American Science in an Age of Anxiety

Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War

Jessica Wang

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780807847497, 9780807824474
• eBook ISBN: 9780807867105
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

No professional group in the United States benefited more from World War II than the scientific community. After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists enjoyed unprecedented public visibility and political influence as a new elite whose expertise now seemed critical to America’s future. But as the United States grew committed to Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union and the ideology of anticommunism came to dominate American politics, scientists faced an increasingly vigorous regimen of security and loyalty clearances as well as the threat of intrusive investigations by the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities and other government bodies.
This book is the first major study of American scientists' encounters with Cold War anticommunism in the decade after World War II. By examining cases of individual scientists subjected to loyalty and security investigations, the organizational response of the scientific community to political attacks, and the relationships between Cold War ideology and postwar science policy, Jessica Wang demonstrates the stifling effects of anticommunist ideology on the politics of science. She exposes the deep divisions over the Cold War within the scientific community and provides a complex story of hard choices, a community in crisis, and roads not taken.

Chapter 1: Competing Political Visions for Postwar Science

Scientists and Science Legislation, 1945–1947

From the perspective of the present, the Cold War seems to have had a certain inevitability, but from the vantage point of the end of World War II, the future shape of American foreign relations and domestic politics was far from clear. By September 1945, U.S.-Soviet relations were already uneasy, as they had been throughout the war, but they had not yet broken down irreparably. Winston Churchill would not make his “Iron Curtain” speech for another six months, and President Truman’s announcement of the Truman Doctrine lay a year and a half away. The general public would not know Alger Hiss’s name for nearly three more years; Joseph McCarthy’s debut on the national scene would wait for almost another five years. At war’s end geopolitics appeared to dictate that the United States and the Soviet Union would form the new loci of power in global affairs. Beyond that, nothing seemed clear except the impermanence and ambiguity that defined international relations in the postwar world.

Social and political tensions dominated American life in the first months after the war. As doubts grew about Soviet intentions abroad, demobilization created domestic economic hardship and labor unrest. Massive shortages of housing and basic consumer goods, inflation, and lost jobs marked the transition from wartime to peacetime. A record strike wave began in the fall of 1945 and continued throughout 1946, as working-class Americans tried to hold on to and extend economic gains they had made during the war. On top of these immediate economic crises, the newly perceived peril of the atomic bomb cast an even gloomier pall over the postwar peace.

This combination of international tension, domestic economic instability, and nuclear fear provided the backdrop for the post–World War II resurgence of antiradical nativism. But several years would pass before Cold War anticommunism became an all-encompassing force in American politics. In the meantime, the transitive flux of international and domestic uncertainty provided a climate for more than the mere expression of apprehension and reflexive nativism. Americans did not simply react to impersonal social forces in a deterministic manner; they participated in the creation of events and responses to them. The unsettled nature of the postwar order and the need to come to terms with the nuclear age supplied an open window of opportunity for intense public discussion and political debate about the future of international relations and domestic political economy in the aftermath of World War II.

Many Manhattan Project scientists believed that the atomic bomb had to become the public’s paramount concern. After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a dark sense of foreboding led them to weigh the meaning of the nuclear age for the postwar world. Soon they matched thoughtful discussion with action. By September 1945, scientists who had worked on the bomb began to organize what later became known as the atomic scientists’ movement. They worked to influence the nuclear policies of the United States and, by extension, the shape of postwar international relations. Through the establishment of a civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to oversee atomic energy research and development, and the formation of a system of international control of atomic energy, they hoped to ensure the worldwide use of the atom for peaceful purposes rather than nuclear destruction. Meanwhile, other scientists continued a debate that had begun during the war over the general future of postwar science and the proper relationship between science and government. In their proposals for a National Science Foundation, liberal and progressive left scientists sought to create a political structure for postwar science that would tie basic research more closely to the general public welfare, reconcile the tensions between expert rule and democratic control, and avoid dominance of science by military imperatives.

Together, these scientists defined a progressive left politics of science. Through their legislative proposals, they espoused a vision of internationalism and public access to science within the framework of a New Deal political economy. Much of their political vision was vague and inchoate, but they made a creative and genuine attempt to wrestle with difficult questions about the social role of science and the place of science within the evolving political economy of postwar America. Internationalism, opposition to military funding of science, and New Deal notions about social and economic equity, however, soon came into conflict with countervailing political tendencies. Ultimately, the progressive left conception of science policy would not withstand the exigencies of the Cold War.

Containing the Atom: The Atomic Scientists’ Movement

The atomic scientists’ movement was a watershed in the political history of American science.¹ It constituted scientists’ first and most successful effort to influence national-level politics from a mass political base. For a brief period in 1945 and 1946, it seemed as if the movement had the potential to become a permanent force in American politics. During that time, the former Manhattan Project scientists’ carefully formulated case for the integral connections between civilian control of atomic energy, freedom in science, and world peace found a receptive audience. But by advocating internationalism and insisting that there were no atomic secrets, the atomic scientists promoted ideas that, over time, grew increasingly at odds with the development of Cold War ideology and an evolving perception of atomic weapons as the keystone of American national security. The atomic scientists’ movement created a new political role for American scientists, but with the rise of the Cold War, it also provided a major avenue for anticommunist attacks against them.

