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Bush's army consists of 6,000 of the top U.S. scientists. They work on assigned jobs, under nonprofit contracts, in some 300 university and industrial laboratories. Their pay is their normal laboratory salaries. They get no royalties, no bonuses, no medals. Their work is surrounded with fantastic secrecy. When they meet for group talks, the meeting place is first searched from cellar to attic for eavesdroppers. Clerical workers often do not know even the name of the weapon being developed in their own laboratory. A few supersecret projects are carried on in isolated, walled villages which no one is allowed to enter or leave except on special permits. For further protection, each scientist is usually assigned only part of a problem. Bush's group, not really a team, in general works like a squad of golfers in which each player is handed a club, told to shoot for a faraway green which he can not see.
In total, OSRD is an enormous enterprise, spending about $135,000,000 a year. To date it has contracted for more than 2,000 investigations, completed 564, produced well over 200 new devices. The only official clue to what OSRD is doing is in the titles of its 18 divisions: e.g., radar, subsurface warfare, radio, explosives, new missiles, "special projectiles" (perhaps rockets), fire control. Of these, far & away the biggest is radar ($30,000,000). Second: subsurface warfare ($19,000,000).
The Soldier's Eyes. In radar, OSRD has carried on somewhat like the airplane designers who picked up where the Wright brothers left off. Credit for discovery of the 20-year-old radar principle is in dispute between two U.S. Navy researchers, A. Hoyt Taylor and Leo C. Young, and a Scottish physicist, Sir Robert A. Watson-Watt. The British were the first to use radar (which they call the radio locator) in the Battle of Britain. But OSRD has converted the first crude radar into something of almost human intelligence and with superhuman powers.
A radio beam follows the earth's curvature, instead of sailing into space, because it bounces along a reflecting roof of electrically charged particles, called the Kennelly -Heaviside layer, which blankets the earth's outer atmosphere. Physicists have measured the height of this layer, varying from 60 to 1,200 mi., by bouncing radio waves off it and catching their echo on a receiver. The first hint of radio's possible usefulness as a ground-level detector came when experimenters noticed that a ship moving between a transmitter and receiver interfered with radio waves. The basic radar instrument had three main elements: 1) a short-wave sender-receiver which could bounce back a beam, through clouds, smoke or rain, from a small object (e.g., a plane or ship) as much as 130 mi. away, 2) a vane to determine the object's direction, 3) sensitive electronic tubes to measure the object's distance by timing the echoed beam, which travels with the speed of light — 186,000 mi. a second.
These basic radar principles are by now well known to all the belligerents. But OSRD's newer instruments have greatly increased radar's usefulness. One new ap plication which has already been revealed is the use of radar with antiaircraft guns to direct fire.