Revisiting The Crocodile Years: The Traditional Image of Science and Physical Scientists' Participation in Weapons Research

The primary motivation of most of the Manhattan Project scientists who built the first atomic bomb

was fear: Werner Heisenberg’s team of German scientists might build one first, and Nazi Germany would

become unconquerable.

In November 1944, however, the United States and Great Britain learned by way of its secret ALSOS

team that the German scientists were years behind the Manhattan Project and that a bomb could never be built in time to be used during World War II. Some six months later, on April 30, 1945, Hitler committed

suicide. On May 8, 1945, the Allied Forces accepted Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender.

Why, then, did scientists in the United States continue to build and test an atomic bomb?

More than forty years ago, this author’s doctoral research began in search of an answer to this question.

The quest eventually evolved into an investigation of the relationship between science and weapons

research and development (hereafter referred to as “R&D”), i.e., the relationship between scientists’

views of science and their willingness to participate in scientific activity that ultimately results in

weapons. The central research question became:

Given the existence of a significant social demand for defense-related and weapons R&D,

why do some physical scientists participate in such research, while others do not?

A theoretical model of the relationship between the social demand for defense-related and weapons

research and development, traditional scientific values related to the worldview of classical physics, and

differential participation by physical scientists in such research was developed and empirically examined.

The model suggested that an antiquated “traditional image of science” exists, and that it may explain, in

part, participation by physical scientists in defense-related or weapons research. The model was located

within the sociologies of knowledge and science, and the dissertation included chapters that provided

overviews of the literatures of these subdisciplines.

The two major hypotheses suggested by the model were: (1) that a constellation of values representing a

“traditional image of science” obtains today among young physical scientists; and (2) that those who

currently engage (or are willing to engage) in defense-related or weapons R&D are more likely to agree

with the values implicit in the traditional image of science than those who do not (or would not) engage in

such R&D.

The investigation concluded with an empirical examination of the model and hypotheses. Primary data,

collected through 73 personal, in-depth interviews of a geographic sample of those who received

doctorates in physics and related disciplines in 1983, were analyzed and interpreted.