Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

By the 1980s, Seitz began increasingly aligning himself with elderly scientific extremists. The tobacco companies were wary of Seitz’s advancing age, but Seitz “found other allies” (36) in the anticommunists of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or Star Wars). Although many scientists believed that no one could win a nuclear war, Seitz and his comrades set out to disprove them. In contrast to Seitz’s academic colleagues, many of whom advocated for arms control, Seitz was fervently pro-nuclear weapons, “believing that the Soviets would use disarmament to achieve military superiority and conquer the West. Seitz’s strident anti-Communism was shared at influential policy think tanks” (37), creating an atmosphere of doubt which would ultimately lead to the arms buildup during the Reagan years.

While Seitz was still involved with tobacco, his colleagues, Jastrow and Edward Teller, defended SDI. When astronomer Carl Sagan argued that an exchange of nuclear weapons would “plunge the Earth into a deep freeze that would devastate the whole planet” (38), the SDI lobby attacked him, creating the George C. Marshall Institute to foster its claims, with Seitz as the founding chairman of the board.

“The Birth of Team B”

Convinced that liberal academics would allow for the Soviets to surpass the United States in military technology, Teller used his status as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to create the appearance of a need for an independent threat assessment of the Soviet Union’s military. Teller believed that the CIA underestimated the capacity of Soviet military technology and that America should prepare for the worst-case scenario, leading to the public eruption of a debate on the Soviet’s military expenditures between the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, one which got blown out of proportion by the conservative press and into a suggestion of massive Soviet military expansion. In reality, the DIA was arguing that the Soviets were not as efficient as the United States in military expenditures, but this claim was taken out of context and the CIA was pressured to allow an independent analysis.

Three teams were created for this analysis, collectively becoming known as Team B: one for missile accuracy, one for air defense capabilities, and one for strategic objectives. Despite that this analysis was supposed to be objective, “the membership was composed entirely of foreign policy hawks who already believed the CIA was underplaying the Soviet threat” (40). The team included Teller, who served as a reviewer for the Strategic Objectives panel. The panel declared that the Soviet Union was working to achieve strategic superiority in preparation for the impending Third World War.

However, “little evidence was cited, and when the available evidence did not support their claims, they found a way to force it….[t]he panel saw evidence that the Soviets had not achieved a particular capability as proof that it had” (41) and had merely covered up their actual capability. Team B used this to push for further American efforts in ballistic missile defense, despite the fact that these systems were both expensive and ineffective, assuring the powers that be that the Soviets far exceeded the Americans in antiballistic missile defense capacity: “While the tobacco industry had tried to exploit uncertainties where the science was firm, these men insisted on certainties where the evidence was thin or entirely absent” (42).

Team B leaked this information to the media, recreating the Red Scare’s Committee on the Present Danger in order to disseminate their misinformation through media channels to the public.

“Star Wars: The Strategic Defense Initiative”

After the nuclear freeze movement—essentially a call for disarmament—began to grow in popularity, President Reagan called upon American scientists to achieve world peace by installing antiballistic missiles in outer space, in order to shield the United States from nuclear attack. This was essentially the opposite of the nuclear freeze movement, which Reagan found repugnant. Reagan’s SDI was instantly controversial, especially within the scientific community, who began “fomenting a coordinated effort to block the program” (43). This included the charismatic Carl Sagan, who asserted that scientists should explain their work to the public. Sagan believed that any nuclear defense technology that wasn’t 100% effective (as no defense technology can ever be as it is made by fallible humans) is worthless, and SDI would cause an arms race, if not Armageddon, instead of preventing these scenarios. Similarly, a space defense system was untestable, both because of the quantities of missiles needed to test it and the fact that it would have to be put into orbit in order to be tested.

Jastrow was infuriated by the popularity of Sagan’s boycott of SDI funding, as he believed in advocating strategic superiority. Jastrow believed that “environmentalists served Soviet interests” (46), as environmentalists were against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, which Jastrow believed to be the only thing that protected the United States against the Soviet threat. Jastrow also thought that the Soviets were in “a position of strategic superiority from which it could dictate U.S. policy” (46). In reality, the Soviet’s military technologies were light years behind those of the United States, and Soviet leaders believed that nuclear war should be avoided at all costs. However, Jastrow and Team B were convincing enough in their arguments that Congress approved the $60 billion SDI and its successor.

“From Strategic Defense to Nuclear Winter”

“While Team B arguments were being used to justify Ronald Reagan’s massive military buildup, a new concern about nuclear weapons was developing in scientific circles” (47). Sagan’s colleagues used the new theory about an asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs (instead of them being phased out by mammals via evolution) to demonstrate that nuclear war would end human civilization via nuclear winter: a time of below-freezing temperatures even in summer, during which there would be entire months without sunlight: “After even a modest nuclear exchange, we would indeed freeze in the dark” (48). Sagan was among this group of scientists, known as the NASA-Ames group, who popularized the term “nuclear winter” and published an academically well-received paper on the subject which in turn spawned similar scientific articles. Before the paper’s publication, however, Sagan leaked some of it to the press in a summary that “admonished readers to support nuclear arms reduction or the nuclear freeze, and to write to President Reagan and Soviet leader Yuri Andropov” (49).

