Short Teaching Module: Science, Technology, and the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex during the Cold War

In the decade after World War II, the research and development (R&D) paradigm of the United States transformed dramatically. Prior to that point, the U.S. government had had minimal engagement with science and technology, especially in comparison to other great powers. But the war changed that dynamic. An influx of European émigré and refugee scientists into U.S. academic institutions, as well as wartime scientific collaboration with allies like Great Britain, drove a sea-change in the government’s engagement with R&D. For the first time, public expenditure reached into the billions of dollars, and crash programs drew thousands of the country’s physical scientists into development of new war technologies like radar, penicillin, computers, jet aircraft, and the atomic bomb.

The obvious importance of these developments to the country’s security meant that, unlike after World War I (when the emergency institutional arrangements had quickly been dismantled), government actors elected to keep the new wartime science and technology apparatus in a mobilized state once peace came. From this point forward, scientists and engineers would be cast in both political and cultural terms as national assets in the struggle to keep the United States “ahead” of adversaries. Scientists, like weapons, were described in the bellicose language of “stockpiles”—a shift in language that became particularly virulent as relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated. 

As the documents here illustrate, the new notion that scientists were instruments of geopolitical power meant that the gaze of government defense hawks trained increasingly on the country’s academic laboratories—a focus that only intensified with a succession of security panics in the late 1940s and early 1950s. First, in August 1949, the Soviets detonated their first atomic bomb; a few months later, news broke that Manhattan Project physicist Klaus Fuchs had been a Soviet spy funneling U.S. secrets to Moscow; and finally, the militarily-connected Ethel and Julis Rosenberg were tried and executed for nuclear espionage. Amid such heightened stakes, scientists increasingly found themselves subject to political and diplomatic witch-hunts. 

On the most basic level, the documents here appear to bear out the arguments of many scientists from the time that their neutral, rational profession was being corrupted and smothered by a militarized state obsessed with geopolitical power, which they termed a “garrison state.” The first two documents, for example, show a backlash from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) and National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to the political persecution of Edward Condon, a physicist and director of the Bureau of Standards. Condon was a moderate internationalist who had a then-mainstream view that atomic bombs were too dangerous for any one country to control. Like many of his colleagues, he was also an advocate for the free, open practice of basic science across borders. As a result of these views, Condon became the subject of a smear campaign by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in Congress, which leaked doctored letters to the press suggesting he was a traitor.

The third document contains the response of the Harvard University Physics Department to a 1950 Congressional amendment requiring that the FBI investigate scientists’ “loyalty” before they could receive government contracts. As the Harvard scientists write, such heavy-handed attempts to root out the very rare disloyal applicant would be highly damaging overall to the morale of researchers. Moreover, if scientists were obliged to second-guess their work, then national security itself would be under threat.

To be sure, reactionary elements in Congress and the executive branch regularly persecuted scientists, including for things that had nothing to do with science, such as the researchers’ sexual orientations. Myriad careers and lives were destroyed, often at the hands of politicians and investigators with little real grasp of the scientific issues at play. 

At the same time, in the debate about a “garrison state,” scholars since the 1980s have added significant nuance to the state-science binary, identifying an atmosphere of mutual manipulation and fluid, malleable identities and categories among scientists and administrators. Taking a second look at these documents, we can identify two embedded arguments that change our initial understandings of a monolithic, militarized government bent on the manipulation of science: first, we see that scientists themselves leveraged discourses of national security, and second, we can identify the significance of their appeals to a concept known as “scientific internationalism.”

In the first instance, as scientists clamored for mushrooming state resources—remember, billions of dollars were being funneled into laboratories and research and development facilities for the first time in American history—they appealed to national leaders’ sense that science and technology was the new key to geopolitical power and national security, as we see here. The language of science-as-power, in other words, was largely their language, rather than one originating from the political class. As such, we can see subtle references to the security importance of U.S. science in all three excerpts.

