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In T R o d u c T Io n : Th e so u R c e s o f we a p o n s In n o v a T Io n 3
isolationism in international affairs during the interwar period, had left the system
of arsenals, shipyards, and in-house laboratories without sufficient resources
to support the wartime mobilization. This gap was filled by new emergency
agencies that coordinated the operational requirements of the military services
and the research, development, and manufacturing capabilities of business and
industry. The Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), for
example, distributed most of the federal funds allocated for R&D to industrial
and university laboratories, where scientists and engineers collaborated with
their government counterparts to produce the atomic bomb, microwave radar,
the radio proximity fuse, and a host of other state-of-the-art weapons vital to
the war effort. The Defense Plant Corporation and the War Production Board
carried out similar functions, coordinating industrial R&D and allocating public
funds to expand the production of steel, synthetic rubber, pharmaceuticals,
aviation fuel, and other critical wartime materials. 4 Although these and other
emergency agencies were quickly dismantled after the war, their institutional
legacies became permanent fixtures in a newly reconstituted, postwar scientific
establishment in which the government had become the largest single source
of funding for academic research in the physical sciences. Moreover, the end
of World War II did not result in the complete demobilization of the armed
forces and the scientific and industrial infrastructure that had been built by the
government to develop and produce new weapons. Deteriorating relations with
the Soviet Union and the subsequent onset of the Cold War after 1945 set the
United States on a course toward permanent military preparedness that would
last for nearly fifty years. 5
The extent to which the government was expected to maintain its new function
as a source of scientific progress, economic prosperity, and military security in
peacetime became the centerpiece of a fierce political struggle between civilian
and government science policymakers during the last days of World War II. A
leading spokesman in this debate was Vannevar Bush, wartime director of the
Office of Scientific Research and Development and one of the major architects
of America’s postwar science policy. In his landmark report, Science—The Endless
Frontier, Bush argued that scientific research of the type normally conducted in
universities rather than government laboratories would be the principal source
of industrial innovation, military security, and economic growth. In Bush’s mind,
the government would simply make funds available for scientific study, and
the recipient private-sector institutions would determine for themselves how
those resources should be allocated. Bush and his allies in Congress favored
4 See David M. Hart, Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and Economic Policy in the United
States, 1921–1953 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), chap. 5; and Peter Neushul, “Science,
Technology, and the Arsenal of Democracy: Production Research and Development during World War II”
(Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1993).
5 On American-Soviet relations and the changing geopolitical environment during the Cold War, see
Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold
War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins
of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972); and Gaddis, Strategies of
Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005).