Major Shift : Research: Emphasis Is Military

It cost $350 million and was eight years in the making. Inside the seven-story edifice, which resembles a hangar for an exotic, oversized spacecraft, about 250 of the country’s most talented scientists hoped to use huge magnetic mirrors to harness fusion--the process that powers the sun and that could, theoretically, provide the world with safe and limitless energy.

If all had gone as expected, the experiment would have taken mankind one step closer to solving the world’s energy crisis. With a little luck and enough time, the scientists might even have realized their dream of ending the energy shortage altogether.

But in March, 1986, the day the Mirror Fusion Test Facility at the University of California’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory was finally completed and pronounced a flawless engineering success, it was shut down by the Department of Energy. Federal funding to conduct experiments had been cut, and no one knew when, if ever, the facility would be able to attempt what it was built to do.

The Lawrence Livermore experience, federal officials would later explain, is one of many painful reminders of the pressure on the federal government to cut spending. Even though hundreds of millions of dollars had already been spent on the facility, it would have taken at least $50 million more each year to operate it. And in an era of high budget deficits, $50 million for experiments that might or might not pay off had to be viewed as an extravagance.

But to some scientists, the Lawrence Livermore fusion project is more than just a casualty of government cutbacks.

More Defense Projects

To some, such as University of California, Berkeley, scientists John P. Holdren and F. Bailey Green, the closing of the Mirror Fusion Test Facility signals a change in scientific research at the nation’s universities and government research centers: away from civilian programs, such as energy and health, and toward defense-related projects.

“The unseemly haste with which long-term energy projects have been closed down (is but one example of how) the remilitarization of federal (research and development) has been a disaster for the balance and continuity of national R&D; efforts generally,” Holdren and Green wrote in a special analysis of military spending published by the Federation of American Scientists last September.

Ten years ago, according to analyses by such organizations as the Council on Economic Priorities, the Department of Energy spent nearly three-quarters of its budget on energy research and conservation and one-quarter on atomic weapons. Today, the balance has shifted so much that even in a department supposedly devoted to energy research, more is being spent on defense than on anything else. In part, this is because the cost of producing nuclear weapons is rising much faster than the cost of conducting energy research. In the government as a whole, however, the defense share of research spending also has grown from about half the total federal commitment to nearly three-quarters just since President Reagan took office in 1981.

What’s more, as even the federal government’s own National Science Foundation has noted, the defense projects that are being supported by the U.S. government are placing increasing emphasis on one particular type of research: that is, applied and developmental research that is likely to have immediate commercial or military payoff, at the expense of the basic research that is needed to provide the essential building blocks for long-term scientific advancement.

Accompanying this overall shift has been a resurgence in the military’s investment in university research. The Department of Defense’s share of federally sponsored university research is comparatively small--17%--but, at $930 million, it is twice what it was a decade ago. Today, according to the Council on Economic Priorities, the military is the fastest-growing source of federal funds on campus.

Training in Science

University research, moreover, is far more important than the dollar figures indicate. Not only do universities perform most of the nation’s basic research, but they also are the training place for future generations of scientists.

How have these changes come about? What do they mean for the country as a whole--both for its ability to defend itself militarily and to compete economically in world markets? And what, in particular, do they portend for universities?

Reagan Administration officials and other advocates of a large military budget contend that the new emphasis on military spending for research will not only strengthen U.S. defense capabilities, but will also spin off discoveries that will later help the country’s civilian economy.

For years, noted John Tirman, editor of the book, “The Militarization of High Technology,” military proponents have argued that there are sound economic reasons for government support of defense research. Some economists have theorized that military spending, including spending on defense-related research, is an important stimulus to the economy during periods of military conflict. And during peacetime, they say, the highly centralized and orchestrated character of military research spending is a means of providing stability and predictability in the science Establishment.

Jet Airplanes, Plastics

Were it not for the military’s investment in research in World War II, said Lt. Gen. James A. Abrahamson, director of the Pentagon’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program, the United States might never have developed the commercial jet plane, for example, or computers or plastics. Even the Vietnam War produced an array of electronic gadgets, such as the automatic sensing devices that now are part of many home burglar alarm systems.

In the future, some government officials argue, the potential applications from military breakthroughs are limited only by one’s imagination and could range from the next generation of super-computers to lasers that will make it possible to perform surgery without a scalpel.

Increasingly, however, civilian scientists have taken a far different view of military spending. Harvey Brooks, a professor of technology and public policy at Harvard, argues that the country’s growing investment in military research is putting a strain on a number of areas of academic and industrial science, causing such projects as the fusion experiment at Livermore to be delayed or abandoned altogether.

