"I, Vannevar Bush, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of the President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."
From Wikipedia -
Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974; pronounced
/væˈniːvɑr/ van-NEE-var) was an
American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the
atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the
Manhattan Project, and the idea of the
memex, an adjustable microfilm-viewer which is somewhat analogous to the structure of the
World Wide Web. As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Bush coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare.
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Bush was a well-known policymaker and public intellectual during
World War II and the ensuing
Cold War [2], and was in effect the first presidential
science advisor. Bush was a proponent of democratic
technocracy and of the centrality of technological innovation and entrepreneurship for both economic and geopolitical security.
Seeing later developments in the
Cold War arms race, Bush became troubled. "His vision of how technology could lead toward understanding and away from destruction was a primary inspiration for the postwar research that led to the development of
New Media."
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Considering that by 1952 the Republicans are due for the presidency and even as early as then Bush is 62 and would basically just be the Adlai Stevenson run but more so, how can we make this a (hypothetical) reality?
Regardless of how it could happen, Vannevar Bush becoming president in the early Cold War could possibly prevent a nuclear arms race by putting control of atomic research in international hands and encouraging scientific exchange with the Soviets. The result might be a Cold War without the constant threat of thermonuclear holocaust but with the potential for more conventional conflicts and cultural clash (due to more cultural exchanges of ideas) under presidents after Bush himself.