Compton, Chairman, Research and Development Board, before the Executives' Club of Chicago).--Out of every dollar which you now pay in federal taxes, a little more than one cent is spent for research and development to provide more effective weapons, equipment, medicines and utilization of human resources for our national defense. Stated in another way, research and development takes a little less than four cents our of every dollar spent for our Military Establishment.
As citizens and taxpayers, you are rightly interested in the efficiency with which this money is used and the valueof the results for which it pays. Are we spending enough or too much on this aspect of national security? What measures are being taken to evaluate these questions and to provide competent guidance and administration?
These are questions which I welcome the opportunity of discussing with you today.
Let me first explain that the sum of approximately 8550,000,000 about which I am speaking does not include the sums separately provided by Congress to the Atomic Energy Commission for its very important research and development program. These amount, for total contract authority in the current year, to about $150,000,000 and it is rather difficult to assign specific proportions of this to research and development versus production, or to military as opposed to peacetime purposes. It can be said that most of the research in this field, whether initially stimulated for military or non-military purposes, is applicable to both.
By a rough estimate, eighty per cent of all the expenditures under the atomic energy program could be justified by purely non-military objectives even though a considerable portion is now going into the production of atomic bombs. This is because the materials uranium and plutonium which are produced for atomic bombs are also the materials required for the production of atomic energy. If the happy time comes when we can "beat our swords into plowshares," then the stockpile of atomic bombs can be converted into the fuel for atomic power plants by methods which are now being developed within the program of the Atomic Energy Commission, and which should be operating in the early experimental pilot-plant stage within a couple of years.