Science and Public Policy since World War II

Abstract

THE PERIOD SINCE WORLD WAR II has long been considered the most important in the history of American science. Even those early skeptics who said that little science of consequence had taken place in America customarily exempted the post-1933 (or post-1940 or -1945) period. The rapid increase in the number of scientists in the United States in the postwar years and the large number of Nobel Prizes going to Americans (whether immigrants or native born) during 1945-1970 testify to the large quantity and high (world class) quality of American science in this period. One reason was the sudden collapse of European science in the 1930s; another was the new and highly visible stress on science and technology in the United States in the postwar era, as both became the basis of international competition and even national survival. Despite the importance of the science done in the United States in recent decades and its centrality to certain portions of American public policy, the whole subject remains badly understudied. For example, previous anthologies or collective volumes on the historiography of American science have dealt with the post-World War II era only rarely if at all, and then simply to stress the later activities of Vannevar Bush, J. B. Conant, and the several presidential advisers. More material with greater breadth and diversity has appeared, however, in recent years, especially since 1979 (to judge from the publication dates in many footnotes here). The situation is in fact changing so rapidly that it is already both possible and necessary for a preliminary mapping of what has been done, what can be done, and what ought to be done. For this endeavor, the whole overwhelming subject needs to be subdivided into manageable units and sources need to be identified and suggested for use. The eight topics discussed here certainly cannot pretend to cover the entire subject; quite the contrary, each was designed more like an exploratory probe into relatively unknown territory-a separate, finite, containable foray that would constitute a preliminary investigation of one portion of the whole. Ideally, each topic would have some unity and development of its own, but since each would overlap or adjoin at least some of the others, all the topics together would give a comprehensible overview. The topics are material and personnel shortages and surpluses around 1950; federal aid to nonmilitary (especially basic) research; loyalty oaths and security checks; the rise of the behavioral sciences; science education from the Cold War to creationism; antinuclear protests and the limited test ban treaty, 1954-1963; Sputnik and the space program; and