POWER June 2012 - 79

NUCLEAR POWER
Too Dumb to Meter, Part 2
As the book title Too Dumb to Meter: Follies, Fiascoes, Dead Ends, and Duds on
the U.S. Road to Atomic Energy implies, nuclear power has traveled a rough
road. In this POWER exclusive, we present the second chapter, " Manhattan
Transfer, " which covers the open fight for control of the development of nuclear
power between the newly created Atomic Energy Commission and the
military services, with the politicians playing both sides against each other.
By Kennedy Maize
F
ollowing the end of World War II, the
victorious United States took as one of its
first tasks asserting control over the atom:
both the physical force unleashed by breaking
its strong bonds and the institutional, business,
bureaucratic, and political forces unleashed
by mastering that physical force. The government
had to turn the military rule of the jungle,
which produced the bomb, into a rule of law,
which would dictate the future refinement and
production of nuclear power and weaponry. It
is no accident that the official Atomic Energy
Commission history of this immediate postwar
period, written by George T. Mazuzan and J.
Samuel Walker, published in 1984, is titled
" Controlling the Atom, the Beginnings of Nuclear
Regulation 1946-1962. " A volume covering
the earlier period, written by Richard G.
Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson Jr., was aptly
titled " The New World, 1939-1946. "
The issue facing the United States after
the war was how to put civilians in control of
what had been an entirely military program,
without sapping the strengths of the military
success. It was a bit like the task of taming
a wild horse, where the ideal is to harness
the strength and spirit of the mustang into a
model saddle pony. Not an easy task.
Two characteristics dominated the United
States government when it came to atomic energy
during and after World War II: overwhelming
reliance on secrecy and overweening technological
hubris. The traits were well earned, as
demonstrated by the success of the Manhattan
Project. That endeavor and the resultant weapons
not only ended the war against Japan but
also altered the balance of power in the postwar
period, and led to the Cold War nuclear equilibrium
between the U.S. and the Soviet Union
that lasted for more than 50 years. The Cold War
competition to build more and better bombs and
faster, smarter, and more deadly delivery and
defense systems may have effectively spent the
Soviet Union into oblivion.
The United States nuclear weapons program
from 1942-1946 was the most secret
large-scale military project in history. Most
of the details, including the most mundane,
June 2012 | POWER
were not made known until a major push by
the Clinton administration in the early 1990s
declassified much of the documentation. The
pursuit of invisibility dominated the nuclear
endeavor from its days as an entirely military
mission through its transformation into a civilian
enterprise, to the point of obsession.
The postwar period was also intensely, radioactively
partisan, which affected the debate
over what to do about the atom. Democrats had
been in control in Washington since Roosevelt's
1932 presidential election. The president had
won unprecedented third (1940) and fourth
(1944) terms. Vice President Truman continued
the Democratic hegemony when he succeeded
to the highest office in 1945. The Democratic
Party controlled Congress, as well as the White
House, during that thirteen-year period.
By 1946, American voters were understandably
restive. The war was over, and it was time
to return to a more normal existence. Truman
tried, but failed, to continue wartime rationing
of strategic commodities. Industries had tired
of wartime production quotas and demands
from Washington. Carmakers wanted to make
cars, not tanks; and consumers wanted to buy
cars and new tires and gasoline without needing
government-allocated coupons or bypassing
rationing for the black market.
Republicans sensed that they had an opportunity
to make great political gains as
the nation came out of its war environment.
One of the first points of contention between
the parties-a harbinger of political fights
to come-was how to organize the nation's
nuclear energy research and development program.
Republicans, with a tradition of fealty to
military leadership and concepts and a desire
to draw a favorable line in the shifting political
sand, started pushing a civilian regime that
retained most of the wartime military controls,
including the dogma of intense inscrutability.
For the most part, the military was perfectly
happy with an arrangement that put civilians
in charge of a weak institution that continued
to respond primarily to military needs.
The Republican view of the postwar atomic
venture resonated with many conservative,
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military-oriented Democrats, splitting the
majority party. The Democratic Party also
had a tradition that valued government control
over market forces, a holdover from the
Depression- and New Deal-era approach to
creating large, government-controlled institutions
to solve social problems, such as the
Tennessee Valley Authority.
But the majority party was riven. Arrayed
against the Southern dominated right wing of
the Democrats were the internationalists, with
a vision drawn in part from their fealty to the
ideas of their icons, Woodrow Wilson and his
failed League of Nations, and Roosevelt and his
variant on the theme, the United Nations. Also
dividing the Democrats were those in the Truman
White House who wanted as much authority
and flexibility located in the executive branch
as possible and congressional Democrats, who
wanted to exercise greater control over their rivals
at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Complicating the politics were the Manhattan
Project scientists, many of whom felt
drawn back to the academic life, where they
exercised control over their research agendas
without any direction from politicians and bureaucrats.
Many of the scientists, Oppenheimer
for example, were also staunch internationalists
who wanted to see atomic energy put out
of the reach of nationalist aims, whether those
of Washington or Moscow.
The Manhattan Project flew in the face of the
ethical and epistemological traditions of science
in general and physics in particular. Traditionally,
science had relied on open discussion, giveand-take,
argument, and sharing experimental
data and research results. But that ran counter
to the needs of the military to compartmentalize
data, restrict access to research, and stifle
scientific debate. Many feared that open science
would arm our enemies, initially the Germans,
but increasingly the Soviet Union.
In the Manhattan Project, the Army created
an open, but extremely limited, arena
for physicists and other scientists to hash out
their diverse views, in remote and completely
controlled environments in the New Mexico
wilderness, the wilds of Tennessee, the desert
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POWER June 2012

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