Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Merchants of Doubt, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science, Trust, and Public Policy
Capitalism and the Environment
Media Bias
Certainty, Doubt, and the Scientific Method
Summary
Analysis
In the 1980s, Fred Seitz began associating with fringe scientists, including a group of anti-communist Cold War physicists who defended Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). After conservative think tanks helped defeat Nixon’s plans to de-escalate tensions with the Soviet Union, physicists Edward Teller and Robert Jastrow decided to start a think tank to defend the SDI. Prominent astronomer Carl Sagan had shown that any nuclear war would create a nuclear winter and destroy much of the planet. In contrast, Teller and Jastrow believed that the U.S. should keep stockpiling weapons so that it could defeat the Soviet Union in a nuclear war. To promote such ideas, Jastrow and several other physicists founded the George C. Marshall Institute. They appointed Fred Seitz as its founding chairman.
Fred Seitz’s work on the SDI was even more directly connected to his past in politics than his earlier work with the tobacco industry. The vast majority of scientists believed in avoiding nuclear war at all costs, but men like Seitz, Teller, and Jastrow embraced the idea—and ignored the evidence of how devastating it would be—because they believed the U.S. should dominate global politics. Just like cigarette companies founded a formal research institute to make their unproven assertions sound credible and scientific, Seitz and his colleagues started a think tank to disguise their political opinions as legitimate, independent research. And because their political opinions agreed with the administration’s official stance, their unscientific assertions about nuclear war gained just as much of an audience as Carl Sagan’s legitimate research on it.
Themes
The Birth of Team B. In 1976, Edward Teller convinced the CIA to conduct an independent assessment of the Soviet Union’s military strength. The CIA’s 1975 report involved collaboration from other intelligence agencies, and Teller believed that it underestimated the Soviet threat and should have focused on worst-case scenarios. When another agency accused the CIA of overestimating Soviet defense spending, it agreed to Teller’s request. It created “Team B”—three panels of extremist foreign policy experts.
Teller’s relationship with the CIA again shows that, just because scientists advise the administration on policy, this doesn’t make their advice scientific. Just like his stance on nuclear winter, Teller’s stance on the Soviet military plainly contradicted the established facts—so he ignored those facts and continued pushing his beliefs anyway. He succeeded because he was influential and political leaders agreed with him, and not because his ideas had any merit.
Themes
“Team B” concluded that the Soviet Union was planning a third world war, and that the U.S. needed to invest more in weapons to remain globally dominant. Even though they had no evidence for their claims, they leaked a draft of their report to the press, then spent four years on a massive publicity campaign. Many “Team B” experts also worked on Ronald Reagan’s campaign, and once he was elected, they took charge of his foreign policy.
With Edward Teller’s help, “Team B” successfully did what the tobacco companies could not: it convinced the administration to ignore the facts and build policy around its own bald-faced lies instead. Its motivations were more political than financial, but it’s easy to see how corporations (and scientists paid off by them) could use the same strategies to promote destructive policies that benefit them, too.
Themes
Star Wars: The Strategic Defense Initiative. The authors describe President Reagan’s plan to set up a satellite-based ballistic missile defense system in outer space. The SDI was designed to both give the U.S. an advantage in the Cold War and undermine the growing anti-nuclear proliferation movement. But thousands of scientists publicly refused to work on it. Prominent astronomer Carl Sagan served as their spokesperson. They pointed out that the SDI could never stop all Soviet missiles, but certainly would encourage the Soviets to develop new, better nuclear weapons—or even launch a preemptory nuclear strike against the U.S. Worse still, the only way for the U.S. to test the SDI would be by launching several nuclear missiles at itself.
In theory, an anti-nuclear missile defense system sounds like an excellent way to prevent nuclear war. But in reality, the SDI program was far more likely to set off such a war, because it probably wouldn’t have worked in the first place. Yet the public controversy surrounding the SDI yet again shows why it can be so dangerous to mix science and politics: even when the vast majority of scientists reach a consensus, this doesn’t guarantee that political leaders will listen to them. Instead, politicians can easily choose to dismiss them and listen to a small group of contrarians who have no solid evidence to support their claims.
Themes
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Robert Jastrow, a prominent retired astronomer who founded NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and frequently appeared in popular media, couldn’t stand the scientific establishment’s opposition to the SDI. In 1981, he published a prominent magazine article declaring that, without massive investment, the U.S. would lose the Cold War due to the Soviets’ superior missile defense system. Even though this Soviet defense system didn’t really exist, the article whipped up a furor, and Congress approved the SDI.
Jastrow proved to be a natural ally for Seitz and Teller: like them, he believed so strongly that the U.S. must win the Cold War that he was willing to publicly lie to Congress in order to justify massive new defense spending. His plan worked: after the fact, it didn’t matter that the Soviets never had a missile defense system, because the U.S. was already investing in one of its own.
Themes
From Strategic Defense to Nuclear Winter. A group of NASA scientists discovered that‚ just like the massive asteroid impact that drove the dinosaurs to extinction 65 million years ago, nuclear detonations could block out the sun and doom humanity to “death by deep freeze.” This group was nicknamed TTAPS, for its authors’ surnames—the last was Carl Sagan, who wrote about the nuclear winter theory in Parade and Foreign Affairs magazines just before the group formally published its results in the prestigious journal Science. Over the next few years, as other scientists added their own findings to the model, a consensus emerged: nuclear war would cool the planet dangerously, although less than the TTAPS model originally predicted. Many scientists were angry that Sagan spoke publicly before this consensus emerged.
