APS and the international physics community in 1983

World War II was a turning point in the fortunes of American science. The many scientific contributions to the winning of the war—radar, the proximity fuse, the atomic bomb—led a grateful nation to expand greatly its support of basic research at universities, from which the bulk of wartime researchers had come and to which they returned. Since physicists had played such a prominent role in the war effort, it was not surprising that physics was one of the chief beneficiaries of the new public policy. It is worth recalling that the first Federal agency to provide substantial funds for academic physics was the Office of Naval Research, which, among other things, provided the funds for the first high‐energy machines. By the early 1950s, the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Science Foundation were fully established and began to assume increasing responsibility for support of basic research in the physical sciences. After Sputnik in 1957, NASA joined NSF and AEC (now DOE) as one of three key civilian agencies funding physics research. The actual figures for FY 1984 may be of interest. The DOE budget, the largest, is $1.38 billion (under the categories of “high‐energy physics,” “nuclear physics,” “basic energy sciences” and “magnetic fusion energy”), the NSF budget is $208 million (under the categories of “physics program” and “materials research program”) and the NASA budget is $324 million (under the categories of “physics and astronomy” and “planetary exploration”), for a grand total of $1.85 billion; incidentally, this represents a healthy 12.5% increase over the corresponding figure for the previous year.

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