The triumph of science and technology in the Second World War reverberated in peacetime. At home, economic and other forces demanded a reexamination of how to maintain the vibrancy and productivity of our science and technology. Other countries, especially the emergent economies, wanted to follow our path and learn from us how to do it. There were uncertainties about how to defend the country against attacks in space and on the ground. And there were disasters, as slip-shod management cost seven people their lives when the Challenger shuttle blew up shortly after launch.

“On March 23, 1983, Ronald Reagan announced in a televised address his Strategic Defense Initiative, the ultimate purpose of which, the president said, was to intercept enemy missiles in flight and thereby ‘to give us the means of rendering those nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.’”¹ He posed the question: “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?” He called on the “scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of

mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. . . . Tonight, consistent with our obligations of the ABM [antiballistic missiles] treaty and recognizing the need for closer consultation with our allies, I’m taking an important first step. I am directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles. This could pave the way for arms control measures to eliminate the weapons themselves.”²

Like all things, this one had histories, including Ronald Reagan’s and mine. In 1945 an Air Force officer—at the time, an Army Air Force officer—warned that the United States would need a missile defense. In 1954³ I chaired a government panel to look at the problems of an antimissile defense system. We found plenty, even though issues were in a way simpler, not least that intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were still in their infancy. But even then we saw many problems in attacking offensive missiles on launch, much less detecting them, killing them before they struck, and dealing with decoys. The world in the 1980s was more complicated, with the two superpowers bristling with nuclear-tipped long- and medium-range missiles, extraordinarily capable guidance systems, and taut warning systems in the event the other guy tried a sneak attack. That made for a standoff—mutually assured destruction— that uneasily caged the nuclear beast for decades. “Star Wars” in principle took out the “mutually assured” since with it we could stop the other guy from hitting us. That was new and for a lot of people scary.

Ronald Reagan may have gotten his original ideas about a strategic missile defense in a visit in 1967 to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the country’s major nuclear weapons laboratories. More than a decade later, at a briefing during his presidential campaign at the headquarters of the North American Air Defense Command, Reagan had it brought home to him that, while the United States could detect missiles about to destroy its territory, it had no way to stop them. The 1980 Republican platform urged “more modern ABM technologies.” With Reagan’s election the pressures for an ABM program mounted, with well-known scientists such as Edward Teller pushing hard. Not least, the forces for a moratorium on testing and production of

nuclear weapons were getting stronger and more insistent. In 1982 a resolution for a nuclear “freeze” failed to pass in the House of Representatives by two votes. Clearly, the nation’s notion of a strategic defense dependent on who had more weapons was being tested hard.

Ronald Reagan, according to George Keyworth, the president’s science advisor, had studied the stability assumed in mutual deterrence, and concluded that stability was eroding and came to “believe that any incentive for a preemptive nuclear attack could be removed by even a rudimentary missile defense system. . . . The SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative] was President Reagan’s idea; it was his initiative, and it was his faith in technology that drove it.”⁴

Troubling to me was that the decision to go ahead with the SDI flew in the face of deep technical skepticism, most especially the heart of the purported system: using lasers—specifically, X-ray lasers—to intercept and destroy incoming missiles in space. One technically astute administration official told George Keyworth that relying on “lasers to shoot down ballistic missiles was like expecting laetrile to cure cancer.”⁵ The White House Science Council, composed of some very distinguished scientists and technologists, was highly dubious of a space-based defense relying on lasers. Finally, Dr. Keyworth was also skeptical of the technical merits of the various proposals for missile defenses and was “inclined to protest the conflicting and exaggerated claims being made on behalf of strategic defense.”⁶

What was the reaction? There was a sharp loss of confidence in the White House science advisor and his office by many in the scientific and technical communities. George Keyworth saw it quite differently:

What the Russians would do was uncertain, but the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a then-classified assessment issued three months after

the speech, on September 12, 1983, asserted that the Soviets would rely on political and diplomatic means to oppose the missile defense plans, “or, failing that, to negotiate them away.” And, the CIA added, they could turn to technical countermeasures. Missiles can be upgraded with new boosters, decoys, penetration aids, and multiple warheads. “The signatures of these systems can be reduced and new launch techniques and basing schemes can be devised which make them less vulnerable to U.S. missile warning and defensive weapon systems. These systems can also be hardened or modified to reduce their vulnerability to directed energy weapons. The Soviets can employ other offensive systems, particularly manned bombers and long-range cruise missiles with improved penetration aids and stealth technologies, to assume a greater burden of the strategic offensive strike role and to exploit the weaknesses in U.S. air defense capabilities.”⁸

The Congress indirectly put SDI on my plate. When the Department of Defense requested funds for fiscal year 1985 to establish a Strategic Defense Initiative office, the House Armed Services committee and the Senate Foreign Relations committee requested that the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) examine the opportunities and risks in accelerating research on missile defense technologies. In spring 1985, John H. Gibbons, the OTA director, asked me to chair the OTA committee. “Now, why would you want me to do that? I’ve never really done anything for OTA.” He said, “Well, there are three reasons. First of all, you know a lot about rockets and missiles and space and military uses of them, even studies of ballistic missile defense.” “Yes, that’s correct. What’s the second?” He replied, “You’ve chaired lots of committees, and so you have good experience in that.” I replied, “Yes, that’s true, too. What’s the third?” He said, “As far as I can see, you are the only person in the country who hasn’t come out on the front page with your views on the subject.” I laughed and said, “Yes, that’s correct.”⁹

The first meeting of the committee¹⁰ was in a classified facility near the Capitol. Once we got through the throat clearing, with introductions and the like, we entered into substantive talk and trouble. The first to speak was quickly interrupted. Committee members had strong positions on the issue and weren’t bashful about pushing them hard. For example, when Robert McNamara at the outset argued for

the current weapons balance and its mutually assured destruction policy, Lieutenant General Daniel Graham sneered “Yes, we call that MAD, M-A-D, MAD!” It became absurd. I gaveled the committee to a full stop and said, “No one can speak without my permission, and the way to do that is either raise your hand or put your nameplate up, and the secretary will note your names in order, and I will then call on you in that order. Everyone who wants to will be heard. Also, you have to limit your comments on any one subject to three minutes— one minute would be better.” It worked. They felt a bit sheepish, knowing that they were all very distinguished people and that this was a stupid but necessary rule to impose on them.

