Salient: An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 11, No. 11, September 22nd, 1948

[Introduction]

The formation of a scientific defence corps has recently been announced and application forms and informatory circulars on it are already available. The scheme is made very attractive by the offer of comparatively high salaries and the opportunity for two years' post-graduate training. Five years' continuous employment is guaranteed and made obligatory. No guarantee, however, of future employment is given, no choice of subject is assured and the recruits are in all respects under the control of the service chiefs. Vague promises are made but those who worked on defence research know just how good are such promises made by the chiefs of staff and departmental heads. It is to be hoped that no scientist is under the illusion that he will be able to pursue serious scientific work for long under this scheme. As with other defence measures proposed by the Government, for example the conscription of the eighteen-year-olds, the scheme is quite superficial and amounts to anything but a serious defence measure.

On considering the whole question of defence research, let us look back a little to the experience of the recent war and see how research was organised in the various belligerent countries and see how efficient these systems proved to be. In Germany from 1933 research was on a war footing and was well subsidised. It is now well substantiated that even military research in that country lagged far behind that of Britain. America and the Soviet Union. Firstly, many men of rare genius such as Einstein. Haber and Planck, being "security risks" and guilty of un-German activities, were persecuted, shunned or humiliated. Secondly, most research was of a short term and technical character. Little attention was paid to most aspects of fundamental research and many flelds of science were completey neglected and even suppressed. Prolonged secrecy, excessive compartmentalisation, degeneration of the universities, etc., all contributed to the decline of German science. In Britain, however, before the war, research was directed more towards peaceful ends. The universities remained free and virile and although they received little financial assistance and were rather removed from the exigencies of every day life they did succeed in establishing a large body of highly-trained scientists perpetuating and extending the great traditions of empirical and theoretical science. It was only this atmosphere which laid the ground for successful work in radar, atomic physics, penicillin, etc. France and America followed a similar line and according to such scientists as Julian Huxley, J. G. Crowther and Eric Ashby, who have worked in and visited the Soviet Union, Soviet science consciously follows the best traditions of French and British science with their academic freedom and their strong bias towards fundamental research.