Oreskes and Conway emphasize that Carl Sagan did make a serious mistake by writing about his results for the popular media before formally publishing them in a peer-reviewed journal. His colleagues’ indignation shows why peer review is the cornerstone of successful science: it ensures that scientists can rely on one another’s results, and that the public can trust them. By speaking out too soon, Sagan undermined this norm—his conclusions could have turned out to be wrong, or he could give contrarians a basis for rejecting good science. Still, Sagan’s results turned out to be mostly right. As in all reliable science, Sagan’s peers checked and updated his results, until the community reached a consensus about them. Consensus means that scientists were as certain as they could possibly be about the dangers of nuclear winter.
Themes
The George C. Marshall Institute. Robert Jastrow decided to start a new think tank. He wanted to undermine the nuclear winter research and the Union of Concerned Scientists, a powerful antiwar group that had long opposed nuclear missile defense systems by pointing out their serious technological flaws. So he called on two close, prominent physicist friends, Fred Seitz and William Nierenberg, and they started the George C. Marshall Institute with funding from conservative foundations.
Just like the tobacco industry, Jastrow, Seitz, and Nierenberg were interested in undermining the existing scientific consensus and not in doing legitimate research of their own. They were primarily motivated by politics, not profit, but they still made plenty of money because their stance closely aligned with that of powerful conservative donors.
Themes
The Marshall Institute started publishing contrarian articles and demanding that journalists include their views in the name of “balance.” They even prevented a major documentary about the SDI from airing on most public TV stations. Jastrow sincerely believed that SDI opponents were doing the Soviet Union’s bidding—he accused the TTAPS scientists of working for the Soviets and deceiving the public by deliberately inflating the risk of nuclear winter, while ignoring the way that rain and the oceans would mitigate it. But he was wrong: the TTAPS group did mention these effects from the beginning.
The Marshall Institute closely copied the tobacco industry’s playbook by promoting their views through a robust public relations campaign disguised as scientific debate. They never found any evidence to support these views—instead, they simply misrepresented the work of the TTAPS scientists, who actually were studying nuclear winter. Next, based on these misrepresentations, they accused the TTAPS researchers of fraud. Finally, they claimed that this supposed fraud disqualified not only the TTAPS team’s research, but the whole nuclear winter theory.
Themes
A Wholesale Attack on Science. Oreskes and Conway explain that Frederick Seitz’s cousin Russell Seitz published a harsh attack on nuclear winter research in 1986. He declared that the TTAPS model was unrealistic and simplified—but the authors point out that every model is a simplification, TTAPS’s used the most advanced research available, and Seitz offered no alternate model of his own. Still, Seitz insisted that the TTAPS authors were primarily motivated by left-wing politics. In fact, he presented the whole U.S. scientific establishment—including the Union of Concerned Scientists and even the National Academy of Sciences—as politically corrupt. By presenting science as nothing more than politics, the authors argue, Seitz hinted to his fellow conservatives that they could simply reject any science they found politically inconvenient.
Russell Seitz also followed the tobacco industry playbook. By claiming that the TTAPS research was illegitimate because it was based on simplification, he preyed on the public’s ignorance about how science is done—all science depends on simplified models. Similarly, he exploited people’s misunderstanding about how scientific proof works: discrediting the TTAPS researchers’ method wouldn’t mean that their conclusion must be false, but only that they failed to prove it. For instance, if someone uses terrible reasoning to argue that the earth is round, disproving their reasoning doesn’t mean that the earth flat—instead, it just means that they have found the wrong explanation for the right conclusion. Finally, Seitz accused legitimate scientists of exactly what he was doing: lying to promote a political agenda. Since both sides were accusing the other of the same thing, it became extremely difficult for the public to decide who was telling the truth. This is why Oreskes and Conway say that Seitz reduced science to politics: with the science so muddled, it became easier for the public and policymakers to just choose the conclusion that fit with their political views.
Themes
Russell Seitz’s accusations were far from the truth. Conservative scientists still worked freely—in fact, Edward Teller and Fred Singer even published rebuttals to the nuclear winter theory in Science, the journal that originally presented it. Most scientists were liberals, but the conservative minority had outside influence—particularly under Reagan. Moreover, the National Academy of Sciences is a famously conservative agency, and hundreds of other scientists had checked and verified the TTAPS group’s results. Oreskes and Conway conclude that “the right-wing turn against science had begun.” It centered on two issues: the arms race and environmental protection, which most scientists were increasingly seeing as incompatible with unregulated free-market capitalism.
“The right-wing turn against science” started when scientists began arguing that conservative political stances were based on misconceptions and could be destructive. Rather than modifying their beliefs to accommodate the facts, right-wing scientists and politicians started modifying the facts to accommodate their beliefs. The scientific community allowed conservative scientists to publish their ideas, and then it evaluated those ideas on merit. In response, the conservatives kept turning science into politics: when their ideas were disproven, they blamed a political conspiracy. Eventually, they began claiming that their right to free speech required their audience to take their lies just as seriously as their counterparts’ facts.
Themes
