and technology development. The most important of them were the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, where Enrico Fermi and his group produced the first controlled chain reaction in December 1942; the Argonne National Laboratory, which became the center for the study of reactor designs of all types; Ernest Lawrence's Laboratory at Berkeley, which was assigned responsibility for developing the electromagnetic method of separating uranium isotopes and designing a production plant for the large-scale separation of uranium-235; the Clinton (Tennessee) Engineering Works, originally built for the production of uranium-235 by the gaseous diffusion method, which became the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and played a major role in the development of atomic power reactors; the Hanford (Washington) Engineering Works, at which the first great reactors to produce plutonium were located, and most importantly, the Los Alamos (New Mexico) Scientific Laboratory. Located at the top of an isolated mesa some 50 kilometers from Santa Fe, the laboratory was established in March 1943, with J. Robert Oppenheimer as director. At Berkeley, Oppenheimer had been carrying forward the theoretical work on fast-neutron chain reactions, and his job now was to achieve the ultimate goal of the Manhattan Project. (The key personnel in the Manhattan Project are shown in figures 12 through 14.)

The goal was to produce fission bombs. As other tasks of plutonium and isotope separation were transferred from scientific to plant engineering personnel, top-flight scientists from the various segments of the program were brought to Los Alamos to solve the ultimate problems of designing the bomb: in particular, determining the optimal method for detonating the critical mass and figuring out how the critical mass of uranium or plutonium would behave in the interval between the chain reaction and the explosion. By the spring of 1945 there were well over two thousand scientific and technical personnel at Los Alamos (ref. 37). Their efforts culminated in the test explosion of a plutonium implosion bomb in the New Mexico desert near Alamogordo, on July 16, 1945, followed by the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few weeks later.

The Manhattan Project created an operating philosophy - a set of standard operating procedures that was to be adopted for a variety of purposes, including the development of space and weapon systems during the post-war years. The project had shown, in Richard Nelson's words, what could be done where there was "a willingness to make large early bets on particular technological options and force these through, or engage in parallel efforts at very high cost." (ref. 38.) The nuclear bomb development program followed several paths simultaneously: plutonium or the separation of the uranium isotopes; electromagnetic or gaseousdiffusion separation of the uranium isotopes; alternative designs of

FIGURE 12.- Three leaders of the effort to build nuclear weapons during the Second World War. From left to right, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the Los Alamos Laboratory where the first atomic bomb was built; Enrico Fermi, who supervised the achievement of the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction; and Ernest O. Lawrence, who invented the cyclotron. (Both Fermi and Lawrence won Nobel Prizes.)

nuclear bombs. It was the concurrent approach, as much as anything, that enabled the United States to produce a nuclear weapon before Germany did.

The crucial error the Germans made in their effort to develop a uranium bomb was to reject graphite as a neutron moderator in favor of heavy water. It turned out that the graphite samples used by Walter Bothe and his group to determine the neutronic properties of the material had impurities that resulted in larger than acceptable values of the neutron capture cross sections. Thus, the Germans would have to employ the only other available moderator, heavy water, in order to build their plutonium producing "uranium piles." Once the German effort came to depend entirely on heavy water, it was probably doomed. There was only one plant, in Norway, that made heavy water, and it was vulnerable to raids by the British, who destroyed the plant in February 1943, and by the Americans, who put it out of commission for good the following November.

FIGURE 13.-Major General Leslie R. Groves, U.S. Army. Groves headed the "Manhattan District" during the Second World War. This was the organization established to produce the first nuclear weapons.

A second feature of the Manhattan Project which was to influence post-war American science and technology development was the tendency to locate government-sponsored research in the private sector rather than in government arsenals. Bush and the other OSRD members quite deliberately decided to circumvent the problems of working through civil-service establishments with little experience in large-scale development projects. Once the decision was made to build production facilities, their operation was assigned to some of the largest firms in the country. Thus for the Clinton Engineering Works, Westinghouse and General Electric were selected to manufacture the mechanical and electrical components and Tennessee Eastman to manage the facility; DuPont operated the Hanford Works; while until recently Union Carbide operated Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

FIGURE 14. Three physicists who have had major influence on technology development and on public policy. Edward Teller provided the ideas for the first thermonuclear weapons, Arthur Holly Compton did the design calculations for the first successful nuclear reactor, and Eugene P. Wigner made important contributions to nuclear theory. (Wigner and Compton both won Nobel Prizes.)

This emphasis on research and development conducted by the private sector had important repercussions over the next three decades. For many large weapons programs, project managers tended to avoid "in-house" arsenals and laboratories except where no qualified commercial sources were available. In the 1960s, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Department of Defense let enormous base operation contracts, by which companies provided support services for entire installations - everything from trash collection to computer programming to mission control. The rationale was that this was the only way to assemble quickly the manpower needed to accomplish goals of national importance and (in theory) to disperse it when those goals were accomplished.

The Post-War Period: Origins of Government by Contract (1946 to 1957)

In 1945, very few people expected that American science and technology would return to its pre-war state. The genie had been let out of the bottle, and there was little inclination, even had it been possible, to put it back in. In his July 1945 report to the President, Science — The Endless Frontier (published in the same month as the Alamogordo test explosion, which it did not mention), Bush sketched an ambitious program of Federal support for basic research. For our purposes, the post-war period from 1946 to the launching of Sputnik in October 1957 can be taken as the period in which the basic institutional arrangements of American science came into being, some by act of Congress, some by executive order, some by agency regulations, and some by informal agreement between the sponsoring agencies and what, for lack of a better word, may be called their clients. Important long-term changes occurred in: Federal policies toward the support of basic research; Federal procurement policy; use of captive research organizations; policy regarding the uses of atomic energy; and philosophies of project management, especially in the larger weapons programs.

First, the Federal Government would continue to support basic research, and would do this through several agencies. Although the National Science Foundation was chartered by Congress in 1950 with the mission of supporting basic research, it was clearly understood (and affirmed by executive order in 1954) that this in no way preempted the research sponsored by other agencies. In 1946, the Navy had taken the initiative in sponsoring research when Congress created the Office of Naval Research, with the aim of sponsoring free, non-directed research, almost none of which was classified. In the same year General Dwight Eisenhower, as Chief of Staff of the United States Army, drafted a memorandum which was a blueprint for a continuing relation between the