Q&A: What would Vannevar Bush say?

In 1997 G. Pascal Zachary published his biography of Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer and visionary who wrote the 1945 Science: The Endless Frontier and circulated in powerful political circles. Bush (1890–1974) was a key architect of both the Manhattan Project and NSF. And, as Zachary recounts, Bush’s ideas about computers, data, and networking and the relations between industry, government, and academia continue to resonate today.

As a tech reporter for the San Jose Mercury News and then on the Silicon Valley beat for the Wall Street Journal in the 1980s, Zachary became intrigued by the connections between the military and the development of personal computers. Realizing that no full biography of Bush existed and that, as he puts it, “the entire historiography of World War II was deeply one-sided toward physicists,” he decided to write that biography and at the same time to give engineers their due, as he saw it, regarding their contributions to the Manhattan Project.

Zachary discusses Bush’s role in the Manhattan Project and NSF—which this year turns 70—and how Bush would view NSF and the US science scene today.

And, before anyone asks—which they always do, says Zachary—Vannevar Bush was not related to the presidents Bush.

PT: How did you come to write about Vannevar Bush?

ZACHARY: I was struck by how Bush was not a physicist, and if you looked at the bomb project from a point of view that was different from the usual “physics and the Manhattan Project,” it had a lot to do with organization and mobilization. I saw an opportunity to rescue an alternative perspective on World War II and the Cold War with regard to science, engineering, and in relation to industry. And I thought that maybe the best way to do this was through a person.

Historians—Daniel Kevles, Larry Owens, Martin Sherwin, and others—had written scholarly works that included Bush. The reason there was no biography of Bush was that people chop up history into different disciplines. Bush was involved in so many things, yet nobody had a professional incentive to look at him in totality. It was an opportunity I was able to seize.

PT: In a nutshell, how would you describe Bush?

ZACHARY: He was an electrical engineer, applied mathematician, and inventor at MIT. He was from New England. He was passionate about unfettered scientific inquiry, but his main interest was national security and military affairs. He served as vice president of MIT, held other administrative positions, and sat on company boards.

PT: How did he become influential?

ZACHARY: First, he was the leading designer of differential analyzers, electromechanical computers in the predigital era. That gave him legitimacy. Second, it was an era when many scientists were shy, retiring, and socially awkward, and he was not. A number of people stepped aside for him to rise, notably Frank Jewett, president of the National Academy of Sciences. Also, he was willing to mix it up with various kinds of politicians. He was a Republican, but he was happy to work with President Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat. Clearly, too, Bush had charisma and the ability to inspire accomplished men to follow his lead.

PT: How did Bush get access to Roosevelt?

ZACHARY: When he was president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Bush met Roosevelt’s uncle, Frederic Delano, and asked him to introduce him to the president. One of FDR’s most left-wing close advisers was assigned to meet Bush, and I think Bush was pragmatic and wasn’t going to let political ideology get in the way of getting things done. Finally, Bush was inclined to keep secrets and not speak out publicly—that was a personal trait that was important to Roosevelt.

Roosevelt left no records of his views on atomic weapons, not even that he authorized the Manhattan Project. Bush had only one document that he could rely on: a memo that he had written himself to the president in an in-person meeting—of which there is no record—and Roosevelt wrote on it “OK, FDR.” Bush was reporting that a bomb was feasible and that a crash program was a reasonable decision. That note gave Bush the go-ahead to set up the Manhattan Project.

PT: What was Bush’s role in establishing NSF?

ZACHARY: I would say that he, more than anyone else, should be described as the inspiration for and founder of NSF. However, there were other midwives. One important one was Harley Kilgore, a senator from West Virginia, who felt strongly that NSF, whatever it would be, could help rectify geographic imbalances. His influence was important for broadening the concept of NSF.

Bush, for his part, didn’t want the NSF director to be appointed by the president. He refused to change his position on that because he did not like then-president Harry Truman. In 1947, the legislation calling for the creation of the National Research Foundation [as it was called] didn’t allow the president to pick the director. That stipulation alone shows how influential Bush was. Truman vetoed the bill.

NSF was established in 1950. The director is nominated by the president and must win confirmation by the Senate.

PT: How would Bush view NSF today?

ZACHARY: I think he would be pleased with it. I think his only complaint would be that he would probably prefer to see more money given to fewer investigators. He had a lot of concerns about diminishing returns.

He would like the breadth and depth of NSF’s purview and its openness to international scientists. From his vantage, winning World War II was inconceivable without the assistance of the British and the Hungarians, in particular. So I think he would welcome the cosmopolitan character of American science.

I think he would be astonished at the overall size of the US science enterprise, and he would think NSF should have a bigger slice of it.

PT: What would his views on diversity be?

ZACHARY: The guys he worked with all knew each other. They were all white men. Not one of them was black. Not one of them was female. Zero. They were mostly from New England and a few from the West Coast. That might have helped them in the short run. Now, when we tackle climate change, we might ask, “What are the differential effects on rich and poor? Black and white? Other countries as well as our own?” Times have changed.

PT: How would Bush approach today’s problems?

ZACHARY: He had a paper that he circulated privately in the early 1950s, mostly to military leaders, called “A Few Quick.” In it he argued that the weapons we had developed did not fit the battlefield conditions we were facing. It was based on setbacks in the Korean War. But consider other wars since then: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia. Nuclear weapons are not helpful. One of the things Bush argued was that the military needed to harness innovations in ways that were more responsive to changing battlefield conditions.

And I think Bush’s concept could be applied to climate change, environmental issues, and other existential threats. The thrust of “A Few Quick” is that the government should rush innovations that address social needs out to the field. Don’t wait until they are finished. Get the innovations out there, and then keep refining them. It’s a model that strikingly tracks what a lot of digital innovators do today.

On the process side, one useful question is how much pluralism we can absorb. When the Soviet Union sent up Sputnik, the US had 50 rocket projects. The response to Sputnik was that the Soviets had one program; we should have just one. Do the states really need to be laboratories for everything? Today, we still have 50 approaches to nearly everything. We have thousands of police forces, thousands of voting districts, and every one can theoretically have a different voting system. Bush would say the US has an excessive amount of pluralism, and we should not fear concentrating our technical resources in pursuit of solving urgent problems.

PT: What world issues would Bush be concerned about today?

ZACHARY: I can only think that existential threats would get his attention. So we would have to try to imagine what he would deem an existential threat. I think Bush would call for a centralized effort to respond to climate change. He would emphasize international cooperation and want to leverage talent across political boundaries. I think he would see science and technology as being underutilized in tackling serious existential problems.

PT: What are you working on these days?

ZACHARY: I will be publishing some of what I call Bush’s “essential writings,” including “A Few Quick.” They are hard-to-find papers from the Library of Congress and other archives. I hope they will be useful to scholars, students, and policymakers.

For my next project, I want to look at some of the unexpected costs and benefits of nuclear weapons around the environment, computers, civic action and dissent, and citizen science. The first example of citizen science in the US was the Barry Commoner tooth experiment, which in the 1950s showed that baby teeth contained strontium-90 as a result of nuclear fallout. That was a big boost for the idea that citizens could organize to do research that either mirrors what the government is doing or consciously tries to challenge it. None of that is news, but I think the current enhanced interest in mass participation and the environment could mean that things that happened in the 1950s that are relatively ignored should be better understood.