James' World 2

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From 1939 to 1941, a ragtag group of mostly Jewish refugee scientists from Hitler’s Europe, including Albert Einstein, approached the government and met with military officials. The scientists educated them on the discovery of nuclear fission, its implications for war and their fears that Hitler would develop an atomic bomb first.

The military brushed them off. “The colonels kept rather aloof,” the physicist Eugene Wigner recalled after one such meeting in October 1939, as Hitler took Poland. “They were friendly, they smiled, but they never expected to see a working atomic bomb in this world.”

One of those colonels told Wigner and Edward Teller, dismissively, that he would award $10,000 to whoever could develop a death ray and prove it by killing a goat — the implication being he imagined that project more likely than a bomb that unlocked the power of the fundamental building block of the universe.

That the push came from refugees from fascist Europe was not a coincidence. “These people — these Hungarian-, German- and Italian-born — knew the organization in dictatorial countries; it occurred to them that there might be ties between research and military applications, that in Germany all scientific work might have been enrolled in the war effort,” Laura Fermi — the wife of the atomic pioneer Enrico — wrote later. “American-born and –

raised physicists had not yet found the door out of their ivory tower: The first knew the military state and the concentration of powers, the latter had seen only democracy and free enterprise.”

The physicist Arthur Holly Compton — who would go on to lead the effort to build the world’s first nuclear reactor in December 1942, tucked in an old squash court at the University of Chicago — explained: “Research in new fields of science had not been recognized by the United States government as a significant source of national strength. There was at Washington no indi­vidual or office having power to deal adequately with a new scientific development whose importance, though urgent and vital, was ill defined. It was simply not in our tradition.”

That arms-length relationship didn’t last long. What came to be known as the Manhattan Project, a $2 billion initiative, employed hundreds of thousands of Americans by 1945 in sites from Oak Ridge, Tenn., to Los Alamos, N.M. World War II efforts like it and the “Rad Lab” at M.I.T., which helped pioneer radar, forever transformed the country and the world.

Out of this grew a tradition of government-supported science, technology, and education efforts. Those fields became a source of national strength and arguably the primary driver of American economic hegemony and prosperity in the eight decades since.

Organizations like the national labs at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Berkeley that grew out of the Manhattan Project became the backbone of a stunning period of scientific and technological advances in the decades after the war. They were joined by the National Science Foundation (founded in 1950), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (founded in 1958); and the National Institutes of Health, which became a major grant-maker after the war, not to mention a host of other agencies like NASA and the Department of Energy.

The return on a relatively modest government investment has been astounding; DARPA alone helped birth the internet, GPS, and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine.

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