The 1980s Science and Technology: Overview

The general anxiety that many Americans felt toward science and technology in the 1970s deepened during the 1980s. The dangers of environmental pollution became more acute and expensive as thousands of hazardous waste sites were identified and the U.S. Congress moved to clean them up by establishing the Superfund. The discovery in 1985 of a hole in Earth's protective ozone layer, a hole many scientists believed was caused by man-made chemical compounds known as chlorofluorocarbons, fed concerns that technology was destroying the basic ecological foundation of human life. The 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine, which spewed radioactive material into the atmosphere, raised further fears. The pollution-filled decade ended with a catastrophic environmental disaster, the oil spill caused by the grounding of the tanker Exxon Valdez.

Huge, expensive, government-sponsored science projects that paid few immediate returns and diverted resources from social programs came under attack in the decade. Public confidence in such expensive projects was deeply shaken by the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger shortly after its launch on January 28, 1986. For many critics, it proved the program was not worth the cost: space shuttles were expensive and complex, and their failures were far too costly.

Failure and sloppy science were not the only stories in science during the 1980s. One new technology in particular delivered the type of progressive improvement Americans had formerly associated with science: Computers had a profound impact on the decade. Capable of replicating a host of intellectual functions, computers revolutionized basic science and increased the speed and accuracy of technical applications. Moreover, when the personal computer was introduced in 1981, it began a revolution in business practices, personal finance, and communications technology whose full impact cannot yet be determined. Computers were an oldfashioned scientific success story, dramatically improving the quality of life and restoring the faith of many in the potential of technology.

Despite such great advances in technology during the decade, Americans found they could not rely on scientific methods to predict accurately the stirrings of the planet. Scientists knew that Mount St. Helens, a dormant volcano in Washington State, was becoming active in the spring of 1980, but they could not tell exactly when it would explode. And when it did, they never imagined the ferocity of the explosion once the underground forces became too great to be contained.