Chapter 9. the Need for More Research, 1955–1958
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Chapter 9. The Need for More Research, 1955–1958 It is both dangerous and poor economy to wait until an emergency is upon us before developing new methods, new concepts, and new applications of the geologic sciences.1 —Thomas B. Nolan As members of the Eisenhower administration assessed the second Hoover Commission’s recommendations for improving the Federal Government, they also took major steps to strengthen the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and to foster world peace. On March 29, 1955, the Senate ratified the Paris trea- ties ending the occupation of the Federal Republic of Germany. The agreements reached Bonn on May 5, and West Germany became a formal member of NATO on May 9. British participation in NATO remained crucial, but Britain’s leader- ship at home changed when Winston Churchill, increasingly ill, resigned on April 5. Anthony Eden, twice Churchill’s Foreign Secretary, succeeded him as Prime Minister, and the Conservative Party increased its majority in the House of Com- mons in the national election on May 26. The Soviets remained concerned about their satellite nations in Eastern Europe (especially in view of the United States’ announced policies and uprisings like the one in East Germany in 1953), NATO’s strength and unity, and an economically strong and rearmed West Germany. On May 14, representatives from eight nations—Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union— met in Warsaw and signed a 20-year treaty of friendship and mutual defense known as the Warsaw Pact. Tito’s Yugoslavia refused to join the agreement. After pro- longed four-power negotiations in Vienna during May, Eisenhower signed on June 25 a peace treaty with Austria that returned sovereignty to the country on July 27. Austria, like Sweden and Switzerland, chose not to join NATO. To try to secure a more tranquil world, President Eisenhower, Prime Minister Eden, French Prime Minister Edgar Faure, and Soviet Premier Nicolai Bulganin, accompanied by Nikita Khrushchev, the Communist Party’s First Secretary, met in Geneva on July 21 to discuss peace and related issues. Khrushchev promptly showed Eisenhower who wielded the real power in the current Soviet Government. Eisenhower proposed a mutual “Open Skies” policy that would encourage the exchange of military information and allow reconnaissance overflights to forestall threats of war or surprise attacks. Neither U.S. radar installations in Turkey and elsewhere around the Soviet perimeter nor the planned reconnaissance surveys by balloons in the Air Force’s Moby Dick Project2 provided coverage sufficient to monitor the testing and deployment of Soviet strategic bombers and missiles. Adequate surety depended on information gained from images taken, during flights over Soviet test sites and bases, by high-resolution cameras made by Edwin H. Land’s Polaroid Corporation and installed in a new high-altitude reconnaissance air- craft that could fly without refueling at least 4,000 miles at 430 miles per hour and altitudes of 70,000 feet, as recommended by James Killian, Jr.’s panel. After Killian and Land briefed Eisenhower, the President gave the new project to Allen Dulles’ The Need for More Research, 1955–1958 471 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and its management there passed to Richard Bissell. The unarmed U–2, developed from a modified F–104 fuselage by Clar- ence L. (“Kelly”) Johnson’s team at Lockheed’s secret “Skunk Works” facility, first flew in August 1955. The initial dozen production models of the new spy plane, a long-winged, glider-like aircraft powered by two turbojets, were deployed in the Far East by the Air Force and the CIA. At Geneva, the new Big Four also discussed the unification of the two Germanys and European security. West German militariza- tion led the Soviet Union to oppose unification and reject the West’s proposals for enduring European security. The Soviets unsuccessfully sought a European mutual- defense alliance that included a unified Germany but not the United States. The Eisenhower administration announced on July 29 that the United States planned, as part of its activities during the International Geophysical Year (IGY), supported by the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council (NAS– NRC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), to have Project Vanguard place a dozen scientific satellites in orbit some 300 miles above the Earth. As Vanguard’s launch vehicle, Eisenhower approved the Defense Department’s recommendation to choose the Navy’s scientific, but not yet enhanced, Viking rocket, rather than the Army’s more powerful, nuclear-capable, and flight-tested Redstone intermediate- range ballistic missile (IRBM). The Soviet Union declared its intention, in Science