| The World War Two atomic-bomb project was the largest technoscientific project ever. It generated a new configuration of the relationship of science with industry and the military, placing expertise in the service of the nation state. The project catapulted scientists into a powerful new position among America's political and administrative elites. Yet the atomic bomb also produced a crisis in the cultural authority of the scientist. It raised most urgently the question of the relationship between technical expertise and moral and political authority. The bomb project put scientists in a new situation where they either had to claim moral authority or publicly divest themselves of it entirely.; J. Robert Oppenheimer occupied a nodal point in the wartime and post-war relationship between science and the state. During the war, he was director of Los Alamos laboratory, which designed and built the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. He was America's most powerful scientific advisor to government until the 1954 security hearings severed his formal ties to state power. In these roles, Oppenheimer was uniquely able to connect instrumental expertise with humanistic moral authority. He embodied the possibility of a broad cultural and political role for the scientist. His condemnation at the hearings, however, destroyed this possibility and helped to reinforce narrow boundaries around the formal power of scientists as advisors to the state. |