We soon got down to substantive matters on subjects such as ballistic missiles and defense, then and now; deterrence, U.S. nuclear strategy, and ballistic missile defense; arms race stability and arms control issues; technologies; feasibility; and alternative future scenarios and alternative research and development programs.

Our report¹¹ was issued in September 1985. The committee without much controversy agreed on continuing research in ballistic missile defense, but without any deployment or setting up of a station that would abrogate the ABM treaty. It noted that national security strategy was composed of strong offensive capabilities and real weaknesses in defending against them and that, “unless this imbalance between the offensive and defensive disappears, strategic defenses might be plausible for limited purposes, such as defense of ICBM silos or complication of enemy attack plans, but not for the more ambitious goal of assuring the survival of U.S. society.” And the report added that “assured survival of the U.S. population appears impossible to achieve if the Soviets are determined to deny it to us,” echoing the CIA’s report on possible Soviet countermeasures to SDI. We also added that it was impossible to price the system, since there was no system—no design and none of the key technologies even close to development. And we added that a decision to either push ahead or scale back an SDI program means, like many things in life, “balancing opportunities against risks, in the face of considerable uncertainty.”¹²

That report dealt with missiles attacking us. What about weapons against our space satellites? As Jack Gibbons put it, “How can the United States respond to the potential threat to its military capabilities posed

now and in the future both by Soviet military satellites and by Soviet anti-satellite weapons?”¹³ Those issues were dealt with in a companion report to the one dealing with SDI, a logical move, since the issues, the technologies, and the possible implications were in many instances close or the same.

There was more. Left very uncertain was whether the daunting computer software needs for an SDI system could be met. Congress was also interested and asked for an additional report drilling down harder on computer issues. Our 1988 report acknowledged the impressive technical work done in some 30 years of work on a ballistic missile defense system, that using optimistic assumptions a “first-phase” system might be online in 1995 to 2000 (i.e., 10 years after our report) and that the software problem was indeed huge.¹⁴ Indeed, the report commented that “no adequate models for the development, production, test, and maintenance of software for full-scale ballistic missile defense systems exist.”¹⁵

Ballistic missile defense had been on my mind from 1944 to the end of the century and it was rearing up again. The committee on missile defense I chaired in 1954 for the Air Force to look at defenses against ICBMs carrying nuclear warheads concluded that any defense was possible only in the terminal phase of the missile’s flight. The Air Force lost interest because it considered that an Army mission. Some 30 years later I chaired another look with much the same conclusion overall, that the overwhelming advantage lay with offense. So back to mutual assured destruction. The changes in the USSR and its economic defeat have made us feel comfortable with the problems in building a missile defense system, though the United States has continued to do research and has had some success at terminal defense of a few weapons from known direction. Now in the twenty-first century a defense against rogue nations is thought desirable. In my view this will prove to be more of a political issue very much as it turned out for the Star Wars proposal of the 1980s.

It wasn’t all Star Wars. I also got heavily if indirectly involved in the purest of science: high-energy physics. When I went in 1965 to Carnegie Tech to be its president, my predecessor, Jake Warner, mentioned that he was involved in the start-up of a new organization that had as its goal

building a new particle accelerator much more powerful than what the country had at the time. That piqued my interest, not least because my doctoral work at the California Institute of Technology was on the decay rate of one of the fundamental particles of nature, the meson. The other fundamental particles at the time were the proton, neutron, electron, and positron. A lot had gone on in the three decades since I did that work in the late 1930s, but in truth high-energy physics in 1965 was a bit of a mess: lots of particles had been discovered, leading to many research papers and headlines but little clarity. How did those particles relate to one another? How did they account for nuclear and atomic behavior? Probing that meant having a more powerful machine with beams that could more completely shatter atomic nuclei and giant detectors to probe and measure the debris.

The new machine would be very large and very expensive. The tactic for getting the money out of the Congress was twofold: form a consortium of universities backing the accelerator, have them pony up $10,000 each, and not select the accelerator site until after the money was appropriated. That was successful. Universities Research Association, Inc.¹⁶ was created to coordinate the universities; Batavia, Illinois, just outside Chicago, was selected for the site; the facility was dedicated in November 21, 1967;¹⁷ and Robert R. Wilson of Cornell University was named the first director in 1967. Wilson put down a set of firm principles for the new facility: scientific excellence, aesthetic beauty, stewardship of the land, fiscal responsibility, and equality of opportunity. Wilson turned the words into reality by building the new laboratory on time and on budget, demanding architecture and design for its 6,500 acres that were highly functional and dramatic and establishing a bison herd to symbolize the place as another frontier, that of high-energy physics.¹⁸ The herd is still there, with new calves each spring. Bob Wilson died on January 16, 2000, and is buried in the small Pioneer Cemetery on the northeast corner of Fermilab where some headstones date back to 1839. Perhaps his finest moment came when he had to defend the cost of Fermilab before a highly skeptical congressional committee. Asked what the new accelerator had to do with national security, he said: “Nothing at all. It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculp-

tors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.”¹⁹

As president of Carnegie Tech cum Carnegie Mellon University, I became a member of the Universities Research Association, Inc. (URA) consortium and from that post watched as Fermilab opened for business and became a major player in dramatic advances in high-energy physics. In its first 10 years, theoretical high-energy physicists working at Fermilab and many other sites in the United States and abroad began to untangle the messy zoo of particles, symmetries, forces, and the like that made high-energy physics such a wilderness. The key was a “Standard Model” that offered a framework for describing elementary particles and their fundamental interactions. It also showed some gaps of as yet undetected particles. Fermilab contributed by finding some of the major missing particles predicted by the Standard Model, including the discovery of the bottom quark in 1977, the top quark in 1994, and in July 2000 the tau neutrino, the last fundamental particle (at the time) to be observed.²⁰ In fact, confirmation of the tau neutrino completed the experimental sightings of the fundamental building blocks of matter prescribed by the Standard Model.

