0.7 The early cold war: 1950-57

And then you had Korea. And everybody woke up! Everybody woke up!! The world was not going to be perfect—ever!!! And rationalization for the pursuit of science and advanced education began to turn toward the umbrella of national security.

—William D. Carey, 1986

Their attitude is that when the crisis comes, the organization will spring up virtually automatically around the science leaders who will come to the fore spontaneously.

—William T. Golden, 1951

Militarization of the cold war

The Korean crisis resulted in a fragmentation of U.S. science policy just as the Truman administration was putting it in place. Because the war focused the attention of the late Truman and early Eisenhower administrations on relatively short-term military applications, divergence between defense- and non-defense science policies widened, and support for the latter was undercut. The science policy debates of the late 1940s had frequently involved areas of vital national interest, such as national defense, public health, agriculture, and effective mechanisms for bringing scientific results to bear on them. Such issues were encompassed by what Harvey Brooks was later to call science-for-policy. Harvey Brooks, The Government of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968). Although Science–the Endless Frontier had focused primarily on policy-for-science, it also envisioned its proposed National Research Foundation as playing a pivotal role in science-for-policy. One result of the Korean War was to legitimize, if only tacitly, the divorce of science-for-policy and policy-for-science, thus relegating the post-World-War-II hope of formulating a coherent national science policy to at least temporary oblivion.

The Korean crisis brought on immediate expansion of federal defense appropriations. In July 1951, President Harry Truman called upon the Congress for an immediate $11.3 billion emergency defense appropriation, both to increase the American military presence in Korea and to prepare for what might become a wider conflict. William A. Blanpied, Impacts of the Early Cold War on the Formulation of US Science Policy (Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1995), xviii. By the end of fiscal year 1951, additional supplementary appropriations had raised the total defense budget to $48 billion. For fiscal year 1952, Truman requested and Congress budgeted $60 billion for defense.

Federal R&D budgets reflected this militarization trend. In fiscal year 1952, total federal R&D expenditures were approximately $2 billion, with defense-related R&D appropriations having doubled to $1.3 billion in just two years.

The presumably non-defense–oriented National Science Foundation was established scarcely six weeks before the outbreak of the Korean War; had the invasion of North Korea occurred six weeks or more earlier, the National Science Foundation Act of 1950 likely would not have passed. And given the tenor of the country for years after, the Foundation might never have been established; from the beginning of the Korean War to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, national defense effectively drove national science policy, with the military services (until the Vietnam War controversies) providing financial support for university basic research.