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Snow Continues Parable Of Government Policy, Decisions by Scientists

Again, the scenes and the men the speaker described seemed out of a novel C.P. Snow, "Perhaps," one could imagine the novel's narrator saying, "this as a hatred as immediate as love, and Lindemann would have opposed any of Tizard's. Or it may have been simply that Lindemann was attached to his own views..."

In his second Godkin lecture on "Science and Government," Sir Charles picked up the threads of narrative where he had left off: with the conclusion of his historic "parable" concerning two English scientists and their portentous . His purpose in using the parable was to show how it is that in advanced societies, "a handful of man make secret decisions which determine in crudest sense whether we live or die."

After F. A. Lindemann, Winston Churchill's scientific adviser, attacked Sir Tizard in 1935, Tizard's secret decision to start a crash program to radar was at stake. In his tirades Tizard, Lindemann proposed Goldberg" alternatives to radar, had an "obsession for mines," Snow .

But Tizard--and radar--were saved two influential scientists on his committee resigned in protest--"a standard English committee maneuver."

The story shows, Snow said, how the politics" of the scientific bureaucracy can run counter to the "open of Parliament and public opinion. Lindemann was then Churchill's ally in the anti-Government ranks agitating for defense preparation. Ironically, Churchill succeeded in becoming Air at that time, Lindemann would be headed Tizard's committee, and the radar project would have stopped. if the radar stations had not been Britain would have lost its battle, Snow declared.

Quarrel Continues

The quarrel between the two men on, for after Churchill became Minister, Lindemann was made his eminence" in science, and Tizard out of a job. "There was to be no authority for him in that war." was sent on a mission to the United States, and noted in his diary, was a method of getting a bother- person out of the way."

even out of power, Tizard was to with Lindemann once again before war ended. "This row, the second, climactic row," was over Lindemann's decision to push strategic bomb- Lindemann, now Lord Cherwell, in the Cabinet, sent out a paper gave impressive estimates, of the strategic bombing of low class housing would have.

paper was opposed by Tizard and other English scientists, on scientific grounds, Tizard and P. M. S. Blackett, another physicist, Lindemann's estimates of the effectiveness of strategic bombing five or six times too high, "Everyone knew that if Tizard and Blackett were right, the thing was not worth doing," know noted. But Lindemann was in power, and his policy was put into effect.

After the war's end, the strategic bombing survey reported that Lindemann's estimates had been ten times too high. And Tizard was able to say, "The actual effort in manpower and resources that was expended in bombing Germany was greater than the value in manpower of the damage caused."

Thus, Snow concluded, although Tizard and Blackett were right, the conflict in the secret politics of high conferences resulted in their defeat. "The minority view was not only defeated, but squashed, The atmosphere . . . had the faint, but just perceptible smell of a witch hunt. Tizard was actually called a defeatist."

Tizard sat out the rest of the war in retirement as president of Magdalene College, Oxford. "It is astonishing in retrospect that he should have been offered such humiliations," Snow said. "I do not think there has been a comparable example in England in this century."

Tizard believed to the end of his life in 1959 that, if he had been granted a fair share of the scientific direction between '40 and 48', the war might have ended earlier, and with less cost, Snow said

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