Bernard Lovell

162 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE an average cost of $59,000 per aircraft. “Smart bombs” became stu­ pid in the presence of haze, mist, cloud, and pronounced atmo­ spheric refraction. “All in all, weather so tempered the targeting, tactics, timing, and type of ordnance employed that the Seventh Air Force’s two major omnibus air plans were entitled ‘Northeast Monsoon Campaign’ and ‘Southwest Monsoon Campaign’ ” (p. 206). Presidents Johnson and Nixon controlled the tactical exercises of a U.S. armed force half a globe removed from the White House. Yet they could not control the weather. “Because they ignored it, some critical diplomatic maneuvering [the authors do not say what] that should have been backed up by airpower was allowed to take place during the annual northeast monsoon, even though that per­ iod brought predominately poor flying weather to North Vietnam” (p. 208). Addressing the issue of technological transfer between military and civilian realms, the authors note that, since 1940, twenty-five presidents of the American Meteorological Society have had mili­ tary backgrounds. Cooperative ventures, such as the joint weathermodification program of the General Electric Company and the U.S. Air Force, cooperative educational programs between the mili­ tary and major universities, and shared technologies such as the com­ puter and weather satellites are cited as mechanisms for this transfer. The topic of meteorology and the military ca. 1940—80 has been ably addressed by Bates and Fuller. Moreover, they have suggested fruitful lines for additional research. Meteorology and the military before 1940 and after 1980 remain to be investigated. James R. Fleming Mr. Fleming is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University and a Smithsonian Fel­ low in residence at the Joseph Henry Papers in Washington, D.C. He is writing a his­ tory of meteorological theories and observational systems in 19th-century America and is a consultant for the American Meteorological Society. Bernard Lovell: A Biography. By Dudley Saward. London: Robert Hale, 1984. Pp. 320; illustrations, index. $21.95. Available from Salem Pr., Inc., P. O. Box 1097, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 07632. This authorized biography is very much a personal memoir of tech­ nical research and development on radar in wartime Britain and of how, in the postwar era, the British military and political establish­ ment made one mistake after another to lose what momentum it had gained during the war to maintain itself as a first-rank military and industrial power. Dudley Saward, a military man turned industry executive (with Texas Instruments, U.K.) and biographer, deftly employs the life of his friend, the radio astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell, as a case study to demonstrate his partisan view of British political shortsighted­ ness. The overall message of the biography, in Lovell’s words as TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 163 quoted by Saward, is that in both radio/radar and rocket technol­ ogy, “we had all the pioneering, technological and engineering experience . . . and yet their successors all over the world are made in either Japan, the USA or Canada, when we should have cap­ tured this market.... Why ever have successive governments al­ lowed this to happen?” (p. 306). How it came to happen—in the opinion of both Lovell and Saward, steadfast advocates of British technological independence—is the point of the book. Following an account of Lovell’s early life, Saward recollects how young Lovell came of age during the war doing radar research for the Bomber Command. He heralds Lovell and his cohorts for cannily managing to work outside the normal procurement and policy channels to design, test, and implement various devices, like X-Band radar in bombers, secure that they had kept sympathetic mili­ tary patrons “in the know.” In later chapters constituting the bulk of the book, Saward gives a similarly admiring account of Lovell’s leg­ endary entrepreneurship in building the gigantic radio/radar astron­ omy facility at Jodrell Bank. Although one would have liked to see important linkages here—how Lovell learned to exploit his wartime experiences in gaining patronage for Jodrell Bank—very little is pro­ vided. We are given the impression that, at every step, it was Lovell against the world, banging his head against bureaucracy

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