I had to leave URA when I became director of the National Science Foundation in 1972 but did go back for a dedication ceremony for Fermilab, representing President Nixon. Almost immediately after I left government I was asked to become a URA trustee. And almost immediately after that, in 1978, we lost Bob Wilson. Operating budgets for facilities were cut in the late 1970s. Bob wrote a blunt letter saying something had to be done or he’d quit and asked the URA officers if he should send it. I think he might have been willing to try a more positive approach, though I am not sure what. His resignation was accepted by the Department of Energy (DOE). That was a blow, but we got a wonderful successor in Leon Lederman, who served two very successful five-year terms. In 1988, the same year he stepped down as Fermilab director, Leon shared²¹ the Nobel Prize in physics for his earlier discovery of the muon neutrino.

I became part-time president of URA in 1982 and served out my three-year term during which serious planning began for the next particle

accelerator. That was supposed to be the Superconducting Supercollider, the SSC. It would have enough energy to produce a “Higgs” particle, the notion of which sent the theorists designing the Standard Model of the nucleus into ecstasy. DOE agreed to start, and proceeded, as had the Atomic Energy Commission when Fermilab was built with Glenn Seaborg at the helm; that is, prepare a design, ask for proposals, and then choose a site. But DOE did not have a Glenn Seaborg nor did the Congress have a Hubert Humphrey to, as in the case of Fermilab, rally the midwestern states to get such a big plum. URA had to have a broadly based Board of Trustees with two Boards of Oversight, one for Fermilab and one for SSC. This resulted when DOE asked Robert Hughes, president of Associated Universities, Inc., and me to referee the competitions between and among the six main laboratories for high-energy particle physics as well as one from Texas with smaller programs in its universities, bringing to seven the organizations we dealt with. All the while jealousies between and among the six main laboratories for high-energy physics kept popping up, and Texas, with a small nuclear particle physics program, insisted it be part of the discussions. But we were able to select Maury Tigner, a Cornell physicist to lead the design effort at Berkeley. The National Academy of Sciences appointed a site selection committee to winnow down the number of suitable sites. The politics began and Texas was selected. I thought we would pick Maury Tigner to lead the construction and program development, but a secret ballot produced Roy Schwitters from Harvard, who at the time had charge of a major experiment at Fermilab.

The SSC didn’t make it, aborted early in its building by the Congress for a farrago of reasons, including costs; loss of political influence by Texas where the SSC was to be sited; notable and very public failure to obtain foreign backing for the project; a succession of perceived overruns; and rough questioning of how funds were used, including by URA, which managed the project for the government. Not least, many in the scientific community outside high-energy physics bitterly opposed the project believing it would drain their own support. SSC began construction in 1990. Four years and $1.7 billion later, it was terminated by the Congress on October 21, 1993. I was out of the line of fire, having left my presidency in 1985 after serving out my full three-year term. I did

stay on the URA board through the debacle.²² Of the many reasons for the demise of the SSC, I believe there was one sine qua non: the loss of political support when Speaker of the House Jim Wright from Texas was forced to resign. We lost the equivalent of Hubert Humphrey, who earlier had rallied the Midwest Congressional Delegations to get Fermilab for the Midwest.

When I chose to do pro bono work from a Washington base and independent employment instead of returning to academe, I knew I would miss one feature of the research university, that of the intellectual ferment of comingling with faculty and with other talented scientists, engineers, and many other professionals. To help replace that, I chose the National Academies. My very close friends, President Court Perkins of the National Academy of Engineering, and President Phil Handler of the National Academy of Sciences, immediately set me to work on a great variety of projects, many in my professional fields, some in science and technology policy, some in international affairs, and some in the organizational infrastructure and operations of the NAS, NAE, and National Research Council (NRC). Court’s successors, Bob White and Bill Wulf, and Phil’s successors, Frank Press and Bruce Alberts kept it up. In the archives there is a record of about 50 assignments to various commissions, boards, committees, panels, and working groups. Although I can tell tales about each, I will be mercifully selective.

While the domestic issues—SDI, the death of the SSC, and the response to the Challenger accident, about which more later—were tough enough, they often got even harder on an international scale. It’s one thing to counsel on the health and use of science and technology in a culture one fully understands and quite another when you’re asked to do that in a different culture, where motivations, goals, and management styles are quite different. That certainly was impressed on me as I undertook in the late 1970s and early 1980s a series of international science and technology missions.

