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Guide to the Records of the Carnegie Program, 1960-1966
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Title: Records of the Carnegie Program,
Date (inclusive): 1960-1966
Collection number: Consult repository
Creator:
Carnegie Program in Science and Government
Extent:
.5 linear ft.
Repository:
California Institute of Technology. Archives.
Pasadena, California 91125
Abstract: Records of the Science and Government Program of the Caltech Humanities Division, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation, 1960-1966.
The program consisted of a series of seminars on arms control. Speakers from government (domestic and foreign), the military,
and from the sciences and humanities were brought together. UCLA participated in the program beginning in the second year.
Language:
English.
The collection is open for research. Researchers must apply in writing for access.
Copyright may not have been assigned to the California Institute of Technology Archives. All requests for permission to publish
or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Head of the Archives. Permission for publication is given on
behalf of the California Institute of Technology Archives as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include
or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained by the reader.
[Identification of item, box and file number], Records of the Carnegie Program. Archives, California Institute of Technology.
The Records of the Carnegie Program in Science and Government were donated to the Archives by Professor David Elliot of Caltech's
Division of Humanities and Social Sciences in 1970.
In 1960 the Carnegie Corporation gave a substantial grant to Caltech's Humanities Division to support a program on "Science
and Government." The decision was made to focus the program on arms control, and by the summer of 1960, the first session
of "preliminary" seminars was underway. The program lasted five to six years.
The program modeled itself to some degree on an existing joint faculty seminar at Harvard and MIT led by Henry Kissinger.
At Caltech, the two original organizers were Professors David C. Elliot (history) and Matthew Sands (physics), with consistent
support from Charles C. Lauritsen (physics). The purpose was to bring scientists, historians and political scientists together
to try to answer some of the most pressing questions of security and arms control. Approximately fifty Caltech faculty members
agreed to commit themselves to weekly meetings, to which a distinguished speaker, typically from the outside but not always,
was invited. In the first year, some of the visitors were: a number of representatives from the Rand Corporation, including
Albert Wohlstetter (the Rand visitors provided the "preliminary" or orientation phase of the seminar); US military leaders,
such as Gen. Maxwell Taylor; representatives from academic institutions, including Kissinger and Thomas Schelling from Harvard,
James R. Killian and Jerome B. Wiesner from MIT and I. I. Rabi from Columbia; and an array of foreign visitors, among them
John Strachey, liberal MP from the UK, Sir Solly Zuckerman from the University of Birmingham (UK), and A. Topchiev from the
USSR. Talks were not recorded or published at Caltech; however, after the first year, UCLA began to host the speakers following
their Caltech presentations, and the talks were then published under UCLA's aegis.
Scope and Content of Collection
During the preliminary and subsequent arms control seminars, the talks were summarized and the summaries were distributed
to interested parties. David Elliot was responsible for most of the summaries, with Al Hibbs contributing significantly in
later years. These summations now form the basis of the papers in the Carnegie Program collection, dating from June 21, 1960
through May 18, 1966. For the first three years, from 1960-1963, the meetings were titled "Arms Control Seminars." Beginning
in the fall of 1963, they were titled "Seminar on National Security." At this time the program merged with a class of the
same name given at Caltech by David Elliot as History 125.
The papers are arranged as four bound volumes of summaries and one unbound. In some cases, semester schedules are bound in.
Researchers should also refer to the oral history with David Elliot by Carol Bugé (1986), pp. 85-99; and to the article, "Scorpions
in a Bottle" by Cushing Strout in
Engineering and Science (April 1961), pp. 9-13.
The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection.
California Institute of Technology
Carnegie Program in Science and Government
Arms Control
- David Elliot Oral History with Carol Bugé (1986)
- Robert Huttenback Oral History with Shirley Cohen (1998)
- Robert Oliver Oral History with Loma Karklins (1990)
- Rodman Paul Oral History with Carol Bugé (1982)
- Hallett Smith Oral History with Carol Bugé (1981)