Today, the Research and Engineering Department at the Pentagon, renamed the Department of Defense Research and Engineering Enterprise, develops all next-generation weapons and counterweapons of mass destruction—the twenty-first century’s swords and shields. It is as true today as it was when World War II ended that America relies upon the advancement of science and technology—and industry—to prepare for the next war. This relationship is understood as America’s military-industrial complex. It was President Eisenhower who, in his Farewell Address to the nation in 1961, coined this phrase. Eisenhower cautioned Americans to be wary of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower’s famous warning is well known and often paraphrased. But he also delivered a second warning in his farewell speech, not nearly as well known. Eisenhower told the American people that, indeed, science and research played a crucial role in national security, “[y]et, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Herbert York, as both ARPA chief and director of the Research and Engineering Department at the Pentagon, worked closely with President Eisenhower on matters of military science during the last three years of Eisenhower’s presidency. He was deeply troubled by Eisenhower’s words in his Farewell Address. “Scientists and technologists had acquired the reputation of being magicians who had access to a special source of information and wisdom out of reach of the rest of mankind,” said York. In the mid-1960s, York went to visit Eisenhower at the former president’s winter home, in the California desert. “I asked him to explain more fully what he meant by the warnings, but he declined to do so,” York said. “I pressed this line of questions further by asking him whether he had any particular people in mind when he warned us about ‘the danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.’ ” York was surprised when Eisenhower “answered without hesitation: ‘(Wernher) von Braun and (Edward) Teller [father of the hydrogen bomb].’ ”
York spent decades considering what the President had told him. “Eisenhower’s warnings[,] which were based largely on his intuition, pointed up very real and extremely serious problems. If we forget or downgrade his warnings, it will be to our peril,” York wrote in his memoir, Arms and the Physicist, in 1995.
The legacy of some of the Operation Paperclip scientists as individuals parallels the heritage of many of the Cold War weapons programs they participated in. The biological and chemical weapons programs can now be looked back upon as distinct failures and the product of vague and often wrong intelligence. So it was with the Chemical Corps’ relationship with former SS–Brigadier General Dr. Walter Schieber. Declassified files reveal that Schieber was double-crossing the Americans from the moment he began working for the U.S. Army in Germany, including the entire time he worked for Brigadier General Charles Loucks on the sarin gas project at Loucks’s private home in Heidelberg. It took military intelligence until 1950 to determine that something about Hitler’s trusted servant was untoward, and even longer to fully realize the extent to which Speer’s Armaments Supply Office chief was deceiving them. Almost immediately after Schieber was released from Nuremberg, he began using his old Nazi contacts to sell heavy weapons to at least one enemy nation through a Swiss intermediary. In 1950, military intelligence intercepted a four-page letter addressed to Schieber, sent from Switzerland. There was no return address on the envelope and only an illegible signature inside. The letter writer discussed with Schieber the sale of weapons to a third party, describing the buyer as “A Prince of the Royal House,” which military intelligence surmised was a code name. “They are looking for everything, tanks, aircraft, etc., weapons, ammunitions in short everything that pertains to armament. I can’t write all that in a telegraph,” stated the author, who requested “PAK anti-tank guns… willing to pay $5,000 a piece; 75 mm weapons at $3,000-$4,000 a piece, and 50mm (about $2,000.00).” This was a “first class business deal if we could arrange it,” the intermediary promised.