It is also, said Pat Brawley, author of a recent briefing paper on research and development for the California Assembly, robbing university and industry laboratories of valuable manpower, which could have serious long-term consequences for the nation as a whole.

Moreover, critics of the buildup say, the highly specialized and esoteric nature of defense hardware today means that there are far too few opportunities for civilian spinoffs from military projects to justify their enormous cost to taxpayers.

Although the debate over military research is not new, it has come into particularly sharp focus in the last several years because of the Strategic Defense Initiative, perhaps the most elaborate and expensive military research project ever undertaken by the U.S. government.

Popularly known as “Star Wars,” the initiative is a plan to design and develop a multilayered strategic “shield” over the United States to protect the country from attack by missiles and nuclear warheads. Its detractors, however, view the multibillion-dollar project as a costly gamble that not only is technically infeasible but that also is a classic example of the defense Establishment’s drain on the nation’s scientific resources.

Despite some rather heated rhetoric on both sides, answers to settle this latest version of the defense debate are not easy to come by, for they depend on analyses made by scientists who know little about politics and by politicians who know even less about science.

Given all the various and strongly held points of view as to how much more should be spent on defense, the real problem, said William D. Carey, executive director of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, is that the federal government has yet to develop a mechanism for making public policy in science and technology, whether it be civilian science or military R&D.;

Increasingly, for reasons of national security, major decisions about military research budgets are being made in secret and are not subject to public scrutiny and debate, Carey said. In the civilian sector, spending decisions are also made for the most part without systematic public input on a year-by-year, agency-by-agency basis, and only scattered guidance is provided by government science advisers and broad-based research organizations.

As the U.S. government begins its fifth decade of supporting scientific research, surely it is time to start looking at science as a “significant national issue” that needs to be “openly debated” and “systematically planned,” Carey said.

Systematic planning, however, has rarely, if ever, been an integral part of the U.S. government’s science effort. Caltech professor Daniel J. Kevles, who has written extensively about the history of science and is working on a book on military research, notes that the government did not even assume the task of supporting science until relatively recently.

Before World War II, American science depended largely on private patronage--the railroad revenues of the Stanfords of California, the tobacco earnings of the Dukes of North Carolina, the oil wealth of Rockefellers and the steel and banking money of Carnegies and Mellons.

It was the war, Kevles said, that gave scientists the opportunity to show just how useful their work could be to the nation.

The proof came at an isolated desert test site in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. There, a $2-billion experiment known as the Manhattan Project, which had brought together many of the nation’s leading scientists, culminated in the detonation of the world’s first nuclear bomb, versions of which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki only weeks later.

In addition to bringing about the end of the war in the Pacific, Kevles said, the invention of the bomb “opened the possibility” of government support for all kinds of research, not only for military purposes, but also for projects with potential applications for industry and society as a whole.

And government support did not end with the Japanese surrender. The ensuing Cold War spurred additional federal involvement in scientific research.

Support for Science

Once started, government support for science grew rapidly. During the war, the average annual federal investment in scientific research rose from less than $50 million to nearly $500 million--from 18% of total public and private research expenditures to 83%. Now it stands at $60 billion annually.

But just as scientists had once worried about being beholden to industry, they quickly became uneasy about their growing ties to the government, even though much of the money throughout the 1950s and ‘60s was being provided for projects that researchers said they genuinely wanted to do and that were scientifically worthy.

Despite a “government-university relationship which was extraordinarily productive,” Caltech President Marvin L. Goldberger said recently, “there were a lot of people, then, as now, who were very apprehensive.”

And so a number of formal steps were taken to disentangle science from the defense Establishment: The National Science Foundation was created as an independent agency charged with supporting basic civilian research; the “Mansfield Amendment” passed by Congress had the lasting effect of getting the Department of Defense out of the business of supporting broad-based basic research in favor of projects with strictly military applications.

By the mid-’60s, the military’s share of the total federal R&D; budget was for the first time in nearly two decades beginning to slip. It remained at relatively low levels in the ‘70s, and by the beginning of the ‘80s the military accounted for only about 50% of the government’s total investment in scientific research. Only when President Reagan took office did it begin to climb significantly--and then at such a fast rate that it took less than half a decade to nearly return to the proportions reached at the end of World War II.

