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"The science of today," he says, "is the technology of tomorrow. Many people are afraid we will be attacked by Russia. I am not free of such worry. But I do not think this is the most probable way in which they will defeat us. They will advance so fast in science and leave us so far behind that their way of doing things will be the way, and there will be nothing we can do about it.
"Every year without war is a benefit for all mankind. But the Russians can conquer us without fighting, through a growing scientific and technological preponderance. Already today we are beginning to have some global control over the forces of nature. Throughout the world we already are beginning to change conditions. The planet will become smaller and smaller. What one country's technology is doing will obviously more and more affect other countries. If the Russians go ahead faster than we do in this direction, then we will be just helpless. If we are not able to use our freedom in the direction of accelerated progress, and if the Russians use their tyranny in this direction, they will win."
Two v. 35. The science race, says Cal-Tech's President Lee DuBridge, is "not like a race of two horses. It's more like a race of 100 yachts. Some of their yachts are ahead, and some of them are way back. But their fleet is moving faster, and all their yachts could pull ahead." Topflight physicists note that the Russians have an 8.3-billion electron-volt particle accelerator (atom smasher) more powerful than the University of California's Bevatron. Says U.C.L.A. Physicist Joseph Kaplan, scientific overseer of the U.S.'s International Geophysical Year effort: "In oceanography, meteorology and upper-atmosphere physics, the indications are that they are certainly as good as we are."
The record of U.S. science shows that a nation's scientific venture can move along fast when it gets up momentum. U.S. science lagged far behind Western Europe as recently as the 1920s. Then the contagious excitement of pure science hit the universities, and the U.S. spurted ahead. An enriching influx of dictator-fleeing European scientists, plus the pressure of World War II, accelerated scientific progress. Recalls Columbia University's Nobel-Prizewinning Physicist I. I. Rabi: "When I went to Europe a quarter of a century ago, I was provincial. When I went to Europe after the war, it was Europe that had become provincial." Adds CalTech's DuBridge: "It's a miracle that's happened in basic science in this country in the last 30 years." From 1901 until 1930, the U.S. won only five Nobel Prizes in science. Since then, the U.S. has won 30 Nobel awards in physics, chemistry, or medicine and physiology, far more than any other country.