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In the uneasy autumn of 1957, the U.S. is reluctantly grasping the full, unwelcome meaning of Russian-made metal objects orbiting around the earth. Sputnik I and Sputnik II have painfully fractured the U.S.'s contented expectation that, behind an impenetrable shield of technological superiority, the nation could go on with the pursuit of happiness and business as usual this year and the next and the next. Now the U.S. has to live with the uncomfortable realization that Russia is racing with clenched-teeth determination to surpass the West in science—and is rapidly narrowing the West's shielding lead.
With the dizzying growth of science and technology in the 20th century, Philosopher Francis Bacon's 16th-century dictum that knowledge is power has come fully and prophetically true. Advances in abstract scientific theory can promise or threaten next year's breakthroughs in the technology of national power. And on the sidelines of the science-technology race, the backward nations, eager for progress and wary of winding up in the loser's camp, watch intently to see how Russia fares in competition with the West.
Unique Endowment. That science has become the balance point between Communism and the rest of the world is no surprise to the Communists. Said Stalin in 1931: "The history of old Russia is the history of defeats due to backwardness ... In ten years at most we must cover the distance which separates us from the advanced countries of capitalism . . . Look into everything, let nothing escape you, learn and learn more . . . We must study technology, master science." Today Russia graduates more than twice as many scientists and engineers per year as the U.S. So sophisticated was the approach of Communist bosses to science—particularly since World War 11—that they freed scientists from the Communist system itself, set them up in a never-never land of unlimited funds, limousines, dachas, and even—in the last few years—freedom of thought. The Sputnik I that came as a shocking surprise to the U.S. public was no surprise to U.S. scientists. From keeping an eye on Russian research through scientific journals, from reports of colleagues who visited Russia, and from meeting their Russian opposite numbers at international scientific gatherings, U.S. scientists were well aware that Russia's scientific venture was accelerating fast.
In a very particular sense, the menacing Russian advance was no surprise to Edward Teller, 49, the rumpled, shaggy-browed, Hungarian-born nuclear physicist, the "father of the H-bomb" and now associate director of the University of California's Radiation Laboratory. Teller was uniquely endowed by his scientific talents, a first-hand familiarity with Middle European tyranny and his deep affection for his adopted U.S. to see what most of his fellow countrymen could not see. Of all the U.S. scientists on campus, in government, in industry, Teller worked hardest and most belligerently to send the warning that the Russians were coming. Looking beyond the obvious dangers of Russian advances in particular fields of military technology, e.g., rocket engines, Teller finds a more worrisome menace in Russia's massive national program of science education and basic research.