It is, however, more than just the resurgence of military spending that troubles scientists today. Much of their concern centers on the fact that so much of that growth is being directed toward one project. Although the Reagan Administration insists that it is still far too early to put a price tag on the SDI project, others outside the Administration, including former Caltech President Harold Brown, who was defense secretary in the Carter Administration, have estimated that the project will cost in the $20-billion range in its first five years of operation and, if ever brought to completion, as much as $1 trillion--the cost of today’s entire federal budget.

Possibly Out of Control

In light of what has already been spent on the SDI--about $8 billion, or more than double the government’s entire annual budget for medical research--many scientists, as well as some politicians, are arguing that the SDI is being allocated more funds than can be spent intelligently.

In previous decades, some of the country’s most acclaimed scientists voiced similar complaints about other big projects that were based on the dreams of individual presidents rather than on the realities of science. Richard Nixon’s “war on cancer,” for example, met with loud protests from some members of the scientific community who argued that money alone could not find a cure for the disease. Even John F. Kennedy’s popular Apollo program, which was successful in getting a man on the moon, was viewed by many of the country’s leading scientists as a waste of valuable research dollars.

But what is so disturbing today, the critics say, is that unlike previous eras, when almost all government research support was on the rise, the military’s share of today’s budget is growing at the expense of civilian projects.

Less Science Research

To be sure, civilian research is not faring nearly as badly as other non-military government programs, such as food, housing and medical care for the poor and elderly. But with non-military research budgets barely holding steady, science research is clearly not growing as fast as it once did, despite Reagan’s recent pronouncement in his State of the Union address that research should now be a high government priority.

Many Washington legislators contend that, given the realities of the budget deficit, big increases in spending for civilian research are unlikely. On top of its huge investment in military spending, the Reagan Administration has now asked Congress, for example, to double the National Science Foundation’s annual budget, and has even proposed building a $5.3-billion Superconducting Super Collider, a huge atom smasher that would be the largest and costliest basic research project ever undertaken in the nation.

If it happens, a renewed emphasis on civilian research would be welcomed not only by many scientists, but also by many economists, who in recent years have taken an equally dim view of defense spending in purely economic terms.

Even the staunchly conservative Arthur Laffer, architect of some of the Reagan Administration’s economic policies, bluntly acknowledged recently: “Military spending is a drain on the civilian economy. There is no question about it.”

Seymour Melman, a Columbia University economist, was perhaps the first to draw the connection between spending on defense and a country’s economic productivity. Countries that spend a high percentage of their gross national product on defense tend to be less productive than countries that spend relatively little, Melman argued.

For many, the American trade deficit serves as ample evidence that contrasted with such countries as Japan and West Germany, the United States has not fared well in the marketplace in recent years. But the U.S. deficit is not the only indicator of poor productivity.

A report last year by the National Academy of Engineering, the nation’s most prestigious engineering organization, concluded that the United States has fallen so far behind in technology that even the “brains” of its missile systems--radar, satellites, air navigation instruments and the like--are now almost totally dependent on foreign-made parts and manufacturing expertise.

The academy’s findings are echoed in recent reports by the National Security Council and the Defense Science Board. All three express alarm, saying in effect that all it would take would be a few strategically placed bombs or some skillful political strong-arming to get nations that are suppliers of U.S. military components to interrupt shipments and bring production of some important weapons to a quick standstill.

Could Backfire

At a conference in San Francisco on the impact of the SDI on American research last year, Lloyd T. Dumas, a professor of political economy at the University of Texas, Dallas, explained his view of why a large military budget could backfire on the U.S. economy:

To have an economy that grows, Dumas said, a country needs a peculiar combination of conditions: high and rising wages combined with stable and competitive prices. To achieve this seemingly contradictory set of conditions requires innovation--”finding better and better ways of producing.”

“I’ll give you one example just to illustrate how this is a real world process,” Dumas told the scientists at the conference. “In the 1940s a tool was introduced in America that has become a common household tool. It is the quarter-inch, hand-held power drill. Thirty years later, in the 1970s, that drill had a lower dollar price than it had had in the 1940s when it was first introduced. Never mind that 1970s dollars were worth very little compared to 1940s dollars; it took fewer cheap ‘70s dollars to buy that drill than it took ‘40s dollars.

“But everything that went into the drill had gotten much more expensive over that 30 years--the steel, the labor, the copper, the plastic. Everything had gone up in price, dramatically.

“Why did the drill go down in price? Because it was repeatedly redesigned, and the processes for making it kept being improved, and it works and is useful. Costs were thus offset, prices were held down and product quality remained high. But to do that, you require the talents of a lot of engineers and scientists working to find those inventions and those innovations.”

