Kristine C. Harper

PROMETHEUS UNLEASHED: SCIENCE AS A DIPLOMATIC WEAPON IN THE LYNDON B. JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION

Scholars who have examined science policy within the Johnson administration have generally argued that science played a limited role in U.S. foreign policy in the mid‐ and late 1960s. Most point to the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), which reached its zenith of influence late in the Eisenhower administration then declined through the Kennedy and Johnson years before being abolished by Richard Nixon in 1973. These accounts, however, have overlooked Lyndon Johnson’s determination to employ science and technology as tools in foreign policy and the rapid growth of the State Department’s international science office early in his administration. They also overlook the singular importance that Johnson‐era officials placed on the physical environmental sciences—especially oceanography and meteorology—as tools of foreign policy. This article, based on archival sources, examines how Johnson administration officials embraced science in diplomatic policy from 1964 through 1968, when rising tensions over Vietnam limited these efforts. Our study includes a detailed examination of one such instance: a secret administration effort to employ weather modification in India and Pakistan as a technological fix to mitigate the Bihar drought and famine of 1966–1967 and to achieve U.S. policy goals in this strategically important region.

50th Anniversary of Operational Numerical Weather Prediction

Abstract The National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA), Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC), National Weather Association, and American Meteorological Society (AMS) cosponsored a “Symposium on the 50th Anniversary of Operational Numerical Weather Prediction,” on 14–17 June 2004 at the University of Maryland, College Park in College Park, Maryland. Operational numerical weather prediction (NWP) in the United States started with the Joint Numerical Weather Prediction Unit (JNWPU) on 1 July 1954, staffed by members of the U.S. Weather Bureau, the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy. The origins of NCEP, AFWA, and FNMOC can all be traced to the JNWPU. The symposium celebrated the pioneering developments in NWP and the remarkable improvements in forecast skill and support of the nations economy, well being, and national defense achieved over the last 50 years. This essay was inspired by the presentations from that symposium.

“Flooding” versus “inundation”

As mean sea level rise (MSLR) accelerates, it will become increasingly necessary and useful to distinguish coastal “flooding” from “inundation.” The growing number of coastal MSLR vulnerability assessments makes it clear that confused usage is abundant. We propose that the term “flooding” be used when dry areas become wet temporarily—either periodically or episodically—and that “inundation” be used to denote the process of a dry area being permanently drowned or submerged. According to these proposed defnitions, flooding is always higher than inundation, but they are fundamentally different. Flooding, including tidal flooding, is and has been dominant along open coasts. However, inundation is likely to become ever more important in the coming decades and centuries and may itself eventually become a dominant physical coastal process. Differentiating between the two will clarify and emphasize the differences between these processes.

Meteorology's Struggle for Professional Recognition in the USA (1900–1950)

Summary Meteorology, a scientific discipline almost exclusively associated with weather forecasting in the first half of the twentieth century in the USA, was viewed with disdain by more mathematically based scientific communities. A descriptive science lacking in physical and mathematical rigor, meteorology was typically without an academic home in US colleges and universities. This stood in sharp contrast to the meteorological communities across the Atlantic which were supported by dedicated geophysical institutes. Four factors kept US meteorologists, unlike their European colleagues, on the fringes of the scientific mainstream: a lack of ‘rigor’, a lack of academic presence, a lack of patronage (governmental or private), and a pervasive public view that meteorological information was ‘free’ and yet should be tailored to a variety of users. The symbiotic relationship of these factors created an almost insurmountable hurdle to disciplinary advancement. That hurdle was effectively overcome in mid-century when the military demands of the Second World War presented meteorology with the opportunity to leave behind its legacy as a ‘guessing science’ and assume its place as a mathematically and physically based theoretical scientific discipline.

Introduction: Exploring Greenland’s Secrets: Science, Technology, Diplomacy, and Cold War Planning in Global Contexts

Ronald E. Doel, Kristine C. Harper, and Matthias Heymann reveal how Greenland became a focus of attention for the USA during the early Cold War. This introductory chapter provides a condensed history of Greenland through World War II and then addresses how the relationship between the USA and Denmark changed as the Cold War escalated. Doel et al. then discuss US efforts to gain environmental knowledge about Greenland, and US–Danish efforts to limit public awareness of those efforts. They also illuminate key dynamics of the Cold War through this significant small-state/superpower relationship, before introducing the volume’s chapters.

AGU's historical records move to the Niels Bohr Library and Archives

As scientists, AGU members understand the important role data play in finding the answers to their research questions: no data—no answers. The same holds true for the historians posing research questions concerning the development of the geophysical sciences, but their data are found in archival collections comprising the personal papers of geophysicists and scientific organizations. Now historians of geophysics—due to the efforts of the AGU History of Geophysics Committee, the American Institute of Physics (AIP), and the archivists of the Niels Bohr Library and Archives at AIP—have an extensive new data source: the AGU manuscript collection.

A Review of “A Professor, a President, and a Meteor: The Birth of American Science”

Journalist Cathryn J. Princes A Professor, a President, and a Meteor: The Birth of American Science purports to tell the story of how one man—Benjamin Silliman Sr.—singlehandedly put American scie...