Mao-Tse Tung died in 1976, the “Gang of Four”²³ was defeated by the fall of 1978, and there had been determined efforts by the Carter

administration to “open” up China, mirrored by determined efforts by China to establish links with our science, engineering, and technology. A high-level government-to-government visit was arranged by my successor as presidential science advisor, the geophysicist Frank Press.²⁴ Before that a private exchange was arranged when the new Chinese minister of education asked the National Academy of Engineering²⁵ to send a group to look at two items: (1) the quality and effectiveness of engineering schools in China and (2) how effectively different industries used engineers. Joseph Pettit, president of the Georgia Institute of Technology, was the chairman, and I the vice chair. We were among the first from the “outside world” to visit China after the fall of the Gang of Four, this being September and October 1978. We started off in Beijing with briefings from the minister of education and his staff, with their thoughts on engineering education and industry. These were two of the five central priorities of the Chinese government—agriculture and food, industry, national defense, science and technology, and education. We soon learned that the Chinese were absolutely standardized in receiving visitors. Wherever we went, we would be taken to the top man of that institution. In his office would be a low table. We would sit around it and immediately hot tea would be served in a fairly large cup, with a neat top on it. I like tea, but having this happen to me more than once per day, I soon developed a tea jag. And we heard the five central priorities of the Chinese so often we repeated them in our sleep.

We did get out of the offices to see some of their engineering work. At Xingua University, albeit not until after another round of tea, we visited a solid-state laboratory, a computer laboratory, and a mechanical engineering student factory. The Chinese had prepared very well. They knew our curriculum vitae and whenever they could they had teachers and researchers who had studied at our universities. I met up with a group of teachers and researchers who had been to the California Institute of Technology, where I got my doctorate 35 years earlier. We also visited the Institute of Mechanics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where I asked about a very distinguished member of that Academy, H. S. Tsien, a close associate of Theodore von Kármán. I’d known Tsien at Cal Tech and at MIT and on the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. In

1950 he was accused of being an alien communist and a danger to the United States. Two weeks in custody were followed by five years of house arrest under threat of deportation. He left in 1955. I asked about Tsien and was told that they did not know where he was. I knew exactly where he was: working on the most advanced technologies for the Chinese military and space programs.²⁶

It wasn’t all business. We visited the Imperial Palace Museum and were taken to the emperor’s theater house (more tea). This was a relatively small, comfortable room that looked out over a moat, across to a theater stage for opera and plays. The emperor and his family could come and watch from this room. The emperor was no longer coming. The curator of the museum, a woman, very attractive and very well spoken, showed us some beautiful Ming pottery. But there was not a lot of it. To be pleasant, I said, “Presumably, if the Nationalists had not taken those freight car loads of things to Taiwan, you would have a much more complete display.” I never saw a face turn to so much wrath and fury—not at me but at that event. She held forth for some time about what she thought of the Nationalists raiding the treasures of China.

We duly issued a report²⁷ that included detailed descriptions and our impressions of the dozen or so engineering schools and laboratories we saw, as well as an equal number of factories where engineers worked. If there is a leitmotif to the report, it is that judging Chinese engineering education in the abstract made no sense. As Joe Pettit observed in his introduction, “One cannot understand the current forms of engineering education without comprehending major trends and events since 1949, such as the impact of Soviet technical advisors in China in the 1950s, the onset of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966, the political conflicts of the early 1970s, and finally the current era which follows the death of Chairman Mao in September 1976.” I backed that up in my assessment of Chinese research and development, commenting that “one is struck by the enigma of a country with so many assets in people and natural resources not having developed more fully . . . and that to account for this enigma one must infer that the nature of Chinese culture, history, politics, and social structure, together with the burden of too many people to support, have been obstacles to modernization.”²⁸

I gained a second perspective on science and technology, culture and industrialization, when I chaired beginning in April 1978 the Joint Consultative Committee on Egypt and made two trips to Egypt with the Egyptians meeting in the United States in the interval.²⁹ It got off to an historical start, for just as we got to our hotel in Alexandria the television monitor came on with the announcement and pictures of the prime minister of Israel and the President of Egypt signing a peace treaty. Somewhat like China, Egypt didn’t fully exploit its scientific and technical resources: some 50,000 scientists and technologists and over 150 research and development institutes. There were many reasons, with a standout one being the weak bonding between these intellectual resources and industry. The Egyptian government had strict rules on foreign investments in factories, including marketing, which meant that they missed out on a great U.S. strength: the ability of research organizations to get the products they needed from industry, rather than having to create their own. They lacked that connection, and it hurt them.

At the same time, the Egyptians were receptive to new ventures and we were able in my three-year tenure as chair to launch new activities, including several research and development programs, which in common emphasized close cooperation between research teams and the beneficiaries in industry and agriculture. These included evaluation of Egyptian phosphate ores for wet-process phosphoric acid and phosphate fertilizer production, the fertilizer industry, and Egyptian farmers; corrosion causes and control for the oil refinery at Suez; improving the processing of wool scouring and wool wax recovery for an Egyptian textile processor and the export market; and development of Red Sea fisheries for Egyptian consumers of fish and seafood products.

Like China, and like the United States for that matter, Egypt didn’t escape the downside of industrial development, in this instance that development would seriously pollute the Nile. And it didn’t escape a second downside, of charging ahead with technology without looking at the social consequences, pro and especially con. A woman who was dean of the College of Social Studies at Cairo University was quite perturbed about government officials treating all new development as a pure good with-

out considering social consequences. Unemployment was high and living standards were low, and while development could in time make for a better life, the transition was likely to be especially tough on the most vulnerable, the poor and the jobless.

I gained a wider perspective on the efforts of Egypt and China to modernize in the late 1970s through another NRC committee I chaired in support of a United Nations Conference on Science and Technology for Development, in Vienna in August 1979. The previous conference was in 1963, and in the interval, as I wrote in my introduction to the report, “the world has come to recognize new problems—finite energy supplies, environmental degradation, runaway population growth—when it was hardly conscious of them” in 1963.³⁰ Our committee offered a plethora of recommendations, with one typical example to find ways to reduce postharvest losses. The message was that the world didn’t have a shortage of food but a shortage of means to get it to the people. “Conservative estimates of the amount of food lost between harvest and consumption as a result of pests, microorganisms, inadequate storage, poor processing techniques, and the like range upward from 10 percent for grains and legumes and 20 percent for perishables.”³¹

The meeting was a mixed experience: a chance to savor Vienna, its music, and its food, offsetting a somewhat disappointing meeting. The general sessions were quite repetitious, with nothing new in them; it didn’t even pay to take notes. There was a lot of required business, with luncheons and dinners held by groups all seemingly with different agendas. It was like a cotillion with everyone hurrying to get their dance cards filled.