Innovations Lag

The problem now, he said, is that there simply are not enough scientists and engineers working in the civilian sector to bring about the innovations that are needed to keep the U.S. competitive in world markets.

Although it is true, he said, that military spinoffs could bring some of the improvements the civilian economy needs, the spinoff argument does not acknowledge the extent to which the military has always relied on the discoveries of basic science for its breakthroughs. Nor does the spinoff argument take into account the vast number of scientists and engineers needed in the civilian sector to translate military breakthroughs into products or processes that can actually be sold on the marketplace.

The fact is, many government and industry manpower experts agree, there simply aren’t enough civilian scientists available to meet the country’s non-military needs--and the problem is growing worse annually.

Number Growing

Although estimates vary, between 20% and 30% of American scientists are already thought to be involved in military projects. The percentage is expected to grow rapidly if the SDI program expands at even half the pace President Reagan would like.

A physicist in the Navy’s research division, noting that it takes five to 10 years to get a Ph.D in physics, said he is worried that if the country maintains its huge investment in military research, “10, 15, 20 years down the road . . . the U.S. will have lost an entire generation of real scientists. An analogy can be made to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which wiped out a whole generation of scientists, and China is now paying dearly for that. (American) scientists are being banished now into weapon systems. They are being turned into military hardware specialists.”

But the problem is not just limited to physics. In many areas, according to the National Science Foundation, the current military buildup is contributing to a “brain drain,” resulting in severe shortages in academia and industry in such fields as mathematics, computer science and electrical engineering.

Ever Greater Shortages

Moreover, the National Science Foundation predicts, as more researchers in these fields are lured away from universities and into defense-related projects, there will be ever greater shortages in the future as fewer qualified teachers are available to meet the demand for increased numbers of science and education courses.

In presenting its budgets to Congress in recent years, the Reagan White House has expressed the expectation that in most areas of research in which cuts were being made, industry would take up the slack.

In fact, the reverse has happened, according to a recent survey by the National Science Foundation of companies in research-intensive industries. Growth in spending by private industry on R&D; actually slowed to 5% last year, contrasted with an average of about 13% in the several previous years. The chief reasons for the slowdown, the survey found, are poor sales expectations, concerns about short-term profits and restructuring of research activities following corporate mergers.

But the strong economic and scientific arguments against the country’s buildup of military research certainly do not mean that the debate is over.

Although many of the arguments against military research and in favor of civilian science may sound persuasive, they are in fact based on a fundamental illusion, said Gerold Yonas, chief scientist of the Pentagon’s Strategic Defense Initiative Organization.

Even if the security of the country weren’t important, which it obviously is, Yonas said, the argument that military research is diverting funds from civilian research simply is not valid. To think that if money weren’t being spent on military research it would automatically be transferred to civilian projects is “an illusion not consistent with the reality of the concern for such matters as budget reductions.”

Martin Anderson, an economist from the Hoover Institution on War and Peace who has been a longtime adviser to President Reagan, takes a somewhat different view: It is “blindingly obvious that if more money . . . is spent on defense research, there will be less for civilian research. What is at issue--and what the anti-military people are afraid to say outright--is that they simply do not want a large investment made in defense.”

Paying the Piper

The fact is that most Americans seem to want a strong defense but they are simply uncomfortable about making the investment it requires, said Les Daly, a vice president in Northrop Corp., one of the country’s leading defense contractors.

The conflict has to do with what Daly calls “the big red fire engine theory of economics.”

“Sure it costs a lot to design and construct the biggest and the reddest fire engine in town. You can say that’s a waste of money and you can bemoan the fact that all those highly trained firemen do all day is sit around and play cards--until there’s a fire. Then that big red fire engine and all those firefighters don’t seem like a waste of money at all,” Daly said.

But for John Holdren, a professor of energy and resources at UC Berkeley, spending on energy is also a wise investment.

To put too little emphasis on defense research may be risky, he said, but putting too much emphasis on defense at the cost of scientific programs such as the fusion project at Lawrence Livermore is shortsighted.

“When the oil glut disappears--probably by the early 1990s--this country will wonder what happened to the energy alternatives that the DOE had been investigating until the early 1980s and then abandoned,” Holdren said in a recent report prepared for the Federation of American Scientists.

Having an insufficient supply of energy simply because we were unwilling to make the investment may be an even greater threat to our security as a nation than having too few weapons, Holdren said.

What it comes down to, Daly concluded, is “a simple matter of priorities. . . . There are no clear answers in this thing. And sometimes it gets complicated. We don’t even know how to ask the right questions.”