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The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford
Focusing on MIT and Stanford, Leslie offers a critical look at American science in the making. He reveals a regrettable series of misplaced priorities and missed opportunities that have characterized the recent history of science and technology in this country.
382 pages, Paperback
First published April 15, 1993
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August 31, 2014
A. Synopsis: The context of this book is the Cold War and American science. The content is detailed description of electronics, aeronautics, physics (nuclear science), and materials science departments at MIT and Stanford after WWII. Leslie sees the connection between this context and the content as degrading American science and universities. This is a policy history in the sense that the military set the paradigm for postwar American science. Leslie says, “political intention became embedded in contemporary technological knowledge. (10)” An example can be drawn from Nobel’s Forces of Production. NC won out over RP not because it was technologically superior but because it was the policy of military planners and corporate clients to reduce dependence on skilled, strike prone labor.
B. Military-Industrial-Academic Complex
1. This emerged mainly in the Cold War
2. Short term benefits: Increased budgets, improved facilities, better military hardware
3. Long term costs: Loss of scientists independence, no return for the civilian sector
4. MIT and Stanford were examples of the MIA Complex: supplied the Pentagon with advisors, trained grad students who went into industry, faculty wrote the texts that shaped their fields, and they were sites of protest during the Viet Nam era
C. Electrical departments
1. MIT: Example was the Lincoln Laboratory which handled the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) Project. This was a nationwide network of radar and antiaircraft weapons that were linked with digital computers. Whirlwind, Jay Forrester’s computer, was the real-time computer behind the project. It received 8 billion from the military.
2. Stanford: Tried to emulate MIT in these years and succeeded.
D. Even more than electronics, aeronautics owed its intellectual character and direction to the objectives of its military patrons
E. Nuclear science and physics.
1. MIT: In the years prior to WWII MIT’s physics department was characterized by its associations with industry. After the war it depended on military support.
2. Stanford became a world center for high-energy physics (electron accelerator). They had military applications like the microwave.
F. Materials science (how to turn basic material into practical devices and concepts)
1. MIT: Their program was linked to ARPA. Their faculty established a committee to research semiconductors and solid-state electronics.
2. Stanford: Initially lagged behind in this area, but by the 1960s caught up to MIT. They channeled their work into electronics and aeronautics applications.
G. MIT’s faculty called a strike in 1969 to consider the abuses of science by the military and in particular the war in View Nam. They wanted to research environmental and social problems and not more weapons systems.
B. Military-Industrial-Academic Complex
1. This emerged mainly in the Cold War
2. Short term benefits: Increased budgets, improved facilities, better military hardware
3. Long term costs: Loss of scientists independence, no return for the civilian sector
4. MIT and Stanford were examples of the MIA Complex: supplied the Pentagon with advisors, trained grad students who went into industry, faculty wrote the texts that shaped their fields, and they were sites of protest during the Viet Nam era
C. Electrical departments
1. MIT: Example was the Lincoln Laboratory which handled the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) Project. This was a nationwide network of radar and antiaircraft weapons that were linked with digital computers. Whirlwind, Jay Forrester’s computer, was the real-time computer behind the project. It received 8 billion from the military.
2. Stanford: Tried to emulate MIT in these years and succeeded.
D. Even more than electronics, aeronautics owed its intellectual character and direction to the objectives of its military patrons
E. Nuclear science and physics.
1. MIT: In the years prior to WWII MIT’s physics department was characterized by its associations with industry. After the war it depended on military support.
2. Stanford became a world center for high-energy physics (electron accelerator). They had military applications like the microwave.
F. Materials science (how to turn basic material into practical devices and concepts)
1. MIT: Their program was linked to ARPA. Their faculty established a committee to research semiconductors and solid-state electronics.
2. Stanford: Initially lagged behind in this area, but by the 1960s caught up to MIT. They channeled their work into electronics and aeronautics applications.
G. MIT’s faculty called a strike in 1969 to consider the abuses of science by the military and in particular the war in View Nam. They wanted to research environmental and social problems and not more weapons systems.
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