Still, there were many pluses. Bunny and I were delighted by the people we met, especially so when just as we got to our hotel we met Fletcher and Peg Byron, old friends from Pittsburgh who we met when I was president of Carnegie Mellon University and Fletcher the chief executive officer of the Koppers Corporation. The U.S. delegation was led by Father Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame; the Department of Commerce had a strong group led by Jordan Baruch and Lewis Branscomb and including many leading industrialists of whom Fletch Byrom was typical. Roger Revelle, a leading scientist in the appropriate use of science and technology for development, was a strong participant.

He and I were asked by our leadership to draft a summary statement for the final report.

There were durable results from the conference. An organization of Third World countries, the Group of 77, created in 1964 at the end of the first United Nations Conference on Trade and Development came away from the 1979 UN conference with a clearer view of the value of market economies. There was indirectly an affirmation of support for the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. IIASA was born in a remarkable speech by President Johnson in 1966 in which he said that “it was time that the scientists of the United States and the Soviet Union worked together on problems other than military and space matters, on problems that plagued all advanced societies, like energy, our oceans, the environment, health.”³² Chartered in 1972, now located in a former imperial residence of the Hapsburgs in Laxenburg a few miles south of Vienna, IIASA has served as a nongovernmental institution that brought the sharp tools of sciences of statistics and decision analysis to bear on studies of environmental, economic, technological and social issues in the context of human dimensions of global change.³³ IIASA had its problems, financial and political. The Johnson administration’s support for it died. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences offered to support it and did. Things weren’t made any easier by the discovery that one of the USSR representatives to IIASA was using it to operate a spy ring in Europe.

On January 28, 1986, came the terrible explosion of the Challenger, 73 seconds into its flight. Seven people³⁴ died in the fiery mess. I was in New Jersey at a Schering-Plough board meeting. My first thought was for Christa McAuliffe, the New Hampshire school teacher. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had decided to put a schoolteacher on board, held a national contest to choose one, and Christa won it. One of the contestants was my son Guy, Jr., also an English teacher in a New Hampshire school, who had spent a lot of time putting together a pretty good case for what he would do as a teacher having orbited in space. I also thought of the second woman on that

flight, Judy Resnik. I remembered that Judy and her fiancé, when they were students at Carnegie Mellon University and I was president, invited Bunny and me to a lovely fraternity dinner in a restaurant atop Mount Washington. It was a wonderful conversation with wonderful people. Beyond my grief for Christa, Judith, and their fellow crew members, I thought about the longer-term effects. The Challenger payload included TDRS-2, one of three satellites for the Tracking and Data Relay System, the telephone central for spacecraft communications.

A presidential commission to investigate what happened issued its report on June 9, 1986, less than six months after the explosion. Its hearings were public, and I and others soon were disgusted by the weaknesses in the design of the solid-fuel rocket booster for the shuttle, mistakes that likely caused the explosion. What was worse, we learned of NASA’s misuse of its own rules on operating limits for the shuttle.

Slow-motion pictures of the shuttle just before it exploded showed a flame shooting out of one of the two solid-fuel rocket boosters and burning straight toward the main liquid fuel tank. The problem was in the two O-ring seals in the booster intended to keep hot exhaust gases from escaping. The O-rings were vulnerable to cold temperatures. And it was unseasonably cold at the Kennedy Space Center the night before the launch. Cold stiffened the O-rings, and they couldn’t seal effectively. Hot gases got past the O-rings, burned a hole in the metal case, and gas jetted out the side of the booster. This jet weakened or penetrated the adjacent liquid fuel tank. It broke apart. Hydrogen and oxygen mixed uncontrollably, exploded, and destroyed the shuttle and seven lives. The late physicist and Nobelist Richard Feynman of Cal Tech memorably showed what happened as he dunked O-ring material into ice water in front of television cameras and his fellow commission members. It became hard and inflexible. Feynman was justifiably harsh in his “personal observations” included as an appendix to the Rogers Commission³⁵ report in urging the commission to:

It shouldn’t have happened. The Rogers Commission called the safety reporting system at NASA “silent.” The agency had in effect ignored prelaunch warnings that could have prevented the tragedy. Engineers at Morton Thiokol, where the solid-fuel booster was made, found the design flaw in 1977 and reported it, only to have it ignored. That continued even after erosion of the O-ring turned up after a 1981 shuttle flight. And finally, and courageously, two Thiokol engineers refused on the day of the accident to sign a release for the firing of the boosters. They knew full well that the cold temperature at the time was beyond design limits. NASA’s ignoring them disgusted me. They became heroes in the engineering profession.

The Rogers Commission coupled its harsh criticism with a recommendation that the National Research Council, of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, oversee the redesign of the solid rocket booster. While I was in Europe, on tasks as foreign secretary of the National Academy of Engineering, Robert White, president of the NAE, called and asked quite bluntly that I chair the panel overseeing the booster redesign. I asked for time to think about it, had a sleepless night knowing full well that this would be a very difficult and possibly thankless task. Bunny, who was traveling with me, told me I should do it. I accepted.

