Blackett's War (46 page)

With only a handful of exceptions, the British and American scientists literally took up where they left off in their research interests before the war. Six would win Nobel Prizes for their scientific discoveries in physics, chemistry, and physiology. Among them was William Shockley, who had a bizarre and tragic end to a brilliant career: after sharing the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956 for the invention of the transistor, he abysmally failed to make the fortune he might have out of that discovery and grew increasingly withdrawn and obsessive, spending his final years delivering lectures on the racial inheritance of IQ and the intellectual inferiority of blacks.

E. J. Williams, probably the most capable of the operational researchers, survived the war by barely a month, dying from cancer at age forty-two. He had rejoined Blackett at the Admiralty in early 1943 as one of his senior scientists in the Department of Naval Operational Research. Like Blackett he drove himself at a relentless pace; an American visitor found both of the men “tired and exhausted from too many seven day weeks.” By April 1945, when he knew he would die, Williams asked his doctor to try to give him as many “effective working days” as possible. “By great will-power over great pain,” Blackett recalled, Williams was able to spend his final months that summer completing an article on atomic collision processes for a special issue of
Reviews of Modern Physics
in honor of Niels Bohr’s sixtieth birthday. “Throughout E.J.’s illness the most painful element was the sense of wanton frustration and waste—his grief for his work was so acute and it
would comfort him to know that others could feel this angle of his tragedy,” recalled a close friend. “There was much he wanted to do.”
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CECIL GORDON WAS
one who put his career where his convictions were, becoming the head of a unit the postwar Labour government established in the Board of Trade with the explicit aim of applying operational research to save British industry and expand export markets. His appointment was greeted in the press with headlines declaring HE SHOWED RAF HOW TO DO IT. AND NOW FOR INDUSTRY …

At the Board of Trade’s Special Research Unit, Gordon launched studies on productivity, consumer needs, the incorporation of operational research into industry. It all went predictably nowhere amid the relieved return to peace and normalcy—and the simple fact that what worked for a centrally organized enterprise where the government was the sole customer had little applicability to the diversity of the consumer marketplace.
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In 1948 Gordon gave it up, joining the animal genetics faculty at Edinburgh at the invitation of C. H. Waddington, and proceeded to have a miserable falling out with his former Coastal Command ORS colleague. Waddington had set up a sort of left-wing commune in a large country house on the outskirts of the town; ten families shared the house, ate meals together, and carpooled to work. “It provided many anecdotes, usually of a wry kind, and a novel,” noted the author of a memorial minute of Waddington for the Royal Society. Gordon was incensed by Waddington’s favoritism in the lab and his misuse of university property, and after he gave evidence to an official inquiry into these complaints, he arrived at work a few days later to find he had been moved into a basement room at the genetics institute. The secretary of the university agreed that Gordon was in the right and Waddington in the wrong on almost every matter in the dispute. But he added that Gordon might not spend quite so much of his energy on “smelling out sin.”

Gordon then abandoned genetics for community medicine, studying class-based inequalities in health, sickness among Scottish railway workers, and the health care needs of the elderly. Frustrated and unhappy, he died at age fifty-three in 1960. At the time of his death he was chairman of the local Labour Party and representative of the Association of Scientific Workers on the Edinburgh Trades Council, still a committed if now deeply disappointed Marxist.
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Blackett also found himself increasingly an odd man out in postwar
Britain. His undimmed admiration for the Soviet Union, and a growing antipathy toward American military and foreign policies, had already marked him as a security risk by the summer of 1945. A delegation of thirty British scientists had been invited to Moscow by the Soviet Academy of Science to celebrate the victory over Germany and mark the 220th anniversary of the academy. The night before their scheduled departure on June 14, Blackett, Bernal, and six others were handed back their passports with the exit visas to Russia canceled. An official explanation published in
The Times
the next day stated that the eight “were engaged on work of the greatest importance in the production of war materials and research.” Unofficially, there were whispers that Churchill and Cherwell were worried about information on the atomic bomb project being leaked to the Soviets. Blackett, furious, declared he would refuse to participate in any more war work until he received assurances that the government would stop trying to limit his freedom to travel or contact scientists in other countries. “To see Blackett marching out of the Admiralty was a magnificent sight,” wrote Nevill Mott, another British physicist (and future Nobel Prize winner) who was barred from making the trip.
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Blackett was never as doctrinaire as Bernal, who in 1949 traveled to Moscow, praised Soviet science, and called Lysenko’s theories on the inheritance of acquired characteristics a democratic response to “bourgeois” science and a refreshing contrast to the situation in Britain, where “science is in the hands of those who hate peace, whose only aim is to despoil and torture people, so that their own profits can be assured.” Bernal airily dismissed reports of the Soviet gulags as “allegations from professed anti-Soviet sources which are unverifiable.” On Stalin’s death in 1953 Bernal hailed the Soviet dictator, explaining that “the true greatness of Stalin as a leader was his wonderful combination of a deeply scientific approach to all problems with his capacity for feeling and expressing himself in simple and direct human terms.”
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The same year the Soviet Union awarded Bernal the Stalin Peace Prize.

