There are a couple fundamental flaws here:

One is that the number one Science and Engineering powerhouse prior to WWII was Germany, not Britain.

Two this totally neglects that the US received the lion's share of Scientists and Mathematicians from countries like Germany, Hungary, Poland etc with the encroachment of the Soviets and persecution of the Jewish people.

While the down up approach of the US and heavy funding probably helped a lot. Bringing in the Von Neumanns and Erdos of the world couldn't have hurt.

This started when George Washington went to the Jews in Newport, Rhode Island to speak to them promoting the 2nd of the 12 amendments to the Constitution, 10 of which became the Bill of Rights. Rhode Island was the last state to ratify the Constitution and this trip was to garner support to ratify the Bill of Rights which was to safeguard individual freedoms and limit the power of the federal government. Many of the Jews who first arrived in the United States did so in New Amsterdam whose families had pervious settled in Amsterdam after the Spanish Inquisition where they were forced to either leave Spain, convert to Catholicism, or be put to death.

Reiterating what the Hebrew congregation write to Washington he responded:

> For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. [0]

It is a paradox that people living the United States with its freedoms can only continue doing so as long as they equally protect the freedoms of everyone else without bigotry or persecution.

[0] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-...

Unfortunately, the German example is quite relevant these days. We seem intent on destroying the leading system of research universities in the world... ;-(

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Prior to WWII the United States was the world's leading power in terms of Science, Engineering and Industry - not Germany or the British Empire. The reason that Central European scientists fled to America (and not Britain) is because the United States had the scientific, engineering and industrial base to absorb them. Consider some of the major scientific breakthroughs to come out of the US leading up to and coming out of the war: Nylon, Teflon, Synthetic Rubber, Penicillin, Solid State Transistors, Microwave Communication, Information Theory, a Vaccine for Polio... These all would have happened with or without the war and the migration of German scientists (though adding John von Neumann to the mix probably helped move things along).