I had a hand in selecting the panel³⁷ and also its senior staff officer.³⁸ I asked at the outset how much time was needed and was told two months. Two months turned into almost 30. The panel held 21 meetings between June 1986 and December 1988; individual members went on 77 site and inspection visits and wrote seven interim reports and one final report.³⁹ All this from unpaid volunteers! We got incredible amounts of data—from NASA, from Morton Thiokol, and from United Space Boosters, Inc. United Space Boosters was responsible for various parts of the assembled rocket, including the skirt, but Morton Thiokol was responsible for the cases and for mixing and pouring the solid propellant. We also produced our own data, including a bar chart tracking the thick-

ness of the agenda books. The average thickness of the agenda books was 1.783 inches, the worst 2.569 inches, and the thinnest .75 inches. We had lots of data.

The panel’s first meeting was rough, with tensions thick between NASA and Morton Thiokol officials and between them and us. When NASA gave its version of what happened in the morning and Thiokol in the afternoon, one panel member bluntly interrupted the second presentation to state, rightly, “What you’re now telling us doesn’t agree with the morning presentation.” Awkward silence, then rancor, and then agreement by the panel that I go see James Fletcher, NASA administrator. I did that and told him it wasn’t our job to decide who got the blame but to make sure the booster redesign was done right. That ended finger pointing before the panel by NASA and Thiokol.⁴⁰

We worked the redesign over hard. We looked not only at the redesign itself but also the means for testing and verifying the safety of new designs, material specifications, and quality assurance and control. Four different joints in the booster rocket had to be redesigned. Crunch time came when the panel insisted on a test not just of the individual components but of the total assembly. And it insisted that a realistic test be done by putting an intentional flaw in the new design so that hot gases could in fact reach the back-up secondary O-ring. Would it contain the hot gas? In fact with the redesign there were now three barriers for containing the hot gases. We believed that final approval of redesign and flight first needed a full two-minute firing of a rocket on the ground—two minutes because that was how long the booster burned in flight. We believed that a full-scale, full-duration test was “essential to the certification of the design.⁴¹ The results of the test, including assessments of the performance of the joints that are intentionally modified to assure pressurization of the primary O-rings, must be available for review before the return to flight.”⁴² Some NASA officials felt that would cause too much of a delay in return to flight. We insisted.

The test came August 18, 1988. Most of the panel was there. By then I had developed back problems and used a cane to walk out to the firing. It was the longest two minutes of my life. But the test was successful and afterwards some NASA and Thiokol officials talking to the press who had watched the test, took full credit for it. One of the reporters said to

me on the side: “Yes, they’re delighted—after you people dragged them kicking and screaming to do this test.” We concluded our seventh interim report to the NASA administrator and the American public by noting that “the redesigned solid rocket boosters have incorporated a large number of improvements that should result in considerably enhanced safety and reliability, hence reduced risk. Risks remain, however. . . . Whether the level of risk is acceptable is a matter that NASA must judge. Based on the panel’s assessments and observations regarding the redesigned solid rocket boosters, we have no basis for objection to the current launch schedule for STS-26.”⁴³

Indeed, on September 29, 1988, over two years after the panel began its work, I was at the Kennedy Space Center for the launch of STS-26. I again felt like I had stopped breathing for two minutes. But I was confident. And the launch went beautifully. The panel’s work did not end with the launch. We inspected the burned-out boosters that were retrieved from the Atlantic Ocean and used that information in preparing our final report, delivered to NASA almost exactly two and a half years after the first panel meeting and a month less than three years after the Challenger accident. In December 1988, NASA recognized the panel members and staff for our work with its public service awards. About a year later NASA brought the panel together for a “reunion” to review data obtained from six shuttle flights and four ground tests conducted in that time. During this meeting, the panel members and staff were all honored by the Corps of Astronauts, which gave us each its Personal Achievement Award for improving the safety of manned space flight.

That ceremony, putting in effect a full stop to an exhausting if very rewarding part of my life, led to some serious introspection. It was 1988 and I was 72. While I was done with the booster redesign, many other things were still in my life and one very large task. Various activities included assisting with advice by the Academies, especially on space issues, for the next president; work on affairs of the National Academy of Engineering; involvement in foreign exchange programs with Japan and China; and the like. The large task, to occupy me for five years, was the

new Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government. But there was also my worsening back problem. For two or three years I had traveled all over the world with recurring pain, but somehow managed throughout to keep a sunny face for the outside world. I knew surgery was ahead. Dr. Donlin Long, professor of neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, did that. The operation⁴⁴ went well, albeit not without complaints from Dr. Long and his associate who did the surgery about the hardness of the bones they had to break to get at the spinal cord. I thought that a plus: my bones were in really fine shape.

In the midst of these medical problems, I returned in a sense to my old stomping grounds: advising the U.S. president, albeit this time from the outside. In 1988 I chaired a committee of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering that advised the incoming president, who turned out to be George H. W. Bush, on U.S. space policy.⁴⁵ And in that year I also began five years of work for the Carnegie Commission.

It’s a Washington cliché that advice not asked for is dead on arrival. Against that, we had little reason to be optimistic that our efforts to formulate directions for future space policy would provide fertile. But in fact they did. Part of the reason may have been desperation. While the flight of the Discovery shuttle in September 1988 put the U.S. “back in space,” it was in fact a program looking for a place to go. There were many questions that a new administration couldn’t avoid: what to do with the shuttle, a very expensive and aging transport system; the role of manned space flight; the purposes, not to mention the stunning costs, of the proposed space station; and certainly not least why we were in space in the first place. Why should the United States pay for a very expensive enterprise that seemed to have lost its way?

