The Fifty Year Strategy

How did the US become the leader in technology?

At the end of World War II, the United States had only two major competitors in science and technology -- Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Continental Europe and Japan were in ruins, China was in civil war, and the rest of the world had few scientific resources as it recovered from six years of war. The United States quickly went on to capitalize on its post-war advantage by developing a national strategy for research proposed by Vannevar Bush, President Roosevelt's director of Office of Scientific Research and Development -- the office responsible for the atomic bomb.

The strategy promoted basic research as "the pacemaker of technological progress” and eventually became embodied in activities such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institute for Health, and the Defense laboratories. Furthermore, competition with the Soviet Union spurred a rapid expansion of the physical sciences which later gave the US a dominant position in such diverse areas as aerospace, computing, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and energy production technology.

The end of the Cold War in 1991 was as a culmination point for this strategy. It was also a moment of transition for science and technology in the US and in the world. The Internet was about to explode with the development of the Web browser and fiber-based communications. The Human Genome Project to sequence human DNA was just getting underway. Personal computing over local area networks (LANs) was reaching ubiquity in United States businesses. And foreign students accounted for 50% of Ph.D. production in the United States with China sending the largest contingent. Globalization was in full-swing.