a lack of cooperation between the Europe-friendly science enterprise and the US military during World War I, and administrative barriers to the military’s adoption of new technologies, that Bush was anxious to avoid repeating—particularly with the vast influx of talent into the United States as a result of the expansion of right-wing totalitarianism across Europe. Albert Einstein was the most famous of these immigrants, but there were many others—some of them gay, many of them Jewish, most of them creative intellectuals from both the sciences and the arts. The entire Frankfurt School decamped and reconstituted itself as part of the University in Exile, a home for German and Italian intellectuals dismissed from their teaching jobs in Europe that was created at the New School in New York City. Later, the university also took in many leading French intellectuals at its École libre des hautes études, or Free School for Advanced Studies. Other universities similarly benefited, as did the US economy as a whole. Patents in the fields the émigrés studied increased by 31 percent over prior years, and the result was an innovation contagion. The émigrés’ arrival increased US innovation by attracting a new group of US researchers to their fields, rather than by increasing the productivity of incumbent inventors, according to Stanford economist Petra Moser. US inventors who collaborated with émigré professors began to patent at substantially higher levels in the 1940s and continued to be exceptionally productive in the 1950s, her study found.
The same was true of Southern California, where many of the giants of European cinema fled from Prague and other cities, breathing innovation and creativity into America’s fledgling storytelling industry, transforming Hollywood into the world’s leading cultural powerhouse. Writers, dramatists, architects, dancers, musicians, and philosophers—the gays, Jews, artists, gypsies, and intellectuals rejected by the Nazi jackbooters—similarly enriched US and UK culture with a flood of new ideas and innovations that created much of the West’s postwar culture.
Vannevar Bush saw this growing influx of talent and believed that science and technology would lead to military superiority for whichever country best exploited them. After the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, Bush became convinced of the need to establish a federal agency that would coordinate US research efforts. He scheduled a hasty meeting in June 1940 with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who approved the agency in less than ten minutes.
The National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), the forerunner to today’s National Science Foundation, was established on June 27. The open society, the wartime esprit de corps, the federal dollars, and the marshaling of talented citizens and émigrés organized the American science enterprise into an intellectual weapon unlike any seen before. Under the auspices of this and a related agency, Bush initiated and oversaw the development of the atomic bomb (until it was taken over by the military), as well as the development of radar, sonar, and numerous other inventions critical to the war effort, in addition to several significant medical advances, including the mass production of penicillin.
The End of Innocence
One of the four top scientists Bush would appoint to lead the NDRC was Harvard president James B. Conant, who was initially in charge of chemistry and explosives. When the NDRC took on the goal of making an atomic bomb before the Germans could, Conant recruited a former Harvard chemistry major, the charismatic and popular University of California, Berkeley, theoretical physics professor J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was recommended by his friend and fellow Berkeley physicist Ernest Lawrence. It was to be physics’ finest hour, and Oppenheimer, the poetic son of German Jewish immigrants, who read the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit and studied philosophy under Alfred North Whitehead, threw himself into the problem with abandon, assembling a crack team of the best minds in physics, including some of his own top students and several European immigrants. In September 1942, the project was turned over to the military under the command of engineer and brigadier general Leslie Groves. Groves recognized Oppenheimer’s brilliance and ambition and appointed him scientific director of what was now code-named the Manhattan Engineer District, or, more simply, the Manhattan Project. The work was “without doubt the most concentrated intellectual effort in history,” wrote William Laurence, science reporter for the New York Times. Science was to be America’s greatest defense against tyranny.
But then, in the blink of an eye, everything changed. The project succeeded, and on August 6, 1945, the United States dropped Little Boy, the first of two of its new bombs of light, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. On August 9, Fat Man fell on Nagasaki. The bombs proved the power of knowledge once and for all, and Oppenheimer, as the director of the project, was the first public spokesman for the awesome power of science in a new era.
After the euphoria of winning the war had ebbed, the idea that the United States had used science to kill an estimated 110,000 Japanese civilians without any warning—with another 230,000 dying from radiation injuries over the next five years (a side effect the United States at first officially denied)—weighed heavily on Oppenheimer’s conscience, and on the American public’s collective conscience as well.
In addition to his moral unease, Oppenheimer, like many other leading scientists, had a mounting strategic concern that the Soviet Union, with its vast uranium deposits, would engage the United States in an arms race.
Up to this point, the Allies had regarded themselves as fighting the good fight—honorable, fair, and true, with one hand tied behind their backs, like Superman. The obliteration of two cities of civilians avoided what would surely have been a bloody invasion against a radicalized nation that was using suicide bombers, but it also exposed the dark side of the power that science could unleash, and the horrific consequences that can arise when ethics lag behind knowledge. Mainstream Americans, who had been largely proscience during the 1920s and 1930s and through World War II, now became deeply ambivalent. Was it right, what America had done? Was it honorable? And could it come back to hurt them?
Science, and with it democracy, was growing up, and with increased power came the dawning of a new age of responsibility. Seven weeks after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts, Laurence, whom the War Department had contracted to be the atomic bomb’s official historian, characterized this visceral feeling:
The Atomic Age began at exactly 5:30 Mountain War Time on the morning of July 16, 1945, on a stretch of semi-desert land about fifty airline miles from Alamogordo, NM, just a few minutes before the dawn of a new day on this earth. . . . And just at that instant there rose from the bowels of the earth a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one.
There was a sense that scientists had unlocked a power whose use crossed an ethical boundary—that this act had soiled science and might even destroy humanity. Oppenheimer, the poet-physicist, who thought of a verse from the Bhagavad Gita upon seeing the first atomic detonation at Trinity test site in New Mexico—“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”—spoke of his growing misgivings at the American Philosophical Society in November:
We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world. We have made a thing that by all standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing, by our participation in making it possible to make these things, we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man, of whether it is good to learn about the world, to try to understand it, to try to control it, to help give to the world of men increased insight, increased power.
Albert Einstein, who had played a key role in alerting President Roosevelt to the possibility of making such a bomb, shared Oppenheimer’s misgivings. He sent a telegram to hundreds of prominent Americans in May 1946, asking for $200,000 to fund a national campaign “to let the people know that a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels. . . . This appeal is sent to you only after long consideration of the immense crisis we face.” The telegram contained what has become one of the most famous quotes in science:
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
Ethical Infants
Today, the idea that everything has changed “save our modes of thinking” might refer not only to the bomb but also to climate change, biodiversity loss and habitat fragmentation, ocean trawling, geoengineering, synthetic biology, genetic modification, mountaintop removal