We responded by setting out U.S. goals in space and then the elements of an effective policy to achieve them.⁴⁶ On goals we argued for continuance of the established preeminence of the United States in space, noting that unmanned missions would be more effective and that the number of shuttle flights could be reduced. We also argued strongly for a program of earth observations done from space under the rubric of “Mission to Planet Earth” and defined the components in some detail. Finally, we dealt with the touchiest part: human exploration of the solar system. We didn’t offer a yes/no on sending manned missions into space, includ-

ing manned outposts on the moon or landing on Mars but pointed out that we didn’t have the ability to do it in 1988, that the cost of each mission was likely to be in the $100 billion range, and that if we wanted to do it, a manned space station was the essential first step—to develop the technologies for manned exploration and to understand what happens to humans on extended trips into space.

We joined these goals with some practical advice to the new president, advice much of which in one form or another entered space policy. We recommended two parts to the space program, a core program and special initiatives. The core program would include a robust fleet of manned and unmanned launch vehicles, a balanced space science and earth remote-sensing program, and an undergirding of advanced technology. That program would then provide realism and flexibility for special initiatives such as Mission to Planet Earth. We also recommended strong international partnerships, both as a simple recognition of the increasing space capabilities of other nations and to learn from the then much greater experience of the Soviets in manned space. Some programs such as Mission to Planet Earth virtually compelled international collaboration. Finally, and certainly not least, we addressed NASA management, some of whose deficiencies were sadly put into relief by the 1986 Challenger disaster:

Many of these things came to pass over time, some within the Bush administration and others afterwards. I learned a long time back that, if nothing happens to good advice, try waiting a while. True in this case, and many others. Being effective in Washington is neither for the impatient nor the cynical.

The belief that good advice eventually takes root was tested even harder in my service on the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and

Government. Why the commission? Why then? After all, this was a very large and costly effort—five years and several million dollars. The immediate “why” I suppose was that the president⁴⁸ of the Carnegie Corporation of New York thought it time and through this foundation could pay for it. But the “why” was more nuanced than that. The 1980s were an unsettling time for science. Again, the crisis of the 1980s in American economic competitivess begged the question of whether the huge federal investment in research and development was worth the money. After all, other nations, investing much less than we, were in some fields beating us like a drum. What were we getting out of all that money? Why support basic research, especially basic research that seemed to have at best a tenuous connection to the American economy, to national security, to our social problems?

Those kinds of questions entered political discourse, as the Congress especially, including the overseers of the National Science Foundation, demanded transparency in the reasons for federal support of fundamental research. How relevant were the sciences to addressing some very serious problems, such as chemical toxins? The launch of the commission was a remarkably prescient act, in effect anticipating the end of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe dissolved, and the Soviet Union itself ruptured in 1991. The Cold War for 40 years served as a major rationale for American investments in science and technology, not only for military security but also for the physical sciences taken very broadly. With the Soviet bogeyman seemingly gone, why spend money on science we didn’t seem to need anymore? What now was the reason for the federal government not only to support science but also to expand it? Not least, it had become painfully obvious that the structure of the federal effort in research and development—how it was dispersed among many agencies and its arrangements within those agencies; the often substantial, confusing, and resource-draining overlap of responsibilities; the often baffling arrangements in the Congress for dealing with science and technology programs and their budgets—was out of sync with contemporary imperatives for the management and application of science and technology.

And these problems were forcing themselves onto the dance floor absent perspectives from the balcony. The last full-scale examination of

the American scientific enterprise was done 40 years earlier, the five-volume report on Science and Public Policy, prepared under the direction of presidential assistant John R. Steelman.⁴⁹ The Steelman Report⁵⁰ established in effect the bona fides for the establishment of the National Science Foundation. Issued in 1947, it characterized the “extension of scientific knowledge . . . as a major factor in national survival,” offered a data-rich argument for support of fundamental research at universities, and recommended a minimum spending level for research of 1 percent of the gross national product.⁵¹ It was then and still is “the most complete and detailed description and analysis of the U.S. research system that had ever been produced.”⁵² It also sought to bring science back into the White House after the end of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development. It recommended the establishment of an Interdepartmental Committee on Scientific Research and Development and appointment of a presidential science advisor. President Truman took the first half of that advice but not the second.⁵³ It took the cold water of Sputnik to get a science advisor in place in the White House.

The Carnegie Commission⁵⁴ took five years of my life, beginning in April 1988. It was led by two cochairs, Joshua Lederberg, a Nobelist and then president of Rockefeller University, and William Golden,⁵⁵ a businessman who had devoted much of his life beginning in World War II to the continued health of American science. Of the 22 members of the full commission, including former President Jimmy Carter, half were like me, scientists and engineers with substantial governmental experience, and half were nonscientists with great interests and achievements in public affairs and science policy. And there was an advisory group with a similar mix, including former President Gerald Ford. It produced in its life 19 formal reports plus memoranda, special analyses, and the like. It was by far the most thorough and exhaustive examination of federal science and technology policy in all its dimensions since Vannevar Bush did it virtually by himself in 1945 with Science, the Endless Frontier⁵⁶ and John Steelman with a lot of help produced the 1947 report Science and Public Policy. I was somewhat involved in much of what the commission did, most deeply in two efforts, chairing the groups that produced commission reports on Enabling the Future: Linking Science and Technology to Societal Goals and E3: Organizing for Environment, Energy, and the

Economy in the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government (E³ Report).⁵⁷ I especially liked the “Enabling the Future” phrase, which came from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Wisdom of the Sands: “As for the future, your task is not to foresee, but to enable it.”

The influence of the E³ Report antedated its publication in April 1990 especially its then-novel focus on the close coupling of environment, energy, and the economy. That message, which we had briefed around the government before formal publication, was embedded in President Bush’s speech to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on February 5, 1990, where he cited the need to review and revise our national energy strategy to include economic and environmental effects. This E³ triplet is of course still at the heart of national concern. And the commission faced the even larger question posed by the steady questioning in the 1980s of the wider relevance of scientific research. That was in my portfolio. Some people questioned whether it was possible to state goals. I thought that nonsense and told them so, reminding them that there are five goals⁵⁸ in the preamble to the Constitution and that at least three of them relate to science—insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare. Our task force indeed produced four major goals in supporting science:

1. quality of life, health, human development, and knowledge;

2. a resilient, sustainable, and competitive economy;

3. environmental quality and sustainable use of natural resources; and

4. personal, national, and international security.

