Scientific Judgment And Political Commitment

What significance should be attached to the expressions of dissent among scientists not at work on SDI is an intriguing and difficult question. In what proportions does the controversy among the scientists and

engineers reflect scientific judgment or political commitment? Many of the physicists who signed the Cornell-Illinois petition are probably not directly conversant with defense research and receive their research support from the National Science Foundation and other nonmilitary agencies. Strong opposition at the universities has not prevented SDIO from placing a large number of projects with university scientists. SDIO officials even claimed to have set up university-industry consortia, though this claim aroused protests from university administrators who noted that contracts accepted by individual researchers did not imply institutional endorsement. Some of the opposition among scientists clearly does not arise solely from scientific judgment. Many university physicists were apt to oppose the Reagan administration and its policies, including SDI, on political grounds. Even many of the critics agree, moreover, that some level of expenditure on strategic-defense research is warranted as a hedge against the possibility that the Soviets might stage a breakout from the ABM Treaty and might deploy certain space-based defensive technologies. Some also suggest that the United States might profitably consider the deployment of defenses aimed at protecting retaliatory capacity and command and control.

A similar division of scientific opinion was expressed in congressional hearings on the proposed deployment of ABMs in the 1960s. Then, too, as Harvey Brooks notes, policy views were couched in the form of technical judgments to suit political purposes:

Many of the technical witnesses, on both sides, were really motivated by strategic policy considerations, or their personal evaluations of the international situation, or the supposed intentions of the Soviets, but their political allies found it more politic for them to couch their arguments in narrow technical terms, partly because technical experts are often automatically regarded as having nothing useful to say on policy matters. Furthermore, technical testimony appears more "objective" and politically neutral, and it is thus thought to carry more weight with those politicians who have not yet made up their minds.^[40]   

Professional and personal interests are also at play. Some of those who do military R&D are no doubt committed to SDI because they see it as a source of continued funding, especially if the need for research on offensive weapons tapers off. In view of the many technical problems that remain to be addressed in order to perfect offensive systems, however, such self-interest seems an unlikely explanation for the attitudes of researchers—although industrial laboratories and firms may have their eyes on the vast potential represented by defensive procurement contracts.

Some scientists may believe, as David L. Parnas has charged, that even if nothing militarily useful can come of SDI, something beneficial can come for the specialties in which they work.^[41]    In that sense professional curiosity and self-interest may be a motivating factor for some of the scientists. In the case of some of the younger scientists, it is also possible that a desire to do something new and better than their elders is at play. Some of the scientists who work on military projects generally, including SDI, believe they have a duty to contribute to the national security of the United States and the security of the West generally, because, generally speaking, the United States has used its power for benign purposes whereas the Soviet Union is an aggressive, expansionist power whose leaders cannot be trusted. Still others view the world as a system of sovereign states with little law and no law enforcement governing the relations among them, and they argue that even if they did not do the research, someone else would. Motives are undoubtedly as varied and complex in this area as they are in others.

On the side of the critics, there seems to be a more explicit political motivation. Generally, those who are ready to renounce funding for SDI and are otherwise dubious about the motivations behind SDI argue that the political forces promoting it are eager to avoid arms control because they do not fear nuclear war as much as they fear Soviet superiority. In their view, the aim of SDI is not the president's benign goal of making nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete" (because that is widely recognized to be unattainable) but a panoply of much less benign motivations: to challenge the Soviets to an expensive race in high-technology weapons development that they would lose, to establish a military presence in space for offensive as well as defensive purposes, and to sustain the military-industrial complex by promoting a new phase in the military competition between the superpowers. Whatever the goal, they argue, the result of the competition would be to make the world less stable and to promote the chances of nuclear war, because the Soviet response would include the development of a stronger offensive force and resistance to any proposals for arms control. In general, they perceived the Reagan administration to be guided by an obsessive anticommunism and mistrust of arms control, ironically at a time when, because of a major change in the Soviet leadership, the U.S.S.R. is more open than ever to the possibility of serious arms reduction and a renewal of détente with the West. If SDI had not been deliberately contrived for aggressive purposes, they suggest, the administration should have been willing to trade it away as a bargaining chip in negotiations.

The report prepared by a panel appointed by the American Physical Society (APS) suggests that despite these very real political differences—which produce powerful effects in promoting policy commitments—the structure of scientific evidence and thinking is such that consensus is possible on a good many, if not all, of the main technical points. Scientists are apt to disagree about what can be accomplished over what span of time and at what level of effort, but they do not disagree much about what is known and what is yet to be accomplished. The APS report makes it clear that some of the proposed technologies are at least theoretically conceivable, but it also points out that the most important of them are still orders of magnitude away from producing the energies or power necessary to be useful in defensive systems. Even if the technical parameters are met, the report cautions, it remains to be seen whether the devices will prove feasible as weapons or will be less expensive to deploy than offensive systems that could overwhelm or evade them.

In political terms, the APS report was widely considered hostile to SDI. Journalistic accounts emphasized the report's conclusion that it would be many years before the feasibility of space-based beam weapons could be demonstrated. That much was correct, and insofar as SDI has been perceived as a program that promises a quick answer to the question, the report was properly considered critical. If SDI is perceived as a research program, however, the report is not so much a critique as a status report. Nevertheless, it did not satisfy enthusiasts for SDI. In a presentation to the House Republican Research Committee in May 1987, two active SDI researchers, Lowell Wood and Gregory Canavan, criticized both the press coverage of the APS report and the report itself.^[42]    As we note in chapter 3, their charges provoked a rebuttal that left the report's findings undisturbed.

The SDI is only the latest chapter in a division among physicists that opened once the atomic bomb was developed and used against Japan. Until then, disagreements had been muted for the sake of winning the war against Nazi Germany. Once the war was over, a split developed that reflected differing appraisals of the need to gain control over atomic warfare and the possibility of rapprochement with the Soviets. Scientists took different views of defense policy, first with respect to containment, then with respect to the strategy of deterrence and arms control. Many have continued to work on weapons even though they may have disagreed with various aspects of government policy. They do so partly to continue to have some access to policymakers and thus to have influence over policy, partly because they are fascinated by the technology, but in

general because they are committed both to the design of military technology and to the effort to achieve their different policy goals. When Hans Bethe came to Livermore and acknowledged that the idea behind the X-ray laser was scientifically sound, Teller felt vindicated. In an open letter to Bethe in 1986, Teller criticized the scientists who had opposed SDI in the NAS poll, lamenting that the "World War II unanimity of the scientific community" in developing nuclear weapons had been lost. "I am writing this letter," Teller asserted, "in the hope that you and others may find some way to move from polemic debate and confrontation toward technical criticism, understanding, and cooperation."^[43]    Behind the show of indignation, however, lies a reluctance to acknowledge that more is at stake than the accuracy of a scientific theory or line of work. Teller and Bethe—and the scientists who align themselves with both—disagree about what is to be done with such weapons and how their use can be prevented. Both sides are inevitably enmeshed in a political struggle to organize constituencies for and against SDI.