Too Much Security?

The security wraps with which the government has been muffling the nation's science laboratories are endangering both our scientific advantage in the cold war and the civil and academic rights of scientists and prospective scientists. That is the position of Walter Gellhorn, a professor of Law at Columbia, who has surveyed the civil rights situation in science for the Cornell Studies in Civil Liberties.

Though Professor Gellhorn ranges far aileld in his discussion of science, he has managed to bring together many aspects of government security and loyalty programs into a cohesive account of the losing battle for civil rights which is going on in the nation's laboratories.

In such of the fields that Gellhorn covers, he finds a progressive deterioration of academic freedom and scientific inquiry. More scientific discoveries are being classified as secret. Curbs on free discussion among scientists of different countries, or even of different laboratories, have been reinforced. Criteria for the granting of scholarships and fellowships by the government become more forbidding every year. And the grounds on which scientists are denied employment in any department of the government have expanded to include the remotest connections with heterodox political movements.

All this has been done in the interests of security. But its effect has been just the opposite, in Gellhorn's opinion. The obsession for security and loyalty has discouraged many able people from researching for the government, be argues. Some of the men who were actually discharged later turned in significant scientific discoveries--for someone else. But, most important, the red tape which the government has strung up between scientists has stopped much of the exchange of information and ideas which has been the source of so many valuable discoveries in the past. Work must often be duplicated at different government establishments because of the difficulty of communication. Sometimes a discovery which is "classified" as a government project is published openly by a private group.

Gellhorn's solution to the morass into which loyalty and security provisions have plunged the nation's laboratories is a program which would (1) be confined to scientific work which was very closely connected with national defense and (2) put the burden of proof on those measures which would tighten security rules. Such "scandals" as the Fuchs spy case emphasize the need for intensive measures directed against espionage, not heterodoxy. The extensive loyalty investigations and "black-lists" have turned up no spies, Gellhorn asserts, but have dangerously weakened the morale of our scientists and our confidence in free inquiry.

Gellhorn's thesis is a good one. It is an important message for these hysterical times.