Scientists at War: The Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research. by Sarah Bridger (review)

Since at least World War II, U.S. scientists have grappled with wrenching ethical and political questions about the appropriate relationship between their expertise and the national security state. Sarah Bridger's new book explores key moments of ethical debate among scientists across a variety of fields in the years from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan. Bridger has two goals: to illuminate how scientists conceived of the ethics of their research roles; and to demonstrate that the Vietnam War instigated a profound shift in scientists' understanding of their ethical responsibilities. Despite the book's subtitle, Bridger's text fruitfully ranges beyond conflicts over weapons research. Some of her richest material addresses scientists' efforts to grapple with the political and ethical implications of their policy-advising roles for organizations such as the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) and the Jason Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses.

Bridger begins her account with the creation of new official avenues for policy advising in the wake of Sputnik 1 in October 1957. Concerned not to lose the weapons race to the Soviet Union, the Eisenhower administration turned to elite scientists, principally physicists with ties to the Manhattan Project, for support. From their new positions in PSAC and on Defense Department advisory boards, scientists in the late 1950s and early 1960s advocated successfully for expanded funding for scientific research and education, somewhat successfully for a nuclear test ban, and unsuccessfully for nuclear disarmament. Citing the test ban debates of the early 1960s, Bridger argues that the Sputnik generation of scientists used their technical knowledge, rather than overtly moral arguments, to influence nuclear policy and military strategy.

This approach, however, led scientists into support roles in the Vietnam War. In the book's middle and most analytically rich chapters, Bridger shows how scientists' opposition to nuclear weapons led them to support research on limited war and counterinsurgency technologies. She tracks debates over the tools and techniques that marked the devastating conflict—from defoliants and other chemical agents to the efficacy of Rolling Thunder to the ill-fated "McNamara Line"—to demonstrate how scientists' ethical landscapes shifted from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s.

The Sputnik generation of advisers and researchers largely sought to deescalate the war, but they also believed that their only credible policy role was technical. They criticized defoliants and Rolling Thunder, for example, on scientific and strategic rather than moral grounds. But this approach limited their ability to speak out against the war itself. Perhaps the most heart-wrenching part of the book is Bridger's sensitive portrait of George Kistiakowsky's tireless but failed efforts to persuade the government to use an anti-infiltration barrier as a means to reduce the war's human toll. The barrier system, much to his dismay, led to the development of brutal anti-personnel weapons and further bombing along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Bridger is adept at bringing the moral quandaries of her subjects alive. Even the Jasons, an elite set of science advisers responsible for assessing various aspects of the weapons and tactics of the Vietnam War, are portrayed in sensitive detail. Often written off as hawkish enablers of the war, in Bridger's hands they are revealed as conflicted—even anguished—over their role.

Neither Kistiakowsky nor the anguished members of the Jason Division managed to deescalate the conflict. Bridger argues that as the war ground on, more scientists—largely those of a younger generation and influenced by the New Left—argued that technical critiques alone failed to fulfill scientists' obligation to challenge the war. They rejected the concept of scientific neutrality and embraced a broader structural critique of the war and scientists' complicity in it. Bridger argues that the "Sputnik consensus" (p. 243) collapsed amid the proliferation of ethical positions inspired by the war, and she traces debates over the removal of classified and military research from campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The...