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

THE PECULIAR PEACE
cated the fission bomb in 4 years; they were almost certainly at work on a
fusion bomb, and might not require that much time again.
Stalinism abroad had its fright.counterpart in McCarthyism at home.
And the cold war became hot when on June 25, 1950, the American Ambas-
sador to the 2-year-old Republic of Korea cabled that the Chinese-supported
armies of North Korea had crossed the 38th parallel. Six days later Amer-
ican planes, ships, and infantrymen put the United States irrevocably into
the war. The initial United Nations forces under General MacArthur's com-
mand, consisting largely of South Koreans and American troops rushed
from Japan, met Soviet-made tanks and fell back. At home the Nation
went back on a war footing, back to wage and price controls. Two months
after the start of the war a new boom was on as employment passed the
62 million mark.
It was August before the Americans and ROK's ended their retreat
and another month before they took the offensive. They had advanced to
the Yalu River in late November when 33 Chinese divisions crossed and hit
the U.N. line. It fell back slowly to the 38th parallel and there stalemate
set in. In June 1951 the Soviet Ambassador to the U.N. hinted that Rus-
sia was ready for a cease fire in Korea. The killing continued through 2
years and 17 days of conferences before an armistice was signed on July 27,
1953.
Eight months earlier, on November 1, 1952, this country detonated
the first hydrogen bomb. Less than a month after the Korean armistice,
on August 12, 1953, the Atomic Energy Commission announced its detec-
tion of a similar thermonuclear explosion in the Soviet Union. And both
nations were already engaged in the development of intercontinental missiles
that would replace planes for the delivery of either the fusion or fission
bomb. There appeared to be no alternative to continued research in weap-
onry; more truly, mankind had no alternative but peace.
If World War II made science for the first time a political, economic,
and social force in the Nation, the postwar years, under the pressure of
"obliteration," magnified that fact manifold. Yet science could not remain
mobilized in the Office of Scientific Research and Development, an emergency
agency for military research, and with the end of the war the weapons re-
search projects of OSRD were transferred to the War and Navy Departments
for peacetime administration. In 1946 Congress divested the Army Engineer
Corps of its Manhattan District and the atomic bomb project was returned
to civilian control by creating the Atomic Energy Commission.
Both the military and the AEC were to call on the Bureau for con-
tinued technological research on their behalf. In the fall of 1944, Dr. Briggs
and Maj. Gen. Levin H. Campbell, Jr., Chief of Army Ordnance, signed
an agreement under which the Bureau would continue its research and design
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