Science: The Word

The Institute of Radio Engineers was closeted to discuss military secrets. President W. L. Everitt leaned forward with a conspirator’s expression and solemnly announced: “Gentlemen, the Army & Navy have now finally given , permission to use the word radar — provided you spell it backwards.” Washington has been grinning over this story for weeks. For censorship officers, the story has a double sting: they are well aware that radar has been one of the worst-kept secrets of the war. A favorite gag pictures a mother remarking to her husband: “John, don’t you think we ought to tell Junior about radar, before he picks it up in the street?”

Last week it looked as if U.S. citizens (and the press) might soon be permitted to talk out loud about radar. The Army, Navy, Vannevar Bush’s OSRD and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics had set up a new Joint Board on Scientific Information Policy. Purpose of the Board was to tell the U.S. public some scientific facts of life which are no secret to the Japanese. Scientists considered it high time.

For months it has been an open secret that a patent argument between U.S. and British inventors, rather than security, has been chiefly responsible for the hush-hush policy on radar. Thus far, the U.S. and Britain have failed to agree on a radar publicity policy which would satisfy the inventors’ conflicting claims.

The new Joint Board, headed by Dr. John Torrence Tate, a University of Minnesota physicist now working for OSRD, is intended to break the impasse. Its instructions: to prepare comprehensive public reports on radar and other wartime discoveries, notifying the British of release dates so that they will not be caught napping. Soon U.S. citizens will be able to get authoritative information about radar, one of the big unpublished stories of the war, before they pick it up in the street.