John von Neumann, who was not as Olympian or as visionary as Einstein, but was more insightful on such practical matters as building an atomic bomb or a computer, turned out, of course, to be right. To Einstein, he responded that there would be no problem in constructing the machine, or finding uses for it. His former associate at the Institute of Advanced Study, Gerald Estrin, would build the machine and the software engineer and project manager would be von Neumann’s own protégé, Chaim Pekeris. Pekeris specialized in such fields as global weather and oceans and interstellar energy patterns that could not be explored experimentally, perhaps even in Einstein’s capacious brain. “Even if no one else goes near the thing, Pekeris will keep it going full time,” replied von Neumann.
A tacit undercurrent of this exchange was a dispute between Einstein and von Neumann over whether Israel should develop nuclear weapons. While von Neumann had served in the Manhattan Project and was sure of its virtue, Einstein was wracked with second thoughts and regrets. He called his letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt urging the construction of an atomic bomb “the worst mistake of my life.” After the war, he downplayed the Soviet threat and at times believed that the greatest danger to the world was posed by Fascist Argentina and Spain. When McCarthyism erupted in the United States, Einstein at first feared that it could portend a new American fascism echoing Nazi Germany.
As the inventor of game theory, widely used to model arms races, von Neumann understood that a U.S. or Israeli decision to forgo nuclear weapons would greatly increase the incentive for all other countries to build them. The smaller the nuclear capability maintained by the United States, the more tempting it would be for enemies to seek nuclear dominance. In a region full of known enemies, Israel without nuclear weapons would not be viable.
In this confrontation of titans, as in other disputes, von Neumann was far more adept at politics and persuasion. He prevailed, and one of the first von Neumann machines in the world was built at Weizmann. The machine soon justified his confidence. The Pekeris team conducted complex non-linear computations that identified and simulated for the first time the amphidromic spot in the Atlantic where the tides so precisely balanced that there was no movement. The team won the Turing Award for this formidable global feat of research computation. At the same time, the Weizmann Institute team fatefully began a program of calculations in nuclear fission that would prove crucial to Israel’s survival.
Toward the end of his life, von Neumann was an intellectual leader in the development of the U.S. response to Soviet nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles. It was von Neumann who shaped the strategy of deterrence, who defined the missile systems that enabled the deterrent, who, with Edward Teller, championed the movement to build a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb, who made possible American air defense systems based on computers, and who provided the computational resources for the development of small warheads suitable for delivery on the missiles available to the United States. In general, he fostered and framed American weapons and deterrent strategy throughout the tempestuous immediate postwar period.
As a commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission, as head of countless commissions on ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons for the United States Air Force, U.S. Navy, and the Pentagon, as a research leader at Los Alamos, Aberdeen, and Sandia, as a valued voice at the CIA, as a consultant with the RAND Corporation, TRW, IBM, and other critical defense contractors, von Neumann was a formidable force bringing order and vision to the chaos of programs and military factions in the 1950s, even as the United States seemed to fall behind the Soviet Union in critical capabilities. Virtually the entire panoply of defense of the United States bore the imprint of von Neumann’s brilliance.
Admiral Lewis Strauss, chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission and long an admirer of von Neumann, told the story of his death of pancreatic cancer at the age of 5 3 in Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC — dying, in all likelihood, of his exposure to radiation while observing nuclear tests. “Gathered round his bedside, and attentive to his last words of advice and wisdom, were the Secretary of Defense and his deputies, the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and all the military Chiefs of Staff…. I have never witnessed a more dramatic scene or a more moving tribute to a great intelligence.” They all realized, within the aura of his presence, that they were near to the center of the sphere.
After World War II, the most transformative development in science and technology was the emergence of information technology. As Edward Teller sagely observed, it was information technology — the rise of computer capabilities and their miniaturization on microchips, nearly all following the von Neumann architecture — that saved U.S. technical leadership during the Cold War when the United States seemed to slip behind even the Soviet Union.
In government-run bureaucracies, swathed in secrecy, riddled with espionage, and paralyzed by pettifoggery and creden-tialism, U.S. science and technology could not even outperform the equally secret and bureaucratic programs of the Soviet Union. The Soviets developed more powerful bombs and missiles after World War II than did the United States. They launched Sputnik. They built nuclear weapons and exploded a hydrogen bomb.
What saved the United States were not the secret programs of the Pentagon or Los Alamos and other laboratories but the open enterprises of the computer industry. Created by scores of Silicon Valley companies, full of immigrants from Europe, microchips enabled the United States to miniaturize all the control functions in the payloads of their smaller missiles and to create the MIRV (multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles) system that secured the U.S. lead.
Anticipated in part by Einstein, fiber optics and lasers from Corning and Bell Labs gave computers the bandwidth to connect with one another around the globe. The rise of information technology in the United States also revitalized the U.S. economy, yielding the resources necessary to win the Cold War while also endowing an ever-growing population with an expanding array of goods and services based on electronics.
In touting the twentieth century as an era of Jewish science, I am resorting to a heuristic device. With some daunting difficulty and grievous lacunæ, one could even write a history that left out Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, von Neumann, Feynman, and all the other great Jewish figures. Rutherford, Planck, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, de Broglie, von Laue, Fermi, Dirac, Tomo-naga, and especially Gödel, Turing, and Shannon, all gentiles, played essential roles in the evolution of twentieth-century science and technology. In recent decades, from Silicon Valley to China, Carver Mead of Caltech became a polymathic figure arguably as influential in the science and technology of his own time as von Neumann had been in his.
Science is a collaborative effort. The Jewish contribution, while crucial and vastly out of proportion to the number of Jews in the population, was not self-sufficient or even always paramount. Nonetheless, Jews were especially central to advances in mathematics and algorithms. Once in 1934, David Hilbert, who had brought von Neumann to the great German University of Göttingen, found himself seated at a dinner next to Hitler aide Bernhard Rust. The Nazi education minister turned to Hilbert and asked pleasantly: “How is mathematics in Göttingen, now that it has been freed of the Jewish influence?” Hilbert replied: “Mathematics in Göttingen? There is really none any more.”
Von Neumann did not make as significant contributions to quantum theory as Schrödinger, or greater contributions to the atomic bomb than Fermi; neither did he have more important insights into computer science than Turing, nor on information theory than Shannon. Nonetheless, an objective observer must acknowledge that without the constant contributions of Einstein, von Neumann, and their many associates — without what the Nazis insisted was “Jewish science” — there might be a mathematician or two in Göttingen, but “there would not,” as Churchill said, “be a free man in Europe.”