The physics of spin: sputnik politics and American physicists in the 1950s

Social Research, Winter, 2006 by David Kaiser

NAZI RACE SCIENCE, STALINIST DENUNCIATIONS OF GENETICS: THE twentieth century provided no shortage of examples of the power of politics to corrupt science. Recoiling in horror from such perversions, many scholars argued with great fervor half a century ago that science was--or should be--inherently apolitical. Others insisted with equal vehemence that there was a necessary relationship between science and politics: science could only function properly within one unique form of political system, namely a democracy (see Hollinger, 1983, 1995). More than a tinge of wishful thinking lurked behind these analyses. No Maginot Line has ever demarcated where science ends and politics begins. The politics of knowledge has been a part of scholarly life since at least the age of Plato's Academy--just ask Socrates, or the twice-banished Aristotle. The present Bush administration, it is true, has expended more effort than most American predecessors to smear any distinctions--imposing political tests on science advisers, censoring scientific reports to better reflect political imperatives--but such clumsy cudgels should not mask more pervasive, if mundane, interrelations between the scientific and the political.

To get a feel for the texture of the science-politics nexus, it may help to step back from present-day hectoring and examine episodes from the recent past. Consider, for example, American physics and politics during the Cold War. On first blush, several areas of overlap stand out: elite atomic diplomacy, low-brow domestic anticommunism, and their occasional intertwining, as in the 1954 security hearing of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Digging a little deeper reveals all manner of additional connections. Who can peel back the "politics" from the "science" in the circulation of cryogenics experts and factory-sized machinery from hydrogen-bomb tests in the Pacific to bubble-chamber laboratories in California (Galison, 1997: 351-52)? Where on the ledger are we to place particle theorist Geoffrey Chew's influential program of "nuclear democracy," which enlisted terms and concepts from a liberal political tradition to interpret the behavior of subatomic particles (Kaiser, 2002a)?

A similar blurring of categories surrounds American physicists' efforts to learn about their Soviet counterparts' work during the 1950s. In this brief paper, I focus on two such episodes. The first involves investigations into the Soviet educational system, in particular its ability to train large numbers of scientists and engineers. The second focuses on efforts to learn how all those Soviet scientific workers spent their time, by making their leading research journals available in English translation. In both instances, the very act of gathering information about the Soviet rivals carried political overtones--overtones, moreover, that were constantly open to competing interpretations. In the first case, the physicists entered late in the game. They remained one interest group among many, vying with other educators, policymakers, bureaucrats, and journalists to control the message and turn it to their advantage. In the second case, the physicists controlled the interpretive field from the beginning, operating in a more organized, purposeful way. As both examples make plain, several leading American physicists proved adept at using the tools of politics to further their own agenda, be it increasing federal aid for science education or garnering behind-the-scenes assistance to launch several new scientific periodicals.

The physicists' adventures in applied Sovietology illustrate the constant intermingling of scientific goals and political means. More important, they show that such hybrid activities are not the sole province of political bullies or repressive regimes. The physicists' goals might have been lofty--who would argue against increasing access to education or strengthening the bonds of international cooperation in science and learning?--but even those fighting on the sides of the angels are inescapably, irreducibly political actors. The physicists were no political naifs, watching innocently or open-mouthed as others dragged their efforts into a political arena. Rather, political jockeying and public relations--in short, spin--proved constitutive of their activities from the start.

ASSESSING THE SOVIET THREAT

During 1952 and 1953, as the Korean War smoldered on, several analysts began trying to assess Soviet "stockpiles" of scientific and technical manpower--those cadres who seemed so "essential for survival in the atomic age," as one breathless New York Times reporter put it (Fine, 1954: 80). Three lengthy studies appeared between 1955 and 1961, each garnering immediate, widespread attention. Pundits and politicians clung to one main talking point, wrenched from all context: the Soviet Union was purportedly training two to three times as many scientists and engineers per year as the United States. The "feverish pace" of training, argued physicist Merriam H. Trytten, longtime director of the National Research Council's Office of Scientific Personnel, proved that the Soviets had subordinated their educational system to their overall policy of "considering scientific and technical personnel as merely another but most important factor in the total national military potential" (Fine, 1954: 80). The reports, it seemed, demanded an obvious response: the United States (and, some were quick to add, its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO) must immediately ratchet up the pace at which it produced its own scientific workers. American scientists and educators were losing key "battles" in the "cold war of the classrooms" (Hechinger, 1960).