Still, Blackett remained far left and pro-Soviet enough to alarm even the new Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, who had appointed Blackett to an Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy in 1945 and immediately regretted it. Blackett had succeeded Bernal as president of the Association of Scientific Workers, holding the position from 1943 to 1947, and in an address to the 1945 meeting of the association he called admiring attention to the fact that the Soviet delegation to the International Congress of Trade Unions
meeting in London that year included at least three scientists. (“Applause,” noted the transcript of his speech at that point.) On the government’s atomic energy committee, Blackett wrote a minority report urging a neutral position for Britain and advising against the country’s acquiring atomic weapons of its own. That prompted Prime Minister Attlee to respond: “The author, a distinguished scientist, speaks on political and military problems on which he is a layman.”
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In 1948, the same year Blackett was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, he published
Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy
(the subsequent American edition was titled
Fear, War, and the Bomb
), which strongly endorsed the emerging left-wing credo that America, not the Soviet Union, was now the real threat to world peace. He cast the American-sponsored Baruch Plan to place atomic weapons and atomic energy under international control as a conspiracy to deny the Soviets access to atomic research, and asserted that the atomic bombing of Japan was carried out “not so much as the last military act of the Second World War, but as the first act of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.”
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(Bernal offered an even more rabid view of America and the bomb in an article for the
Daily Worker
several years later in which he made Cherwell the original villain, calling him an “ultra reactionary” whose advocacy of strategic bombing against Germany—“the doctrine of those who hate and despise common people”—now “survives in an infinitely more horrible and militarily futile form in the era of the atom bomb.” That and a similar depiction of Cherwell in a 1960 lecture by C. P. Snow on the Tizard-Cherwell rift prompted Zuckerman, who certainly had no love for Cherwell, to counter that he could not “see the Prof as some kind of Second World War Dr. Strangelove.”)
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Blackett’s book earned him a glowing review in
Pravda
, the attention of the FBI, and a place on a list George Orwell supplied the British government naming thirty-eight journalists, writers, and actors who were “crypto-communists, fellow travellers or inclined that way.”
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When Blackett traveled to a scientific conference on cosmic rays in Mexico in 1951 he knew he might have trouble getting a visa to the United States, so arranged to take a Trans-Canadian Air Lines flight from Toronto to Mexico City. On the return trip the plane stopped in Tampa, Florida, to refuel; he and his wife were taken off by U.S. immigration officials, questioned whether they were carrying any subversive literature and what their views on America were, and detained for a few hours before being allowed to depart on the next flight out. Blackett
took a slight sardonic amusement from the incident—he subsequently sent his erstwhile jailer a picture postcard from Niagara Falls—but it clearly rankled.
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IN BOTH BRITAIN AND AMERICA
the war did secure a permanent institutional foothold for scientific advice in government. With the Labour victory in 1945, Henry Tizard returned to Whitehall as the new government’s chief scientific adviser. Solly Zuckerman had a distinguished postwar career as the top scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence in the 1950s and later to the government of Labour prime minister Harold Wilson in the early 1960s. But both were keenly aware of the limitations of scientists as public policy advisers in the business-as-usual world of peace. The great contribution of the operational research scientists to the war effort was, as they often themselves remarked, their ability to ask the right question. But that was within a framework where what constituted success—U-boats sunk, merchant ships saved—was usually clearly understood and widely agreed regardless of preconceived notions or political inclinations. On the great issues of political economy and social policy, though, the question frequently
is
the answer: one can get any scientifically logical and mathematically rigorous answer one wants depending on what criterion of success one chooses to measure.

Blackett often seemed unable to tell the difference. R. V. Jones ran into this right after the war when Blackett chaired a committee to decide on the future of scientific intelligence in the military services. “Blackett had been a hero of my undergraduate days,” Jones wrote, and his contributions in the war “had been great.” But, Jones continued, “I had seen him make mistakes”:

Blackett concluded that each of the three military services as well as MI6, the British secret service, should have its own scientific intelligence staff; even worse, he decided that all of the separate scientific intelligence staffs should be housed together in a new location, away from the existing ministries. It was, Jones argued in vain, an “organizational disaster,” the absolute worst of both worlds, both fragmenting the work and isolating it from the service staffs. But Blackett refused to allow any further discussion and dismissed Jones’s objections. Jones had promised the members of his scientific intelligence group at the Air Staff he would stay on through “the dull days of peace” to keep the nucleus of their organization together should trouble threaten again, but decided there was now no point and sadly resigned. With the help of recommendations from Cherwell and Churchill, he was named to the chair of natural philosophy at the University of Aberdeen.
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Blackett returned to the University of Manchester to head its physics department. A colleague recalled that “some of us certainly thought of him as an admiral” with his air of command, and sometimes harsh intolerance of mistakes. A student remembered being “awestruck by his stately procession down the main stairs for lunch. He always walked in the dead centre of the staircase, disdaining the banisters. He held his hands, naval fashion, in his jacket pockets, with thumbs protruding. He had no nickname: he was Professor Blackett.”

In 1953 Blackett moved to Imperial College, London, and in the 1960s served as president of the Royal Society for five years, by most accounts having “mellowed considerably” in his later years. He still was as intensely private and serious a man as ever, however. When a staffer from the American Institute of Physics came to interview him for its oral history project, Blackett refused to allow him to turn on his tape recorder or take any notes, made short work of the list of prepared questions the poor man had brought with him by dismissing each as irrelevant or ill conceived, and then impatiently told him he did not have any more time to waste on the matter. “Why should I tell about my personal life?” he demanded.
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IN AMERICA,
where the scientists were never quite so political as they were in Britain, there were also hopes that the operational research successes of the war would be the seed of a new scientific discipline that would revolutionize both industry and military science. Phil Morse and George Kimball
wrote a textbook drawing on many examples from the antisubmarine war to show how the basic methods of operational research might be applied to other problems. A professional society, the Operations Research Society of America, was established in 1952 and grew to 500 members in its first year; MIT launched a program in OR the same year and began accepting students and was soon studying problems such as easing traffic congestion, scheduling shifts for police and fire departments, and regulating releases of water on the Columbia River dams. For a while there was great enthusiasm in the business world for operational research’s promise of quantitative solutions to management problems in organizing workflows, maximizing manufacturing efficiency, and eliminating bottlenecks in production and distribution.
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