Bring on the Scientists

In an advanced industrial society, however democratic, a "handful of men in secret" make the choices that "determine in the crudest sense whether we live or die." So argued English Novelist Sir Charles Percy Snow last week as he delivered Harvard University's prestigious Godkin Lectures on public affairs.* Snow's plea was for more scientists in government, thus minimizing the role of hunch and political intuition.

Famed as a critic of the "two-culture" gap between scientists and nonscientists, Sir Charles is qualified to protest: he was a physicist long before he became Britain's most knowledgeable novelist of top-level science and politics (The New Men, The Masters, The Affair); he was knighted not for literature but for his work as chief organizer of scientists in the World War II Ministry of Labor. To illustrate his point, he said last week, "The best I can do is tell a story."

Hidden Feud. With a novelist's relish, Insider Snow then described one of the unknown battles of wartime Britain: the feud between Sir Henry Tizard (rhymes with lizard), "the best scientific mind that in England has ever applied itself to war," and German-raised F. A. Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), right-hand science adviser to Winston Churchill. As Snow tells it, the fate of England all but hung on the enmity between these two strong men.

Once close friends (and now both dead), Tizard and Lindemann turned to public power after failing to reach the first rank in pure science. They had little else in common. Chemist Tizard, who at times "looked like a highly intelligent and sensitive frog," was the outgoing, very English son of a regular navy officer. The "very odd and very gifted" Physicist Lindemann was "repressed, suspicious, malevolent." A fanatic Englishman-by-adoption, he was a fierce ascetic who shunned sensual pleasures. Snow recalls him as "an extreme and cranky vegetarian who lived largely on the whites of eggs,/- Port Salut cheese and olive oil."

In the 19205 the ambitious and "distinctly rich" Lindemann, said Snow, began "eating his singular vegetarian meals at a good many of the great English houses." He met Churchill, formed a lifelong friendship, even though Churchill soon was out of political favor. Tizard took a different road. After teaching at Oxford, he turned to science-advising at Whitehall, and with his bluff, soldierly manner "fitted into that world from the start." Lindemann was jealous.

In 1934 the Air Ministry gave Tizard charge of a four-man committee to study British air defense. The group soon made a far-reaching recommendation: put every ounce of British brainpower into developing radar. Then Lindemann landed on the committee as Churchill's delegate. For a solid year, he argued so savagely for his own gadgety notions (infrared detection of enemy planes, aerial parachute mines) that at one point the committee broke up. Costly Victory. Tizard pressed on, and radar was ready in time to help win the Battle of Britain. But the feud had just begun. When Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, Lindemann forced Tizard out of his job as the Air Ministry's science adviser. In 1942 the new Baron Cherwell pressed for strategic bombing of such targets as workers' housing to cripple Germany. Asked to study Cherwell's statistics, Tizard found the damage estimate five times too high. But he got nowhere. Churchill's intimate won a backstairs Cabinet fight that had "the faint but just perceptible smell of a witch hunt." Labeled a defeatist, Tizard was forced to sit out the rest of the war as president of Oxford's Magdalen College.

At war's end a survey of actual strategic bombing damage proved Cherwell's estimate not five but ten times too high. Had Cherwell not won his way, argues Snow, "the war might have ended a bit earlier and with less cost."

Snow sees clear lessons: "It is dangerous to have a solitary scientific overlord" such as Lindemann was during the war. "It is especially dangerous to have him sitting in power, with no scientist near him, surrounded by politicians who think of him as all-wise and all-knowing." It is even more dangerous to give any power of choice to the scientist who deceives himself through an excessive devotion to gadgetry and secrecy.

Future-Directed World. But why give scientists any political power? Because, says Snow, Western nations are "becoming existential societies--and we are living in the same world with future-directed societies." Snow says: "We seem to be flexible, but we haven't any model of the future before us. In the significant sense, we can't change. And to change is what we have to do.

"That is why I want scientists active in all the levels of government," Snow adds. For they are trained in foresight, while politicians are "masters of the short-term solution." Scientists "have it within them to know what a future-directed society feels like, for science itself, in its human aspect, is just that. That is why I want some scientists mixed up in our affairs. It would be bitter if, when this storm of history is over, the best epitaph that anyone could write of us was only that: they were 'the wisest men who had not the gift of foresight.' "

/- To be published next spring as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection by Harvard University Press. f Lindemann found yolks to be "too exciting."

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