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3 Nuclear Approach/Avoidance: Social Scientists and the Bomb The real problem is in the hearts of men. Albert Einstein Social Scientists as First Responders to the Atomic Dilemma As the radioactive mushroom clouds from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki began to drift across the Pacific Ocean, concerns about the future of human society were already in the air. On August 10, 1945, radio station WNEW in New York ran a special program titled “The Atomic Bomb—The End or Rebirth of Civilization?” In the presentation, the sociologist Harvey Zorbaugh made a powerful and insightful plea to the listeners: “The problem we face is this: During the years we must wait for science to harvest atomic energy in the interests of civilization, can we prevent atomic energy from destroying civilization? . . . There were physicists who predicted that the splitting of the atom would cause the disintegration of the physical universe. The atom has been split and the physical universe maintains its stability. It is the social universe the stability of which has been threatened. The prevention of the disintegration of the social universe is the fateful challenge the Atomic Age throws down to our generation.”1 In the days immediately following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, anxiety about the nature of human beings was voiced throughout American society, and one segment that heard those calls loud and clear and hurried to respond was the social-science community. If human culture needed to be transformed, social scientists claimed, they had the expertise and training to midwife the transformation. Social scientists felt the same visceral threat to human society that many people sensed in those first days of the atomic age. The world had endured two global wars in thirty years, and these had claimed the lives of more than seventy million people. The violence inherent in human beings and societies seemed only too evident, and the prospect of those violent impulses armed with nuclear weapons was chilling. Many in the socialscience community felt called to intervene in this dangerous dynamic. Nuclear Approach/Avoidance c 43 The historian Paul Boyer has astutely pointed out that “many social scientists in this post-Hiroshima period embraced the view that they possessed knowledge and expertise essential to mankind’s survival.”2 This feeling was not merely born out of the urgency accompanying the advent of nuclear weaponry but was also rooted in Progressive-era beliefs that experts could intervene in society to improve seemingly intractable problems , such as poverty and alcoholism. This combination of a global threat to human society, controlled from within the dark recesses of the human personality, and faith in social betterment perfectly challenged the emerging skills of the social-science community in postwar America. The belief that a social leap forward was needed to avoid global atomic destruction was rooted in anxiety over the impact of technology on American society—a central concern for many social thinkers. At the time of the Hiroshima explosion, the specific question of a gap between technology and society had already provided a prominent career for one sociologist: William Fielding Ogburn of the University of Chicago, an expert who published widely on the social effects of technology. In 1922, Ogburn had first articulated his theory of “cultural lag.” He presented a formula for the predicament in which modern society found itself: “Cultural lag occurs when one of two parts of culture which are correlated changes before or in greater degree than the other part does, thereby causing less adjustment between the two parts than existed previously.”3 Immediately after Hiroshima, Ogburn was widely consulted on the atomic dilemma. In the first days of the atomic age, he was asked to appear on Chicago-area radio stations and to participate in University of Chicago forums to discuss the bomb’s impact on society. Ogburn argued that major funding should be secured that would allow expert social scientists to map a successful path to the future.4 Ogburn made his case to President Harry Truman; in a letter dated October 1, 1945, he stressed that the bomb’s “social effects cannot be well anticipated by natural scientists, but can be predicted and plans made much better by social scientists.” He went on to lecture the president: “It is the job of natural scientists to make the discovery, and that of the social scientists to tell what its social consequences will be.”5 During the same fall, Ogburn testified before a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on...

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