Moreover, with a careful eye, we can glimpse that scientists also used security as a reason for them to be exempt from too much state direction or oversight, despite the huge sums of public money they were now receiving. One strategy was to appeal to what has been called the “linear model” of innovation, which posited a kind of conveyor belt between “basic” science (the raw exploration of the laws of nature, free from consideration of future use) and “applied” technology (the concentrated application of the “basic” concepts to develop new and useful innovations and devices, as had happened during World War II). The “linear model” was a vastly oversimplified idea, but it was politically useful, because “basic” science was framed as something centuries old, sacrosanct, and based on the total freedom of scientists from outside pressures—in other words, modern academic physicists, chemists, and others framed themselves as being on a continuum with past polymaths and inventors like Benjamin Franklin and Isaac Newton, whose apparent freedom from outside meddling had contributed to their revolutionary discoveries. The implication was that equal professional freedom would inevitably result in new, militarily useful inventions “of greatest importance to the welfare of the country,” in the words of the AAAS. By extension, any state procedures that “limit[ed] the freedom” of scientists and their students would also detract from “national safety [and] security.”

Turning to our second category, we can see that science lobbyists also used the notion of “scientific internationalism” to lend themselves political and professional credence. The idea of scientific internationalism dated back at least to the seventeenth century, when elite literati spoke of their participation in a nationless, borderless “republic of letters” premised on freedom of exchange and the selfless pursuit of the laws of nature and the universe. By the time of the Cold War, this had morphed into a claim among U.S. researchers that “basic” science was a universalizing agent of progress, above the fray of geopolitics or power squabbles, and that it was international, transhistorical, and uncontainable. In this conception, “progress” could only be attained by allowing maximal freedom both at home and across international borders. Thus we see the AAAS’s argument that the transnational sharing of science—including between the United States and Soviet Union—not only had no bearing on questions of “disloyalty,” but also would benefit all humankind. 

Scientists found national leaders receptive to this argument—especially if it could benefit U.S. diplomatic interests. The Atoms for Peace campaign in the 1950s and the space program in the 1960s used scientific internationalism to suggest that America’s greatness in R&D could justify its global leadership. Only the following decade, with failure in the Vietnam War, growing awareness of environmental degradation, oil shocks, and political and cultural turmoil, did the positivist notion of scientific internationalism as a diplomatic tool begin to come apart.

Returning to our documents, now we begin to see the way in which these two scientific lobbying discourses—national security and scientific internationalism—came together as a tool for scientists to enhance their profession’s material and political standing. On the one hand, scientists were now directly engaging with politics, and had considerable leverage in doing so, because they represented a vital national security asset—a “stockpile” in a new kind of arms race. They argued that if they were given nearly unlimited state resources and total personal freedom, they could let the “linear model” play out and transform free, basic science into astonishing new technologies and weapons for the nation. To bolster this case, they turned to the axiom that scientists were not just national actors, but also part of a cosmopolitan, transnational fraternity of truth-seekers. The universal nature of “basic” science meant that it would not only be anti-scientific for the state to attempt to impose any limit on U.S. researchers, but that doing so would also weaken the nation’s most important asset “at a time when effective government science is of the greatest importance to the welfare of the country.”

Ultimately, a close reading of these documents reveals that in the newly science-focused postwar United States, there was indeed a growing, aggressive, and suspicious military-industrial complex—but it was not set apart from the scientific community in the way that many earlier narratives made it seem. Government and science instead learned to accommodate and exploit each other in various ways. The state needed scientists’ expertise because of its growing belief that science and technology were key markers of geopolitical power; scientists, meanwhile, used the political process to secure state money and resources while resisting control and oversight. Narratives of national security and internationalism were used by both sides to serve their political ends—but also had the power to escape the control and intent of their original proponents. 

It is thus productive to complicate older notions like the “garrison state,” and instead to recognize that national security might be better framed as a process, rather than a thing, as much defined by outcomes as intents, and with its improvised frameworks and language often repurposed—and abused—in unexpected ways. 
 

Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Vannevar Bush, “Science: The Endless Frontier.” Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1945.

Joy Rohde, Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013.

Joseph Manzione, “‘Amusing and Amazing and Practical and Military’: The Legacy of Scientific Internationalism in American Foreign Policy, 1945-1963,” Diplomatic History 24:1, 2000
 

Michael Falcone is an Ernest May Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. As a historian of the U.S. and the world, his research examines the connections between science, technology, and global power in the twentieth century. His book project, The Rocket's Red Glare: Transatlantic Technology and the Rise of American Global Power, analyzes the role of British knowledge and technology in the U.S.'s rise to hegemony, as well as the ways in which technology came to redefine notions of empire, aid, diplomacy, and development in the twentieth century. He has previously held fellowships at Dartmouth College’s Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College and Yale University’s International Security Studies. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2019.