Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

Although Fred Singer was an environmentalist in the 1960s, he became an adamant Cold Warrior, dedicating his life to fighting communism and the Soviet Union. He “joined forces with the self-appointed defenders of the free market to…undermine science, to deny the truth, and to market doubt” (238). He believed that the EPA was responsible for increasing government control over American lives, which he felt was a slippery slope to communism; as the EPA continued to increase regulations, Singer became more and more opposed to their work and to the work of environmentalists in general: “In the mid-1990s, Fred singer co-authored a major report attacking the US Environmental Protection Agency over the health risks of secondhand smoke” (5-6). This flew in the face of extensive research concerning secondhand smoke, as well as the Surgeon General’s warning that secondhand smoke was toxic and carcinogenic.

Like many of the other merchants of doubt, Singer was a politically conservative physicist “with a history of working at the interface between science and government” (83). He was highly respected by politicians and the media alike, and so many of his claims were given more credence than those of his younger academic counterparts. However, like Seitz, Singer worked closely with the tobacco industry, as his anti-EPA report was funded by the Tobacco Institute and channeled through the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Singer also worked at the behest of many other industries, including challenging the Nobel laureate who first realized that CFCs destroyed stratospheric ozone. Along with Seitz, Singer worked closely with the Marshall Institute to defend Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.

A child of immigrants, Nierenberg quickly rose through the ranks of scientists to become a leading face in Cold War politics. He was “a child of the atomic age, a man for whom the global anxieties and national challenges of the Cold War had offered remarkable personal opportunities” (79). Nierenberg helped to build the atomic bomb and was closely associated with Cold War weapons programs and research; like Seitz and Singer, Nierenberg received his scientific bona fides from his work with atomic warfare and his political connections.

He was a member of Reagan’s transition team, working closely with the Reagan administration to prevent government regulation. He was a staunch defender of SDI, cofounding the Marshall Institute in order to disseminate the claim that SDI was a crucial aspect of winning the Cold War. Of the scientists, Nierenberg perhaps worked the closest with the Reagan administration. Among other issues, Nierenberg denied the horrors of acid rain, editing the Acid Review Panel Report’s Executive Summary to align with the goals of the Reagan administration. In collusion with Jastrow and Seitz, Nierenberg also wrote a report questioning the existence of global warming. The authors depict Nierenberg as being self-assured to the point of arrogance: “he was sometimes in error but never in doubt” (80). This lack of self-doubt made him appear trustworthy to politicians, who favored certainty over the queries presented by scientific claims. 

“Jastrow was a prominent astrophysicist, successful popular author, and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who had long been involved with the US Space program” (8). His books were widely received by the American public, who credited him as the “man who brought ‘space down to earth for millions of Americans’” (45). As such, the American public was given to believing Jastrow’s claims, despite the fact that many of them did not concern astrophysics. His name carried a lot of political weight because he had the unusual ability among scientists to communicate ideas to laypeople.

A member of the SDI lobby, Jastrow led the way in strategic defense during the late 1970s and early 1980s. His beliefs, like many of his fellow merchants of doubt, closely aligned with those of the Reagan administration, especially concerning national defense. Jastrow argued that “détente was naïve—a latter-day version of appeasement […and] that Soviet capabilities were far greater than we knew and that it was essential to continue to maintain and even expand our nuclear weapons stockpile” (37). An adamant Cold Warrior, he stressed the uncertainty of Soviet capability, arguing that SDI was the only way to protect the American way of life. 

Although Teller does not appear as much as many of the other scientists in the narrative, he is an important figure nonetheless. He represents the similarity in beliefs held by these conservative scientists, all of whom were closely linked with the atomic age. Teller was the father of the hydrogen bomb, working closely with weapons throughout the Cold War. During the Reagan years, he came on board as a member of the SDI lobby and eventually served on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Teller was convinced that liberal academics were to blame for the Cold War, as they had wiped out military research and development. He feared that the Soviets would soon surpass the United States in technology, blaming the concerns of environmentalists for distracting from what he deemed the greatest threat to America: The Cold War. His views were similar to those of Jastrow, and he held the same scientific credibility as Fred Seitz.