This nuclear winter set of papers was juxtaposed against Reagan’s reopening of the Cold War via SDI, reviving the morality debate that had arisen after the implementation of the atomic bomb during WWII. Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research published their own paper in response, arguing that temperatures would not drop as much as the nuclear winter paper suggested. The nuclear winter team then reviewed the literature and amended their conclusions. But many scientists weren’t happy that Sagan had leaked his findings to the press and also sought the most alarming set of data, criticizing “the nuclear winter movement for its ‘lack of scientific integrity’” (52) and also the NCAR’s research for their inappropriate behavior, leading to a lot of bad blood between the various groups of scientists:

the core of the hypothesis—that a nuclear exchange would have serious environmental consequences lasting long after the fires had gone out and the radiation diminished—was still intact. Within the scientific community, then, the nuclear winter debate took place at two levels: over the details of the science and over the way it was being carried out to the public” (54).

Eventually, a scientific consensus emerged, but “Robert Jastrow was not content” (54).

“The George C. Marshall Institute”

Seitz, Teller, and Jastrow were all unhappy with the nuclear winter debate, many of whom they viewed as Luddites, due to their environmentalist leanings. They were also unhappy with the continuing lack of support within the scientific community for Reagan’s SDI, believing that any statistics that came out against SDI, including how expensive it would be to implement, were incorrect. Jastrow decided to create “a union—or at least a coterie—of scientists who shared his concerns about national security and had faith in the capacity of science-based technologies to address them” (56). He enlisted the help of Seitz and a physicist named William Nierenberg and named this collective the George C. Marshall Institute, after the American architect of post-WWII European Reconstruction designed to halt communism.

The Institute planned to disseminate their information to the public via books and pamphlets and by training journalists and congressional staffers: “Replaying the tobacco strategy, they began urging journalists to ‘balance’ their reports on SDI by giving equal time to the Marshall Institute’s views. When they didn’t, Jastrow threatened them, invoking the Fairness Doctrine” (57).

Whereas 6500 scientists signed a petition against SDI, the Marshall Institute consisted of merely Jastrow, Seitz, and Nierenberg, and so the relative fairness concerning this dissenting opinion is arguable. The Institute continued its pursuit to promote SDI by targeting Congress. Jastrow believed that those who opposed SDI were “stooges of the Soviet Union” (58). A main point of contention for SDI was whether or not it violated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which the Institute maintained it did not, and that the purpose of SDI was to free the Soviet people. Unlike the tobacco debate, which dealt with substantive evidence, the debate concerning SDI and nuclear winter was only comprised of hypotheticals.

But Jastrow wanted to go further by demonstrating that the effects of nuclear war would be minimal, and that the authors of the nuclear winter documents were negligent in their science:

Jastrow concluded the worst, accusing the authors of deliberately ignoring the effects of the oceans and the fact that smoke would rain out...misrepresenting their work to suggest that they had intentionally downplayed elements that would lessen the impact, and [had] played up the worst-case scenario(59).

“A Wholesale Attack on Science”

Russell Seitz, cousin of Fred Seitz, tried to dismiss nuclear winter as bad science, saying that the models were simplified, which they of course were, because they were models. He then alleged that the authors of nuclear winter had ulterior motives by linking them to liberal and environmental organizations, naming nuclear winter as propaganda for leftist politics. Russell Seitz “insisted that scientists had betrayed the public trust” (61) by not being objective, honest, or rational. He used a popular book by Broad and Wade that argued “scientists were fallible, and that more than a few of them had committed fraud” as science does not exist outside of social context (62). However, Russell and other conservatives capitalized on these ideas in order to “undercut science that contradicted their views” (62). Russell attacked mainstream American science, which he viewed to be full of left-wing activists, creating a narrative of conservative victimhood. He failed to mention the effect of conservative scientists’ political leanings on their respective findings. He also overlooked the political clout held by conservative scientists, many of whom directly advised presidential administrations, as well as the absence of radical views published by the National Academy of Sciences, which only publishes consensus and is funded by governmental administration. This belief in conservative victimhood in science was taken up later by right-wing politicians, beginning the right-wing turn against science.

Much of this antipathy towards science can be linked to capitalism, as many conservatives believed that capitalism and freedom were one and the same. Ergo, they were (and many still are) stridently anti-communist:

But their scientific colleagues were increasingly finding evidence that capitalism was failing in a crucial respect: it was failing to protect the natural environment upon which all life—free or not—ultimately depends…If science took the side of regulation—or even gave evidence to support the idea that regulation might be needed on Earth—then science…would have to be torn down (65).