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The libertarian Cato institute points out that the US has been losing international scientists in recent years whereas not only has China gained but so has "non-US OECD" countries. The latter is code for Europe and AU/NZ/CA.
The immediate cause is probably the misguided and arguably racist "China initiative" which essentially led to a witch-hunt against ethnic Chinese people. But I suspect domestic factors in China and Europe are also responsible. Both have been ramping up R&D spending in recent years and visa policies in Europe are often more favorable for researchers than American policies are. Easier to get and easier to stay.
It is no exaggeration to say that most of STEM innovation in US academia is now being carried out by foreign-born people. So this development should worry Americans. I also think many people in the West underestimate how much genuine innovation there is in China. Viewing data from the Nature Index, which tracks elite science production, it isn't clear that China is far behind anymore. If at all. In areas like EV batteries, China is now ahead of the West. Progress in their semiconductor industry has been faster than even many insiders had expected.
I still think the US has a series of unique advantages over its competitors, but falling prey to scare-mongering campaigns and McCarthyite tactics isn't going to capitalise on them.
I think the China initiative is stupid for a different reason you do--there is no innovation going on in American academia, so there is no reason to worry about the Chinese stealing it. The most useful function of academia is not the academic research, but the training of scientists who can plausibly be reassigned from their highly cited meme projects about quantum nano-solar graphene batteries to actual useful research if a war breaks out. The real reason the Chinese work in US academia is not espionage but to gain the skills necessary for setting up university research groups in China.
With that in mind, it is probably a good idea to limit the number of foreign researchers in the US and ensure Americans are trained for those roles instead.
Are there non-Manhattan Project examples of scientists being reassigned to a project of great importance for national security during a crisis? As far as I know even that was voluntary. There wasn't much for covid either that I can recall.
Kidnapped Germans for the Soviet nuclear weapons programme, kidnapped Germans for the American rocketry programme.
Were they really "kidnapped," at least in the case of the Americans? "Come work for us and we won't hang you for being part of the Nazi Party" was probably the offer on hand, and it was probably a pretty damn decent offer for those German scientists.
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I strongly agree with the second point, I work for a national lab and it is so hard to find US citizens/green card holders to do scientific work. I believe universities bear a lot of the blame for this situation, because they so aggressive use international students to keep graduate student compensation down (I myself dropped out of a PhD to make more money, this option simply isn’t available to international students)
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