With the exceptions of Niels Bohr and a group of scientists at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory, few scientists connected to the Manhattan Project gave serious thought to the social, political, and moral implications of the atomic bomb during the war. Without reservation, the scientific leaders of the Manhattan Project recommended the use of nuclear weapons on Japan, while scientific personnel at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge generally remained silent. Seduced by the technical problems posed by their task and swept up by the warinduced momentum to bring their undertaking to technological fruition, most Manhattan Project scientists had little inclination to consider the consequences of the atomic bomb’s use or the long-range impact of weapons of mass destruction.²

Immediately after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, the atomic scientists could talk about little else. Knowing what their handiwork had wrought, they began to envision a terrifying future conflict that would end with the indiscriminate use of atomic weapons and the collapse of civilization. It was difficult for them to walk city streets and pass scenes of everyday life without imagining them transformed into nightmarish landscapes of death and rubble at ground zero. That science could someday prove responsible for slaughter and ruin so complete as to be beyond all description was unbearable. Humanity, it seemed, now possessed the technological means for easy self-annihilation. Without drastic, intelligent, informed action, the former Manhattan Project scientists feared, global disaster would result.

Pushed out of their complacency by images of nuclear devastation and a tormented sense that scientific development had outpaced humanity’s ability to cope with it, scientists at Chicago, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge began to discuss the long-term implications of atomic weapons and possible ways to remove the threat of nuclear warfare. They created formal organizations: the Atomic Scientists of Chicago, the Association of Oak Ridge Scientists (later the Association of Oak Ridge Engineers and Scientists), and the Association of Los Alamos Scientists. The scientists reached a general consensus that long-term security could not be based on atomic weapons. Since discoveries made by scientists in one country could be made independently in another, eventual loss of the U.S. atomic monopoly was inevitable. In the absence of international agreements, a nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union would promote international instability and increase the risk of worldwide nuclear holocaust. Given the destructive capability of the atomic bomb, the atomic scientists concluded that only some form of international control of atomic energy and a postwar international order based on cooperation between nations could protect the world from the danger of nuclear obliteration.³

This emphasis on internationalism tied the atomic scientists’ agenda to the progressive left. Popular front liberals, as Mary S. McAuliffe has observed, embraced “an identification with common people and antipathy toward big business, a faith in popular government, and a belief in progress and man’s capacity for improvement, if not perfectibility.”⁴ For the postwar period, the progressive left hoped for an expansion of New Deal social and economic reform and an international order characterized by a commitment to peaceful coexistence between the United States and the Soviet Union. The atomic scientists remained vague concerning economic structures and the role of the state in areas outside science. Given this lack of interest in general matters of political economy, the atomic scientists should not be thought of as part of the progressive left. But their commitment to international cooperation in science and a postwar system of international relations based on a cooperative relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States, their optimistic faith in the capacity of people to act rationally for the greater good, and their belief that science could serve as a model for reasoned decision making and greater trust between nations together defined a more moderate liberalism that shared some of the central tenets of the progressive left.

Meanwhile, other developments soon threatened to preempt the atomic scientists’ attempt to rethink international relations. The May-Johnson bill, announced on October 3, proposed a very different conception of atomic energy’s political future. Drafted hastily by the War Department in the weeks following Japan’s surrender, the May-Johnson bill left all aspects of atomic energy open to military control, required strict secrecy and security regulations, and mandated heavy penalties for any security violations. Three prominent scientist-administrators—Vannevar Bush, James B. Conant, and J. Robert Oppenheimer—endorsed the bill. Scientists back at the Manhattan Project sites were outraged by the scientific elite’s apparent capitulation to military authority. Security policy had been a major source of contention between scientists and the army during the war, and for many scientists, scientific freedom and the need to minimize external controls on research more than justified opposition to the bill. The atomic scientists objected to May-Johnson for reasons beyond pure self-interest and a desire for scientific autonomy, however. They opposed the bill’s exclusive emphasis on military applications of atomic energy, and they felt the secrecy regulations left little room for information exchange between nations, international cooperation on peaceful uses of atomic energy, and the development of international control schemes. Heavy secrecy restrictions were not simply a drag on scientific research; they constituted a misguided and futile attempt to preserve the U.S. atomic monopoly. Furthermore, if the United States pursued an atomic energy policy based purely on the military uses of the atom, other nations would distrust American motives, with disastrous consequences for international relations. Atomic energy, the atomic scientists insisted, had to be placed under the authority of a civilian agency in order to convince the world that the United States was serious about promoting the peaceful development of atomic energy and averting its military use.⁵

