The Fall of Vannevar Bush (original) (raw)
Related papers
2005
This paper focuses on the extraordinary efforts of Vannevar Bush and James B. Conant to create an effective and efficient relationship between American science and government between 1940 and 1945. Their success in creating an institutional framework for government funding of military research, coupled with their ability to convince Franklin D. Roosevelt to sanction an aggressive and expensive American atomic bomb project, is what made the United States a nuclear power in 1945. Their actions also served to shape the nexus between science, government, and institutions of higher education during the Cold War. We still live with the results of their actions.
My paper focuses on the efforts of Vannevar Bush and James B. Conant to create an effective relationship between American science and government between 1940 and 1945. Their success in creating an institutional framework for government funding of military research, coupled with their ability to convince Franklin Roosevelt to sanction an aggressive and expensive atomic bomb project, is what made the United States a nuclear power in 1945. Their actions also shaped the nexus between science, government, and institutions of higher education during the Second World War. This structure also served as the foundation of the Cold War national security state. Even now, in the post-Cold War era, we still live with the results of their actions. My paper includes research from the Niels Bohr Library, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, the National Academy of Sciences, the United States National Archives and Records Administration, and the British Public Records Office.
Greg Whitesides's Science and American Foreign Relations Since World War II
The sciences played a critical role in American foreign policy after World War II. From atomic energy and satellites to the Green Revolution, scientific advances were central to American diplomacy in the early Cold War, as the United States leveraged its scientific and technical preemi- nence to secure alliances and markets. The growth of applied research in the 1970s, exemplified by the biotech industry, led the United States to promote global intellectual property rights. Priorities shifted with the collapse of the Soviet Union, as attention turned to information technol- ogy and environmental sciences. Today, international relations take place within a scientific and technical framework, whether in the head- lines on global warming and the war on terror or in the fine print of intellectual property rights. Science and American Foreign Relations since World War II provides the historical background necessary to understand the contemporary geopolitics of science.
The Rise and Fall of the Science Advisor to the President of the United States
Minerva, 2009
The president's science advisor was formerly established in the days following the Soviet launch of Sputnik at the height of the Cold War, creating an impression of scientists at the center of presidential power. However, since that time the role of the science advisor has been far more prosaic, with a role that might be more aptly described as a coordinator of budgets and programs, and thus more closely related to the functions of the Office of Management and Budget than the development of presidential policy. This role dramatically enhances the position of the scientific community to argue for its share of federal expenditures. At the same time, scientific and technological expertise permeates every function of government policy and politics, and the science advisor is only rarely involved in wider White House decision making. The actual role of the science advisor as compared to its heady initial days, in the context of an overall rise of governmental expertise, provides ample reason to reconsider the role of the presidential science advisor, and to set our expectations for that role accordingly.
In the exploration of the consistently complex and brutal interplay between politics and scientific and technological advancements, significant insights can be found within a number of large government-sponsored programs in which exceptional new technologies were developed and significant scientific research was either accomplished or seeded for future discoverers. Those specific projects are the Apollo Program, the Space Shuttle (Space Transportation System) project, the Superconducting Super Collider, and the Space Launch System. The numerous failures of nuclear power in the decades following the Manhattan Project also provides a window through which socioeconomic and political influences can afflict science and technology. These projects all share some form of significant failure or premature cancellation wrought upon them by industrial, managerial, and political failures of all kinds, failures which severely inhibited or even completely destroyed the original potential of these projects. The roles of overwhelming bureaucracy and of overbearing mistakes on behalf of the government are central to these failures, and as a result it is clear that the importance of the interactions between science and the political systems and industrial complexes that they must coexist with to succeed cannot be exaggerated. Throughout the history of governmental interactions with scientific endeavors, it becomes clear that the support of a government in scientific research carries with it an expectation that the research conducted is inherently a means to an end. This expectation, illustrated time and time again in undertakings like the Manhattan Project and the Apollo
Science and the State during the Cold War: Blurred Boundaries and a Contested Legacy
Social Studies of Science, 2001
My introduction to this volume of essays on Cold War science (in the journal Social Studies of Science) outlines key interpretive issues that arise from the contested interactions between scientists and the nation state during that time period. I emphasize that growing controversy over science-state relations during the 1960s and in later years helped call into question foundational assumptions from an earlier era about the nature of science, specifically, the alleged apolitical, anti-ideological, and objective character of scientific inquiry.
2020
The post-WWII era represents the genesis of science policy, as we understand it today. Its importance is augmented on account that other nations took the United States as a standard to which they measured their own efforts. In this thesis, I hypothesize that (1) the shape of postwar science policy in the US was a result of ‘basic research ideology,’ a coherent set of interrelated propositions regarding the university system, government-science relations, and an economic theory of basic science. As corollaries, I also hypothesize that (2) the primary impetus behind the first successful development of a national science policy was WWII and that (3) the notion of national interests in university-based science was a result of basic research ideology. The core tenets of basic research ideology became a post-war consensus, while its operational extensions were debated and negotiated between groups of political and academic rivals. In explaining this, I also introduce the concept of the ‘bureaucrato-scientific field’ to demonstrate the unique paradoxical logic of science policy. To carry this out, I principally rely on Bourdieu’s field theory, focusing on the shifting boundaries of fields and how these have changed the social structure. In this regard, the thesis is one of the rare attempts to bring Bourdieusian relationalism to science and technology studies.