Dorothy Thompson

Fort Worth Star Telegram/July 2, 1946

Sen. Harley M. Kilgore of West Virginia hopes to push through the Senate the bill sponsored by leading representatives of American science and education for the creation of a national science foundation.

This is necessary but not enough. The atomic physicists themselves divided on many issues are practically unanimous on one thing—namely that American scientific advancement is slipping back from the extraordinary achievements of the war. These were the result of close integration and teamwork between the pure or exact scientists, the technicians, the men who had industrial or production “know how,” and the government. A remarkable fellowship was thus created which solved the problem of atomic fission and produced the decisive weapon of history.

This fellowship has been disintegrating since the pressure of the war relaxed. Its disintegration may be fateful for American defense until the problem of the abolition of atomic war is solved.

Thus, the struggle as to how and by whom atomic energy should be controlled is not merely an international issue but a domestic issue as well. The heated fight over the relative merits of the McMahon bill is a symptom. The scientists with their knowledge of the necessary conditions of freedom for research are so bitterly opposed to Army or “brass” control that many of them have practically gone on strike; the Army, which rightly recognizes the vast importance of atomic energy to American defense until some generally and credibly effective system of collective security is created is unwilling to relax its hand, although in the sphere of creative economic application it is largely a strangling hand.

Thus the great creative co-operation which produced an apocalyptic weapon of destruction is not on hand to develop with anything like equal unity and energy the peaceable potentialities of atomic science. Can the Gordian knot be cut and the old co-operation be restored?

It will, of course, by the nature of our economic system be more difficult. But our economic system had better get rid of some of its traditional prejudices if it wants to live much longer in this dynamic world. Some business men who have made a habit of turning what they call “private enterprise” into what could better be called “amortization enterprise” are afraid that atomic energy will replace sources of power and machines for transmitting that power before they have paid their original investment 10 times over.

They are also afraid of the socioeconomic implications in the ownership of atomic energy. Its secrets and its control belong to government, and there the effective ownership must and will rest. Private firms eventually may have access to the energy but they will have to rent it under conditions set and supervised by government. They will never “own” it. Hence in some quarters there appears to be a silent sabotage of its economic development. Yet it holds within itself the greatest possibilities since the dawn of the industrial revolution and possibilities even mere revolutionary for the raising of the standard of living throughout the globe.

To cite but one, and one which is by no means a pipe dream of the remote future; it holds within itself the possibility of regulating climate, of giving temperate stability to such volatile climates as that of our Eastern Seaboard; of producing rain in the exact quantities required or desired in such areas as the Midwestern dust bowl; of cooling torrid zones and warming cold ones; of building artificial barriers with the effect of mountain ranges; in fact, of heating, cooling and air-conditioning, not houses but whole regions.

When one considers how relatively large a proportion of the Soviet Union is inarable and uninhabitable, one grasps from this single possibility the vast imports of atomic energy to Russia. When one realizes how much of our own country and the world is desert, reclaimed, insofar as it is reclaimed by such costly and already theoretically antiquated means as Boulder Dam and TVA; when one thinks of the tremendous overcrowding of the temperate zones of the earth, one can see in this single possible use of atomic energy an entirely new life for mankind.

Therefore, it seems to me, for the sake of reinstating creative co-operation, both for defense and for economic development, we need not only a scientific foundation, but a new cabinet post, a secretary of science, preferably a civilian, all other things being equal, a scientist.

For science will make or break the world.