for October 12, to place in orbit its own IGY satellite. As IGY planning continued during 1955–56, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) moved to centralize and increase its capabilities in using electronic comput- ers in mapping, scientific, and administrative operations, including payroll proce- dures. On February 27, 1956, an amendment to the Survey order3 that established the Administrative Division in 1953 now founded within the Division a Compu- tation Branch. The Survey order that followed on March 7, 1956, authorized an Advisory Committee on Electronic Computers that would report to the Director through the Executive Committee. The new five-member Advisory Committee, comprising one representative from each Division and one from the Director’s Office, would be led by a chairman designated by the Director. The Advisory Com- mittee was asked to “maintain familiarity with computer equipment and be alert to the application of its techniques to the scientific and administrative functions of the Geological Survey.” Its members also would review the coordination of “tabu- lating and computing problems at such times as the available workload capacity of the [Computation] Branch is to be exceeded.”4 The USGS appropriations for surveys, investigations, and research (SIR) for fiscal year 1955–56 gave the Geologic Division more than $5,718,000 of the $14,494,000 it received that year. The Division remained, as in recent years, heavily dependent on continued transfers from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commis- sion (AEC), which again reduced its funding but this time only by $238,000 to $5,579,000. To the Geologic Division, the Department of Defense (DoD) trans- ferred $1,361,000, the International Cooperation Administration (ICA) shifted $577,000, the Defense Minerals Exploration Administration (DMEA) provided $441,000, and the General Services Administration (GSAd) sent $259,000. From these and other Federal sources, the Division received a total of $8,539,000. The ICA, established within the State Department on June 30, 1955, pursuant to an Executive order of May 9,5 replaced the Foreign Operations Administration. Wilmot (“Bill”) Bradley had been Chief Geologist for more than a decade, an interval longer than that served by any of his predecessors, and the Division’s staff continued to support him. Players in the Pick and Hammer Club’s show in April 1956 rejected attractive offers to leave the Division for higher paying jobs in academia, the AEC, consulting companies, or the oil patch. In the ode “Hi–Fi,” sung to tune of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” from Cole Porter’s 1938 “Leave It to Me,” Bradley knew, the geologists claimed, that they “couldn’t be had”: 472 The Need for More Research, 1955–1958 So I want to warn you laddie, Though your proposition is swell, Yet my heart belongs to Bradley, And our Bradley he treats us so well.6 Geologists in Charles (“Andy”) Anderson’s Mineral Deposits Branch mapped and studied the geology of active and potential mining sites as part of 98 projects operating in 29 States in fiscal year 1955–56. As before, Branch personnel worked to improve their understanding of the genesis and geologic setting of these and other mineral commodities and the physical and chemical factors controlling their localization and distribution in the wider crustal framework. The AEC supported 40 of these projects, but, in April 1956, it ended its support for the USGS search for uranium and vanadium on the Colorado Plateau. That physical-exploration program was the largest yet conducted by the USGS and was rivaled only by the agency’s effort in Alaska’s Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4 (NPR–4). Beginning in November 1947, cooperative efforts by the USGS and the U.S. Bureau of Mines (USBM) in mapping, criteria development, diamond drilling, and core analyses discovered nearly 2.3 million tons of ore that averaged 0.34 percent uranium and 2.12 percent vanadium and was valued at about $96.5 million. Industry also adopted concepts developed during the USGS program, including the demonstra- tion that buried stream channels in three sites in the Monument Valley of Arizona and Utah, disclosed by geologic mapping, geophysical surveys, and drilling, were favorable sites for uranium deposits. Related geochemical work in the Black Hills also identified some of its carbonate-cemented sandstones as uranium hosts. Branch members devoted considerable effort to mineral-commodity studies and to reviews of information about these commodities. Several major mining companies joined in an exploration program for Utah’s Tintic district that used the results of USGS mapping and studies of rock alteration. Additional exploration by industry disclosed a new zinc-mineral district in Tennessee’s Copper Ridge area, and USGS geologic maps aided