Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

368 WORLD WAR II RESEARCH (1941-45)
1940 under Vannevar Bush, to initiate and speed the development of new and
improved instruments of war.6
Over the next year NDRC organized four divisions with multiple sub-
units to propose and direct research, in armor and ordnance; bombs, fuel,
gases, and chemical problems; communication and transportation; and
detection, controls, and instruments. Wholly manned by physicists, chem-
ists, and engineers from the universities and the laboratories of industry,
NDRC was authorized to originate and support military research needs and
to utilize as necessary the facilities of the Bureau and other Federal agencies.
At the inception of NDRC, the Bureau through Briggs' Uranium Commit-
tee had just one specifically assigned project, that of investigating "the pos-
sible relationship to national defense of recent discoveries in the field of
atomistics, notably the fission of uranium." It was the first of more than a
score of NDRC projects assigned to the Bureau.
The mobilization of science and scientists began as the military serv-
ices sent to NDRC lists of projects in which they were engaged and investi-
gations they believed important but had not started for lack of funds or
manpower. To them NDRC added projects of its own, in some cases over
the early indifference or even opposition of the services. The projects were
apportioned among the NDRC divisions and negotiations opened to assign
them by contract to the institutions best qualified to work on them. As 1941
began, a total of 184 contracts had been recommended.8
Rounding out the organization of scientific research for national
defense, an Executive order of June 28, 1941, established the Office of Sci-
entific Research and Development (OSRD). Vannevar Bush, NDRC chief,
moved up to OSRD as James B. Conant assumed direction of NDRC. OSRD
extended the range of research beyond weaponry to include medicine. With
enlarged authority it was also better enabled to correlate NDRC research and
that undertaken by the military services themselves and, with the need to
accelerate the atomic bomb program, to bridge the gap between research and
procurement of the device.9
8 Irvin Stewart, Organizing Scientific Research for War (OSRD, Science in World
War II. Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), pp. 3—7. The Council of National Defense, cre-
ated in 1916 "for the co-operation of industries and resources for the national security
and welfare," consisted of the Secretaries of War, Navy, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce,
and Labor.
Ibid., p. 19.
8 Ibid., pp. 18, 20. For the negligible impact on the military of technological advances
up to 1940 in weaponry, radio, radar, and aviation, see Reinhardt and Kintner, The
Haphazard Years, pp. 131 if.
°As finally reorganized in December 1942, NDRC consisted of 19 divisions, in almost all
of which the Bureau had some degree of involvement: Ballistic research; effects of im-
pact and explosion; special projectiles and rocket ordnance; ordnance accessories; new