Mixing Science with Politics

...But because technical advice cannot be separated from political choice, and because political choice in a democracy is the function of elected decision-makers, a problem exists...

...His personal position is particularly noticeable in the discussion of the manner in which the first-round technical negotiations at Geneva were carried on...

...Starting with the controversies over attacking Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the early split between universal disarmers and universal deterrers, Gilpin goes into the creation of the Baruch Plan (on which almost all scientists agreed), the H-Bomb struggles, and the Oppenheimer ouster...

...but it is slightly annoying...

...More than half the book is devoted to the nuclear test-ban controversies, both those with the Russians and those within the Government...

...Reviewed by ROBERT A. LEVINE Research Associate, Harvard Center for International Affairs The idea that the decisions which determine public policy can never be made on the basis of technical expertise alone is one which evidently must be learned anew by every generation of technical experts...

...Economists have begun to understand that the tough choices of fiscal policy, such as the one between a little bit of inflation and a little bit of unemployment, are not simply matters of objective truth and pure scientific solution (though these can help in minimizing the inevitable conflicts), but also depend on delicate questions of political and value judgment...

...Perhaps the learning of this lesson is the reason that so many economists are employed by the Kennedy Administration in non-economic capacities...

...The political struggles between groups of physical scientists, each claiming to represent objective truth and morality, form the subject matter of Robert Gilpin's first-rate description and analysis of the relationship of scientists to nuclear policy during and since World War II...

...And there is no such thing as an "objective" or self-evidently correct political decision in the real world...

...Once this is realized (as it is being increasingly by both scientists and politicians), advice can be given frankly and taken fairly without the belief by either party that the policy advice consists merely of objective truth...

...In the '40s came the discovery that combatting depression also abets inflation-increased demand frequently has a push-pull effect on prices well before employment is full-and with this discovery came the beginnings of political wisdom...

...If perchance it is read by one of the latest corps of bearers of revealed political truth-the psychologists who have discovered that our picture of the Russians is a "mirror-image" of their picture of us, and thus conclude that both are equally wrong, and anybody who disagrees with them is mentally ill -it may do some additional political good...

...In the history of the United States this lesson was first learned by uniformed technical experts on warfare who submitted readily to civilian control of the military and, with exceedingly few exceptions, have remained submissive ever since...

...Gilpin's solution, backed up by common sense, logic and a wealth of case-study detail, is that the expert and the decision-maker must each realize that the former speaks only in part as expert, with the remaining part being well-informed citizen...

...At any rate, Gilpin's book is both sound analytically and well written...

...Specialized knowledge and theory may be useful, or even essential, in delineating policy alternatives, but final choice of a particular alternative is a political matter...

...But men like Robert Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller and Linus Pauling, all intellectually capable of giving technical advice on policy matters, are seldom emotionally capable of separating themselves completely from value judgment and choice...

...Evidently, political scientists (to which breed Gilpin belongs) are no better than the rest of us...

...Nor should they do so...

...and the "control school" (Pauling), favoring control, first, last and always...

...He feels the American scientists were at a disadvantage from the outset, and he takes some delight in detailing how that wily politician, Semyon Tsarapkin, ran rings around our political innocents...

...One of the first generations of academic specialists to serve the Government consisted of economists, who for many years proclaimed the objective truth of the balanced budget and the gold standard...

...Gilpin's explicit moral is that, whatever may be the case in theory, it is impossible in practice to separate the technical process of analysis and prognosis from the political process of choice and action...

...Had his book been based on any other thesis than that of the impossibility of scientific objectivity in policy matters, Gilpin's failure to indicate his own subjectivity would have been completely within the limits of fair discourse...

...Gilpin's position on the test ban is clearly closer to that of the Teller infinite-containment group than that of the finite controllers...

...As it stands, it is still fair (even though at one point he refers to a no-lessobjective description of the controversy from the finite containment point of view as partisan...

...What has been obvious to soldiers for almost 200 years, and has begun to be learned by economists during the past 30, must now be learned in a much shorter time by the physical scientists who have flooded into governmental and semigovernmental posts since 1940...

...Here Gilpin details the ins and outs of both the technical arguments and the political machinations of the schools of scientists and describes how we got to where (if anywhere) we are today...

...If it helps push physical scientists along the way many of them have already started-toward the realization that science in the service of politics must inexorably be political -it will have performed a service...

...But a good defense can also be made for the pro-ban finite controllers, and, since Gilpin does not make it, it should be incumbent upon him to follow his own precept and realize his political prejudices rather than present what is politically controversial as objective truth...

...He describes the division of the nuclear scientists into the "infinite containment school" (Teller), believing that with the world as it was (and is) the U.S...

...Mufti-clad experts have been longer in the learning...

...Here also is the one major blemish which mars an otherwise excellent book...

...He may well be on firm ground, and he certainly has the intellectual right to write the issue up in his own way...

...It may be possible in principle for a scientist to cold-bloodedly expose to a politician the existing alternatives and stop there...

...Gilpin believes that the controllers, powerless and outside of the dialogue for a decade, are now conring back in by joining the finite controllers...

...the "finite containment school" (Oppenheimer and, later, Bethe), also favoring a deterrent policy but reluctantly and with a constant search for alternatives of international control...

...In the 1930s, under the tutelage of Lord Keynes and President Roosevelt, the economists discovered the objective truth of unbalanced budgets to combat depression...

...had no choice but to pursue a purely national nuclear policy designed for deterrence...