Eisenhower, Science Advice, and the Nuclear Test-Ban Debate, 1945–1963 (review)

Dwight Eisenhower never succeeded in negotiating a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing with the Soviet Union. Benjamin P. Greene offers an intriguing argument to explain why the president failed. His book is carefully crafted, it is methodologically sound, and it makes a genuine contribution to scholarship on the politics of science and technology in the cold war. Greene's conclusions, however, are bound to be controversial because of what they say not only about science advice but about Eisenhower's control over his own administration.

Greene takes aim at scholars who doubt Eisenhower's sincerity in trying to achieve a comprehensive test ban. He judges that Eisenhower believed by 1954 that a test ban was the necessary and desirable first step in disarmament. But the president lacked the confidence to overrule his closest advisors, and his style of leadership—based on consensus— prevented him from pursuing his true aims. Eisenhower deceived and misled Americans and the world, claiming that tests were necessary while secretly wishing he could ban them. He wanted a test ban as much as his opponent in the 1956 election, Adlai Stevenson, but he felt unable to admit it publicly. Greene paints a portrait of a frustrated president trapped by his own leadership style, his mistrust of the Soviets, a lack of pressure from his allies and advisors, and most important of all his "understandable confusion with the complex technical issues" (p. 3).

As improbable as the scenario sounds, Greene has done an admirable job of making the case. The villain of his story is Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chairman Lewis Strauss, with supporting roles played by politically conservative scientists Edward Teller and Willard Libby. These men monopolized scientific advice during the first five years of Eisenhower's presidency, and virtually all their advice emphasized the need for more testing. Only after the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik, and the subsequent creation of the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), did Eisenhower begin to receive a broader range of scientific advice. The PSAC's support for a test ban, the exit of Strauss from the AEC, and the willingness of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to support a test ban gave the president enough confidence to pursue the ban openly. Still, the objections of Strauss and Teller prevailed because of uncertainties about differentiating earthquakes from nuclear tests. Ultimately, the president ran out of time on the job.

Some scholars may be uncomfortable about letting Eisenhower off the hook as a frustrated and befuddled victim of scientific manipulation. Greene's conclusions may derive from his focus on the scientific controversy about detecting nuclear tests, rather than the controversy about nuclear fallout. These were two distinct issues, but they are intertwined here as the "test-ban debate." One was an obstacle on the path to disarmament. The other was a warning from biologists who feared cancer and predicted mutations in future generations. If Eisenhower sincerely wanted to work toward disarmament, then his frustration with scientists on the issue of test detection makes sense. But there is little evidence that he agonized behind the scenes and agreed with his opponents—during, say, the election of 1956—about the dangers from fallout. Eisenhower knew of geneticists' claims but played them down in order to continue testing. If he later was frustrated by the politicization of science, a cynic might conclude that he was simply hoist by his own petard.

Greene's book, which is nearly identical to his 2004 Stanford University dissertation, is a provocative indictment of those who control scientific advice, but it is also a disturbing apologia for Dwight Eisenhower. The president appears as a moral man wishing to do the right thing, but with his hands tied by narrow-minded ideologues. Greene insists that Strauss misled the president and was the dominant influence on him until Eisenhower finally was freed by PSAC scientists. Was he really such a creature of Lewis...