No sooner did Sputnik I go into its orbit last Oct. 4 than Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, orbiting in his own familiar sphere, ordered a full-fledged tracking of U.S. preparedness. Last week, gaveling his seven-member Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee to order for the first three days of the hearing, Texan Johnson tersely outlined the Senate's objectives. Said he: "With the launching of Sputnik I and II and with the information at hand of Russia's strength, our supremacy and even our equality has been challenged. Our goal is to find out what is to be done."
The Johnson subcommittee got a dour estimate of U.S. strength from its first witness. In four hours of testimony, shaggy-browed, often emotional Dr. Edward Teller (TIME, Nov. 18) ran off a grim morning line on U.S. chances in the race for survival. The University of California physicist estimated that Russia is closing the gap in nuclear weapons, is about equal to the U.S. in aircraft and radar development, is ahead in ballistic missiles. Said Teller: "I would not say that the Russians caught up with us because they stole our secrets. They caught up with us because they worked harder. A Russian boy thinks about becoming a scientist like our young girls dream about becoming a movie star."
Pay & Priority. Moving from past and present to the potentials of the future, Teller predicted that the Russians "within the next decade or two" may be able to manage even the weather. Said he: "Please imagine a world in which the Russians can control weather in a big scale, where they can change the rainfall over Russia, and that might very well influence the rainfall in our country in an adverse manner . . . What kind of a world will it be where they have this new kind of control and we do not?"
Behind Teller came a top-name team of experts on science and military matters to criticize and suggest. Dr. Vannevar Bush, able wartime director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, urged a revamping of the Armed Forces Unification Act "so that we can have in this country unified central military planning that transcends the interest of any particular service." Lieut. General James Doolittle warned that the U.S. must overhaul its educational system. "Certainly," said he, "the scientist and the educator must be given more prestige and more pay." Beyond that, said Doolittle, the Defense Secretary needs the services of a new type of general staff, i.e., "an advisory military staff to assist him in resolving the honest differences of opinion that now occur between dedicated military people." Dr. John P. Hagen, director of Project Vanguard, insisted that if the U.S. had treated its own satellite as less of a bauble, had assigned it higher priority, "I think that we probably would have come very close to the same time [as Sputnik I], if not ahead of them."