The High Cost of Whiz Kids

Five hundred scientists have announced that they will have nothing to do with research on biological and chemical weapons. One said that it would be a “perversion of our work.” The Pentagon, whose budget for such undertakings has grown 500% in the 1980s, did not seem worried about finding other researchers who would be less squeamish about how they applied their chemistry or biology.

What bothers the reluctant 500 scientists obviously is the same thing that led President Dwight D. Eisenhower to warn Americans in 1961 not to let their whiz kids get out of control. “Scientific research and discovery,” he said, is entitled to the country’s respect and support but not to the point where public policy might become “the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Americans now are paying the price, in billions of dollars at a clip, for not paying closer attention.

In the generation since the warning there is an ample record of scientists pursuing research on some weapon simply because it was technically satisfying, then promoting it relentlessly, without regard for its weight on the scale of the nuclear balance of terror. “Star Wars,” President Reagan’s dream of a shield to protect against ballistic missiles, is such a project. It has involved a whole series of devices that have been technically compelling but that could as easily provoke a missile attack as prevent one.

Nobody in the Pentagon actually ordered scientists to produce the multiple, independently targeted reentry vehicle (MIRV) that allows both the United States and the Soviet Union to put 10 or more warheads on each ballistic missile. But, once conceived, MIRVs were built, putting the nuclear-arms race on the fast track of the 1970s and ‘80s and making intercontinental missiles immune to arms control.

What these captors of public policy produce does not always work--the Navy’s Aegis, designed to protect entire fleets from incoming missiles, and the B-1 bomber being two prime candidates for that category.

The B-1 is a weapon that the nation did not need, but this did not slow researchers. It was designed long after intercontinental missiles were perfected, so that its only mission could be to follow them to their targets and roam around shooting the wounded, if any. Now it is sufficiently flawed that it may not be able to carry out any mission at all.

As for the Aegis, either the Navy oversold it before it opened fire on Iran’s Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf or the Aegis underperformed. That it shot down a commercial airliner by mistake already is cause enough for even closer examination of the promises of technical perfection being glibly applied to every new budget request for the Star Wars system. The United States should not even think of putting the Star Wars system into space without years, and perhaps decades, of basic research not only on the technology but also on the strategic theory of missile defenses.

Nor is the elite that pursues every piece of technology for its own sake without any larger world view peculiar to the United States. In a recent conversation with columnist Flora Lewis of the New York Times, Roald Sagdeev, director of the Soviet Institute of Space Research, complained mostly that defense and manned space programs rob basic space science of money that it needs to survive. But he also noted that scientists in both countries pass bad habits back and forth. For example, he said, the clamor of Americans for a space platform to catch up with the Soviets is used by Soviet scientists to demonstrate to Soviet leadership that manned space platforms are valuable. Otherwise why would Americans lust after them? Another case in point is a new giant Soviet rocket, the Energiya, built to match the Saturn 5 rocket that launched the Apollo space capsules to the moon. The scientists duplicated the giant Saturn without noticing apparently that once the space shots ended the United States never found another mission for the rocket.

Against this background, it is useful to be reminded of Eisenhower’s warning of 1961 by people like the 500 scientists who will not work on biological anc chemical warfare. At the same time, it forces the nation to look back and count the ways in which it would be better off had it listened to the warning from the outset.