American science and the Cold War: The rise of the United States President's Science Advisory Committee

When the Soviet Union launched the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, the feat did more than propel the world into the space age. It also marked the beginning of a "total Cold War" in which science, technology, education, and the pursuit of national prestige ranked with military and economic strength as vital forces in the struggle between the Soviet-dominated East and the US-led West. In response, Dwight Eisenhower brought a group of American scientists into the White House where they, as the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), helped shape US science and defense policy for more than a decade.;Utilizing recently opened archival material, this study examines the experience of PSAC in the broad context of the relationship between American science and the Cold War, with emphasis on the committee's dual goal of containing the nuclear arms race and supporting basic research. The narrative starts with PSAC's predecessor, the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM-SAC), which was created by President Harry Truman in 1951 to help the government mobilize science for the Korean War. The ODM-SAC had both its triumphs and travails as American science and the national security state maintained an uneasy partnership in the shadow of the nuclear arms race and McCarthyism. The study then charts the post-Sputnik transformation of this partnership as it details PSAC's rise out of the ODM-SAC and its role in national space, defense, arms control, and science policy-making in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Among PSAC's most important contributions was its education of government officials about not only the value but also the limitations of science and technology, as it warned against various "technological fixes" or "crash programs." Finally, the epilogue provides a brief survey of PSAC's gradual decline in the 1960s and its abolition by Richard Nixon in 1973 as a result of the Vietnam War and other changes in American science and society. Both PSAC's rise and fall largely followed that of the government's perceived need for science during the Cold War.