U.S. Elites and Scientific Mobilization After World War II

This chapter analyzes the origins of the post-World War II military-intellectual complex by examining how members of the military and scientific establishments created the ideological, intellectual, and institutional conditions that allowed for permanent scientific mobilization. Specifically, the chapter explores how Army Air Forces General Curtis E. LeMay, MIT engineer cum War Department official Edward L. Bowles, and physicist Louis N. Ridenour, Jr., promoted and legitimated peacetime scientific-military collaboration. In this way, the chapter illuminates the process by which such collaboration, and the military-intellectual complex that facilitated it, became permanent features of the American policymaking landscape.