The support of Bush, Conant, and Oppenheimer for the May-Johnson bill, as opposed to the hostility of the working scientists at the Manhattan Project sites, is indicative of the political divisions within the American scientific community during the early postwar years. The elite scientist-administrators tended to be elder statesmen of science and team players when it came to matters of policy, and only Oppenheimer might have been described as something other than conservative. Bush’s conservatism was particularly strong and well formulated. Although personally fond of Franklin D. Roosevelt, he had no use for the New Deal. Distrustful of state expansion, he preferred Herbert Hoover’s vision of voluntary associationalism. Conant, a lifelong Republican, sometimes demonstrated a tepid liberalism, but when faced with potential controversy, he usually allowed political pressure and pragmatic considerations to hold sway over his personal beliefs. As for Oppenheimer, although he had been involved in radical politics in the 1930s, his own political identity was rather hazy. By the late 1940s, he labeled his earlier interest in the Communist Party an example of youthful experimentation long outgrown. After the war he became reluctant, for the most part, to challenge publicly prevailing government policy, and when he did dissent, he was guided more by a generalized ethos about scientific freedom than a commitment to any particular ideology, whether conservative, liberal, or radical.⁶

It would be simplistic and wrong to suggest that Bush, Conant, and Oppenheimer therefore had nothing in common with the atomic scientists’ movement. To the contrary, Bush and Conant had devoted extensive thought to the need for international control of atomic energy since the war, and in 1946, Oppenheimer served as one of the primary architects of the Acheson-Lilienthal report, the first American working proposal for international control. At the same time, however, these three scientific leaders were slow to question the conventional wisdom of high-level officials or to endorse measures that required going outside the decision-making hierarchy. As part of the rarefied social circle of the policy elite, they also had few qualms about forging close postwar ties between science and the military. By contrast, the atomic scientists viewed strict limits on military authority as critical to maintaining both the autonomy of science and the stability of the postwar world order. They also searched for political alternatives beyond the upper ranks of government and attempted to circumvent the policy elite by bringing mass-based politics to science policy.

Members of the scientists’ associations at the Manhattan Project sites quickly launched a lively and energetic campaign against the May-Johnson bill. Most were younger working scientists, such as William A. Higinbotham and Katharine Way, who came from the lower ranks of the Manhattan Project. Only in his mid-thirties at the end of the war, Higinbotham had been a group leader in electronics at Los Alamos despite never having earned a doctorate. After the war he became a leading figure in the atomic scientists’ movement, and throughout his postwar career as a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, nuclear arms control would remain a central part of his life. Katharine Way had been a physicist at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory during the war, where she contributed to reactor design and theoretical work on the decay of fission products. She also compiled data on nuclear cross sections and created what became known as the “Kay Way tables.” As part of the atomic scientists’ movement, Way directed publicity for the Atomic Scientists of Chicago during the fight over the May-Johnson bill, and she coedited the book One World or None (1946), a best-selling collection of essays about the dangers of the nuclear age. She would later protest restrictive security clearance measures while working at Oak Ridge. Although most of the participants in the scientists’ movement had worked on the atomic bomb during the war, a few had no connection to the Manhattan Project. Richard L. Meier, for example, earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1944 and was working as a research chemist at the California Research Corporation in Richmond, California, when he first became involved in the scientists’ movement. Some of the atomic scientists, such as Philip Morrison and Robert R. Wilson, would later become well-known and highly respected scientists. Most, however, would lead successful but quiet careers, known and recognized by their colleagues but with names largely unfamiliar to historians.⁷

Despite their individual anonymity, the atomic scientists soon established a powerful presence in American political life. They appealed directly to the public through a long series of media interviews, articles, radio addresses, and public speaking engagements in which they discussed both the specific legislation at hand and the general political and social implications of atomic energy. In mid-October, members of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago, the Association of Oak Ridge Scientists, the Association of Los Alamos Scientists, and the Association of Manhattan Project Scientists (centered at Columbia University) began to travel to Washington, D.C., on a rotating basis. Between October and December 1945, some thirty-odd scientists went to Washington, where, in a whirlwind of social and political activity, they built influence in excess of their numbers. As Washington’s newest lobby, they arranged for federal lawmakers to be flooded with telegrams from scientists and other citizens, spoke to and dined with members of Congress, and testified about atomic energy in hearings on the proposed National Science Foundation. With the formation of the Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy (SCAE) in late October and Congress’s entry into the public debate over atomic policy, they found especially strong allies in Chairman Brien McMahon (D.-Conn.) and committee counsel James R. Newman, head of the science section at the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion. Through the committee, the atomic scientists gained the opportunity to participate directly in the formulation of atomic energy policy. At the end of Oc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• American Science in an Age of Anxiety Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Competing Political Visions for Postwar Science
• Chapter 2: Fear, Suspicion, and the Surveillance State
• Chapter 3: Individual Encounters I
• Chapter 4: Individual Encounters II
• Chapter 5: Negotiating Security
• Chapter 6: Responses
• Chapter 7: Drawing the Line
• Chapter 8: Consequences
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index