The creation of the Office of Scientific Research and Development

In the last days of June 1941 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 8807, which established the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). At its head stood the engineer Vannevar Bush, answerable directly to the President. The new office absorbed the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), which had been at work for a year, and was to mobilise American scientists and university and industrial laboratories to work on new weapons, equipment and military medicine. Within it were also the research on uranium out of which, a year later, the project to build an atomic bomb grew.

Under the date of 21 June some lists state that Roosevelt “allocates 6,000 dollars to Executive Order 8807 (the Manhattan Project, nuclear weapons)”. This version runs together several different facts. Executive Order No. 8807 is dated 28 June 1941, and no document from 21 June leading up to it is known. It did not concern nuclear weapons alone but military research as a whole, and uranium was only one of many fields within it. The sum of 6,000 dollars comes from a different moment: that was the amount granted in the autumn of 1939, for the purchase of graphite and uranium for the experiments of Enrico Fermi and Leó Szilárd, by the Advisory Committee on Uranium, set up after the letter signed by Albert Einstein in August 1939. The Manhattan Project, as a programme to build the bomb run by the army, began only in 1942. The creation of the OSRD was nevertheless one of the important steps on the way to it, because it gave American work on uranium leadership, money and direct access to the President.

Science without organisation

When war broke out in Europe in September 1939, the United States had no institution capable of harnessing civilian science to military purposes. The army and navy laboratories were small, poor and cut off from the best scientists in the universities and industry. The National Academy of Sciences, established in 1863 to advise the government, had neither money nor an executive apparatus. The only exception was the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which since 1915 had brought together the government, the universities and the aircraft industry.

The chairman of NACA since 1939 was Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a designer of analogue computing machines, co-founder of the firm from which the Raytheon corporation grew, and recently appointed president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, one of the largest private scientific foundations in the country. Together with the president of MIT, Karl Compton, the president of Harvard University, the chemist James Bryant Conant, and Frank Jewett, president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Bell Telephone Laboratories, he concluded that the coming war would be won by technology and that the military research system, as in the First World War, would not deliver new weapons in time. All four were Republicans distrustful of the growth of the state under the New Deal, and yet they decided that a new federal agency was needed, operating directly under the President’s wing.

The impetus came from the German offensive in the West. On 12 June 1940, as France was collapsing, Bush, with the help of the President’s adviser Harry Hopkins, put a one-page proposal to Roosevelt. The meeting lasted less than a quarter of an hour. The President approved the plan on the spot, writing “OK – FDR” on it. On 27 June 1940, by order of the Council of National Defense, a First World War body revived for the occasion, the NDRC was created with Bush as chairman. Bush himself later admitted that it was a short cut by which “a small company of scientists and engineers, acting outside established channels”, gained the authority and money to develop new weapons.

The NDRC’s year

The committee had eight members, who worked without pay: besides Bush, Compton, Conant and Jewett, it included the Commissioner of Patents, a representative of the army, a representative of the navy and the Californian physical chemist Richard Tolman. Its most important innovation was its way of working. Instead of building government laboratories and drafting scientists into the forces, as in 1917–1918, the NDRC signed contracts with universities, institutes and industrial laboratories, which kept their independence while working on problems set by the state. Conant recalled that he understood at once that this meant the beginning of a new relationship between the federal government and the universities.

In its first year the committee launched programmes that soon proved crucial. It owed much to the British: in September 1940 the Tizard Mission showed the Americans the cavity magnetron, and the NDRC decided to create a separate laboratory for it. On 11 November 1940 the Radiation Laboratory began work at MIT, and by the summer of 1941 it already had a working airborne radar set. At the Carnegie Institution the physicist Merle Tuve began work on a proximity fuze, which was to detonate a shell near its target without a direct hit. In February 1941 Conant went to London to set up a permanent NDRC liaison office there. The Uranium Committee of Lyman Briggs, director of the National Bureau of Standards, was also placed under the NDRC. Bush removed the military men from it and, for security reasons, appointed no foreign-born scientists to it. Publication of research results on uranium fission was halted.

After a year, however, Bush clearly saw the limits of his institution. The NDRC could commission research but not the development work needed to turn a laboratory discovery into a weapon ready for production. It had no formal powers to coordinate its work with the needs of the army and navy. Military medicine lay outside its remit. Finally, it was financed from the President’s emergency fund, which put it on an uncertain legal footing and condemned it to a constant shortage of money. According to American studies, in its first year it received about 6.5 million dollars of the 10 million it had asked for. In the spring of 1941, when after the passage of Lend-Lease American war industry was turning to production for Britain and on 27 May Roosevelt proclaimed an unlimited national emergency, Bush agreed with the President on the creation of a stronger office. Preparations had been under way since May.

