Office of Scientific Research and Development

Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), US organization which, along with its predecessor, the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), played a key role in the rapid wartime mobilization of American science and engineering. Established before US entry into the war, by 1945 the OSRD had spent nearly half a billion dollars and accelerated a revolution in modern warfare. From OSRD-sponsored research in university and industrial laboratories came a host of new and improved weapons including radar and the proximity fuze that helped create a new electronic environment for war (see also Tizard). Other contributions included rockets and high explosives; the DUKW (see amphibians) and the weasel; medical advances such as antimalarial drugs, blood substitutes, and the quantity production of penicillin (see medicine). OSRD helped insinuate mathematicians, economists, and other experts into military planning at all levels in the new discipline of operational research or operations research as it was called in the USA. Its most notorious achievement was the atomic bomb, a project for which the agency bore primary responsibility until its transfer to the army at the end of 1942. As important, however, as its military work were the institutional precedents it set for the large-scale federal patronage of civilian science ‘in the nation's service’ that became commonplace in the years after the war.

The NDRC was established by Roosevelt's executive order on 27 June 1940, largely due to the efforts of the engineer Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Initially the committee consisted of Bush himself, who maintained responsibility for high-level policy and liaison; Karl Compton, the president of MIT; James Conant, the president of Harvard; Frank Jewett, the head of Bell Laboratories and president of the National Academy of Sciences; Conway Coe, the commissioner of patents; Richard C. Tolman, a physicist from the California Institute of Technology; Rear Admiral Harold Bowen; and Brig-General George Strong. In its first year, NDRC funded research worth almost $6,000,000 and assigned over 250 contracts. In 1941 it was renamed and its mandate enlarged to include development. The new OSRD included, in addition to the original NDRC, the Committee for Medical Research, the Office of Field Service, and several ancillary panels including the Applied Mathematics Panel under Warren Weaver. By the end of the war it had a staff of more than 1,400 and had issued almost 2,300 contracts worth approximately $500,000,000. OSRD was not the only sponsor of wartime research and development (R&D); its share of the nation's R&D budget was some 30%. It was, however, crucial for the rapid and effective mobilization of civilian science.

OSRD's achievements, which rested on an impressive civilian scientific and industrial base laid down in the early decades of the century, were facilitated by key decisions made early. First, in contrast to the policy of the First World War, Bush decided to rely on existing private facilities rather than newly built and federally managed laboratories. Second, mobilization was to be managed by civilians familiar with private sector strengths, frequently serving ‘without compensation’ and thus free of political and bureaucratic ties. Third, the agency would operate contractually, in the manner of the market-place. The contract was doubly crucial to OSRD's wartime achievements, not least of which was the rapid enlistment of private sector leaders and resources. In brief, the contract (and the supervision exercised by OSRD's contract office) both guaranteed centralized control of the agency's programmes and funded them in a manner that respected traditional boundaries between the state and private enterprise. Lastly, Bush committed OSRD to close liaison with the military. That liaison was fraught with tension and hindered by bureaucratic jealousies; but by 1945 the military—civilian co-operation to which OSRD had committed itself was accepted by the armed forces. All in all, OSRD was an effective though ambivalent success. On the one hand, it embodied an older and more conservative belief in limited government and the primacy of private enterprise. On the other, it foreshadowed an era of federal dominance.

The influence of the OSRD on post-war developments was mixed. In November 1944, Bush had been asked by Roosevelt to report, on behalf of his organization, on the requirements of future national science policy. Science—The Endless Frontier was delivered to President Truman in July 1945. In his report Bush argued for the establishment of a new civilian-controlled scientific agency to manage the massive federal support for civilian and military R&D that post-war national security required. The report was widely read and enormously popular, but its goals were attained only in part and with great difficulty. Indeed, while federal sponsorship grew dramatically in the decade after the war, none of the agencies influenced by the OSRD satisfied the hopes expressed in Bush's report. The Atomic Energy Commission, created quickly in 1946, was narrow in its focus and tightly constrained by the needs of the military and national defence; the National Science Foundation, established in 1950 only after five years of controversy over political accountability, proved modest in scope, budget, and authority; and attempts to unify military R&D in any manner fell victim to bureaucratic squabbles within the military.

In more general ways, however, OSRD's success helped shape a new political economy for American science. Many in the younger and less conservative generation for whom wartime patronage proved addictive welcomed the new linkage between government, national security, and institutional growth. Furthermore, the co-operation between scientists and military men fostered by OSRD survived the war and contributed to the development of the military—industrial—university complex. And not least, OSRD helped convince the military that future security rested on new and improved weapons. The ‘Star Wars’ defence shield and other federally funded, large-scale, hugely expensive, ‘high-tech’ weapons systems like the B2 Stealth bomber are only recent examples of a military faith in technology encouraged by the success of OSRD. See also scientists at war.

Larry Owens

Bibliography

Baxter, J. P. , Scientists Against Time (Boston, 1946).
Stewart, I. , Organizing Scientific Research for War: The Administrative History of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (Boston, 1948).