

Rabi's reminiscences were accurate. Even at that critical juncture, Truman ignored the scientists. It was financier Lewis Strauss, a commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission, not Truman, who convened the AEC's General Advisory Committee (GAC), headed by Oppenheimer (see box 1), to consider the US response to the USSR nuclear success. If there was ever a time when a president would have benefited from a dialog with scientists who were knowledgeable about the American and Russian nuclear programs, it was in the fall of 1949.

More at: http://ptonline.aip.org/journals/doc/PHTOAD-ft/vol_60/iss_6/47_1.shtml