Executive Order No. 8807

The order of 28 June 1941 placed the OSRD within the Office for Emergency Management in the Executive Office of the President. It invoked the “unlimited national emergency” directly, together with the need to provide scientific and medical research for national defence. The director, appointed by the President and acting under his direction, was to advise the President on military research, serve as the centre for mobilising the country’s scientific personnel and resources, coordinate and supplement the research of the War and Navy Departments, draw up research programmes in cooperation with the military, and initiate research on “mechanisms and devices of warfare” and on medical problems. One clause allowed research to be carried out at the request of the governments of countries whose defence the President had deemed vital to the security of the United States under the Act of 11 March 1941, that is, Lend-Lease. The office could conclude contracts with universities, scientific institutions, including the National Academy of Sciences, and businesses. It took over the contracts of the NDRC and of two earlier bodies dealing with health and medicine.

Two main bodies operated within the OSRD. The NDRC, now chaired by Conant, dealt with weapons and equipment. The new Committee on Medical Research, headed by the pharmacologist Alfred Newton Richards of the University of Pennsylvania, took charge of military medicine. The director was advised by a council made up of the chairmen of the two committees and of NACA and representatives of the army and navy. The OSRD was to receive money directly from appropriations voted by Congress, and not only from the President’s discretionary funds. Most important of all, however, it could pursue a project even when the military were not interested in it. If the army did not want to adopt a new invention, Bush could build a working prototype and present it with a fait accompli. The word “development” was added to the office’s name for precisely that reason.

Uranium in the new structure

In June 1941 uranium research was one of the less promising fields. Since physicists at Columbia had confirmed fission, work had gone slowly. Briggs was cautious and attached to secrecy, and Karl Compton complained at the beginning of 1941 that the committee was working at the pace of a peacetime government office. In the spring Bush commissioned a review of the programme from the National Academy of Sciences. A committee chaired by the Nobel laureate Arthur Compton recommended on 17 May 1941 that the effort be increased, but it concentrated more on nuclear power than on a bomb, which did not convince Bush. News from Europe, on the other hand, was disturbing: in April a report passed on by a refugee from Berlin reached Briggs that many German physicists under Werner Heisenberg were working intensively on a uranium bomb.

Within the OSRD Briggs’s committee became the Uranium Section, soon renamed, for the sake of concealment, Section S-1. Briggs remained chairman, but Bush gave him new members. The breakthrough came from Britain. In July 1941 the British MAUD Committee concluded that a bomb containing about 11 kilograms of uranium-235 could be built within about two years, and in August the Australian physicist Mark Oliphant came to America and discovered that Briggs had locked the British reports in a safe without showing them even to the members of his committee. On 9 October 1941 Bush put the matter to Roosevelt and Vice-President Henry Wallace. The President agreed to an expansion of the work and reserved policy decisions to a small circle: himself, Wallace, Bush, Conant, the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, and the Army Chief of Staff, George Marshall. On 6 December 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor, Bush organised an accelerated research programme.

In 1942 the scale of the undertaking outgrew the capacities of a civilian office. In June Bush replaced Section S-1 with a smaller executive committee chaired by Conant, and the army created the Manhattan District, which in September, under General Leslie Groves, took over the building of the bomb. The OSRD’s contracts were transferred to the army, most of them by March 1943. Bush and Conant, however, remained in the project’s inner leadership.

Its place in the war

The OSRD became the brain of the American scientific effort in the Second World War. By mid-1946, according to the office’s own figures, it had disbursed about 536 million dollars. At its peak, in 1945, only about 1,500 people worked at its headquarters, but thousands of scientists and engineers worked under its contracts. MIT received the most money; its Radiation Laboratory grew to some 4,000 staff and designed almost half of the radar sets ordered by the American armed forces. The proximity fuze, developed at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University, went into the anti-aircraft shells of the Pacific Fleet from January 1943 and, in December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, into the shells of the field artillery as well. The Committee on Medical Research contributed to the mass production of penicillin, the development of chloroquine against malaria and the use of DDT against the lice that spread typhus. Work was also done on rockets, sights and anti-submarine equipment.

The model worked out in 1940–1941, in which the state finances research carried out in universities and industry while leaving scientific decisions to the scientists, outlasted the war. Critics such as Senator Harley Kilgore accused it of favouring big corporations and a handful of universities. In July 1945 Bush presented the President with the report “Science, the Endless Frontier”, in which he called for permanent state funding of science. Out of this idea grew the National Science Foundation in 1950. The OSRD itself ceased operations at the end of 1947. The atomic bomb, which in August 1945 destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was the most famous, but not the only, fruit of the decision Roosevelt signed at the end of June 1941, a few days after Germany attacked the Soviet Union and almost half a year before the United States entered the war.