Published as a Sandia Corporation Research Colloquium report, this work records Morgenstern’s lecture of 20 November 1957 and seven subsequent answers to audience questions, most of which could not be transcribed. Addressing scientists and engineers after the Soviet space successes, Morgenstern argues that American technical ingenuity is insufficient without institutions capable of sustaining research, circulating knowledge, and evaluating weapons within a coherent political strategy. The lecture moves from scientific organization and security restrictions to retaliatory forces, limited war, civilian protection, and economic recovery. Its governing objective is survival through a stable balance of power, not decisive superiority.
Morgenstern begins with the failure to establish an independent, civilian-directed institution for assessing future weapons systems. The Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, he argues, lacked the independence, access, and continuity originally envisaged. Retrospective investigations cannot substitute for discovering present mistakes before their consequences become unavoidable. Examples of eminent scientists dismissing atomic energy, long-range missiles, or spaceflight illustrate the fallibility of authoritative forecasts. Soviet accomplishments expose both scientific capability and sustained political support that Americans had assumed a totalitarian system could not provide. American projects, by contrast, repeatedly lose momentum through cancellation and revival.
The one weapon this country needs is more highly trained people with proper motivation behind them.
This formulation relocates defense strength from hardware to the people and conditions that generate it. Morgenstern calls for scientific careers with adequate material and intellectual rewards, cooperation with allies, and less duplication of their research. Basic research and weapons development have different strategic meanings: expanding the former strengthens defense in unpredictable ways without the specific provocation associated with expanding particular weapons programs. Yet both compete for scarce talent. Rather than presume that administrators can calculate an optimal allocation, he would let scientists choose their fields while maintaining continuing support.
Information policy must likewise distinguish scientific productivity from administrative control. Morgenstern argues that the United States has excessive secrecy within its research system but insufficient restraint in some public disclosures.
The 'need to know' is a pernicious thing.
His objection concerns scientific work within a secure system, not every intelligence practice. Neither a supervisor nor a security officer can anticipate which information will stimulate a discovery. Hierarchical clearance procedures therefore obstruct precisely the connections on which innovation depends. Conversely, publicizing a technical success may spare an adversary expensive uncertainty. Morgenstern tentatively proposes a third possibility: selectively communicating actual American strength to Soviet leaders could reinforce deterrence. Information is thus neither inherently dangerous nor inherently beneficial; its strategic effect depends on its recipient and purpose.
The military argument turns on the difference between vulnerable and survivable retaliation. Morgenstern considers the vulnerability of Strategic Air Command a central liability. A force threatened with destruction creates pressure for immediate, comprehensive retaliation, whereas a surviving force preserves time and choice. He favors mobile dispersal away from American territory and allied bases, discussing carriers, seaplanes, speculative nuclear-powered aircraft, and submarine-launched POLARIS missiles. These proposals serve a broader conceptual claim: secure retaliatory power permits graduated responses rather than making automatic massive retaliation unavoidable.
If either opponent attempts to win too much from the other he stands to lose all.
Mutual destruction makes restraint a condition of rational strategy. Morgenstern’s account of limited war accordingly emphasizes political conventions, not merely smaller weapons or narrower battlefields. Historical limitations collapsed when participants refused established stopping points. Contemporary governments must accept local defeat and avoid demanding concessions that endanger an opponent’s essential interests or make surrender intolerable. The Berlin airlift and the Austrian settlement exemplify contests resolved without unlimited escalation. Declaratory policy must leave room for such outcomes rather than threaten massive retaliation for minor engagements.
Recognition of defeat is itself an analytical problem. Recalling a RAND economic simulation, Morgenstern describes how production constraints could establish that future military requirements had become unattainable before ordinary observation revealed the loss. This extends his opening concern with discovering present errors: strategic judgment requires understanding consequences already determined but not yet visible. His discussion of civilian shelters applies the same attention to indirect effects. A rapid, comprehensive shelter program might signal preparation for attack and destabilize deterrence. He therefore distinguishes gradual protection from provocative crash construction and advocates protected stores and an underground recovery capacity. These are expressly exploratory arguments, not settled demonstrations.
The concluding theses translate the lecture into institutional reforms: sustained research funding adjusted for research-specific costs, investment budgets beyond annual appropriations, shorter production delays, and service organization adapted to technology. Continuous negotiation accompanies credible strength, while peaceful messages to the Russian population should be distinguished from communicating capabilities to its government. The appended answers clarify that a “long war” includes years of reconstruction and that gross economic comparisons can obscure resources actually available for defense.
Our hope, however, is in a continuing stalemate, not a happy state but at least it is a state under which we have lived.
The report’s enduring significance lies in connecting deterrence to the organization of knowledge and to freedom of political choice. Its speculative technologies and controversial shelter analysis belong to its historical moment, but its core move is consistent: scientific and military capacity should preserve a negotiable balance, not produce an advantage so abrupt that it frightens the opponent into war.
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