We then set out particulars for each of these very broad hopes, 25 in all. And we were realistic enough to know that goals do evolve, and for that reason we suggested a standing group—a nongovernmental National Forum on Science and Technology Goals—to dynamically seek to refine and seek the implementation of goals in the context of evolving national and international circumstances and policies. That never happened, but two fora were held focusing on goals for science and technology as they related to the environment and the nation’s economic future. For the environmental goals, and backed by a very considerable amount of dis-

cussion, commissioned papers, and the like, we examined in detail six topics: economics and risk assessment, environmental monitoring and ecology, chemicals in the environment, the energy system, industrial ecology, and population.⁵⁹ The second effort, on science and technology and the country’s economic future, set out three major goals:

1. Over the next decade, achieve a sustained level of productivity growth that will allow rising living standards and noninflationary economic growth. Do that by increasing investments in science and technology; developing new mechanisms for international research collaboration to advance fundamental knowledge, drawing on the experience of recent years; and developing better metrics and understanding of science and technology trends and their connections to economic growth.

2. Increase the number and proportion of Americans prepared for science and engineering careers with a focus on underrepresented groups. Do that by having more scientists and engineers work with local communities to improve K-12 education; creating institutions and a supportive culture that facilitates lifelong learning; and, encouraging U.S. industry and wealthy individuals, particularly those who have gained great economic benefits from high-technology booms, to focus efforts and resources on improving education for a science and technology savvy work force.

3. Improve the domestic and global market environments for U.S.-generated innovations. Do that by adopting national standards for securities litigation and product liability, and examine trade, antitrust, and intellectual property policies with a view to improving global market access for U.S.-generated innovations.

Those were deliberately ambitious goals, but at the same time they are goals that in one way or another have been addressed since we wrote our report.⁶⁰ Whether that was cause and effect or we were simply leading where others were going anyway, I can’t say. But these things are getting done.

A particular example—one that certainly hit on our call for developing better metrics and understanding of science and technology trends and their connections to economic growth—was the work of a

committee⁶¹ on which I served in the late 1990s to develop a more realistic understanding and allocation of what the federal government invests in science and technology. The scale in dollars of the federal effort in research and development has historically included items—for instance, testing of new weapons—that are not really part of the effort to push new knowledge. As the report,⁶² which became known as the Press Report, after its chairman, Frank Press, who succeeded me as presidential science adviser and then went on to the presidency of the National Academy of Sciences, stated:

The committee confronted this distortion of what we really invest in new knowledge with a new concept: a federal science and technology budget that gave a much truer measure of federal investments in new knowledge and enabling technologies. It was different, and predictably it set off a storm of debate. And predictably while lip service was paid to the idea, the administration and the Congress ignored it. But like many good ideas, it’s beginning to go mainstream: the George W. Bush administration in its first budget message highlighted and used the concept for its fiscal year 2002 budget—six years after the report was published! Again, policy work in Washington is not for the impatient.

This intense look at national science and technology policy through the Carnegie Commission and the Press Report finished in 1995. But Bunny and I had a new beginning: we moved. I would be 80 in 1996. Since I came to Washington in 1972 to be director of the National Science Foun-

dation we had lived in a wonderful house in Georgetown. Best of all, our Georgetown base meant I could walk or cab to many working places—to the National Academy of Sciences building near the Lincoln Memorial, to the headquarters of Science Service where I served on the board, to the offices of Universities Research Association, and to the Washington offices of the Carnegie Commission.

But we knew our time in Georgetown was over. The 200-year-old house was creaking. There was a lot of work to maintain it and always stairs to climb. And Bunny and I were also creaking: we both had medical problems. In 1995 I surrendered my gall bladder to surgeons, and Bunny had pneumonia. And in 1996 I was told I had prostate cancer. So a summer idyll at Randolph got traded for nine weeks of X-ray treatment at Georgetown University Hospital. Even so, we were at Randolph in October for a “geriatric jubilee” for my eightieth birthday. My capacity for outdoor sports was down since I had my back operation and we’d given up downhill and cross-country skiing, and in the cruelest loss I gave up fly-fishing on some of my favorite streams where the slippery rocks made wading too dangerous.

After a lot of hard work, including consulting with dear friends who had faced these decisions, we found a wonderful place in Asbury Methodist Village in a Maryland suburb. It was a house with all the living quarters—from kitchen to bedrooms—on one floor, with a very large basement and attic. It was commodious enough to accommodate our steady stream of visitors, most especially our children and grand children—in 1995 when we moved we had seven grandchildren—although unlike our summer place in Randolph, New Hampshire, not all at the same time!

Those hard changes lightened a lot when I was given a chance to think about what had been done by twentieth century technology. Toward the end of 1999, I was asked by William A. Wulf, our effective president of the National Academy of Engineering, to chair a committee to pick the 20 greatest engineering achievements of the twentieth century. There was one condition: it was supposed to make a substantial favorable contribution to the quality of life. That meant that we would not select one great achievement, excluding to my regret the moon landing in 1969 or the construction of the Panama Canal.

The list we produced⁶⁴ (see Box 10-1) was stunning to me at the time and still is. These achievements enabled by science and technology changed everything. No, they were hardly unmixed blessings—several in the list from highways to nuclear technologies give one pause—but as with me they gave Americans many more choices in how to lead their lives than were obvious at the end of the nineteenth century. What choices will this new century bring?