‘Patronised servants’: Australian scientists in the 1940s PHILLIP DEERY AND LACHLAN CLOHESY T he relationship between scientists and Western governments has had a long and uneasy history. During World War II, new links were forged between governments and the military on the one hand and civilian scientific communities on the other. Global war required the mobilisation and ongoing participation of civilian scientists in military research and development. The wartime partnership between science and the state, culminating in the development of the atomic bomb, was a highly successful one. Western leaders were utterly convinced that scientific breakthroughs in military technology had helped secure victory. No group was more impressed with science as an instrument of national power than the defence establishment, and none was more determined to harness that power for its own purposes in the postwar period. The fresh hopes of defence departments for considerable command over military research clashed, however, with the existing peacetime tradition of civilian control and the pre-war relationship between science and the state. The social relations of science became an overriding preoccupation of scientists during the war years. Scientists nurtured their own postwar ideas about how a partnership with science should be structured and to what purposes it should be directed. There were also vital questions about the role that scientists should play in military research, the notions of responsibility for the results of this research, and the extent to which science should be held accountable to public authority. The implications of these and similar questions were played out during the early Cold War. With the onset of the Cold War, global conflict again appeared imminent and the use of atomic weaponry a distinct possibility. In this context, the safeguarding of scientific secrets was deemed vital. Scientists became embroiled with issues of national security and the purpose of science itself became redefined. 1 By 1945, partly as a result of the war, a great many scientists were deeply committed to notions of social responsibility of science. They shared a sanguine, perhaps naive, faith in the potential for international cooperation and sharing the fruits of scientific research even, or especially, with the former wartime ally, the Soviet Union. World