Science and Technology in the Global Cold War

Naomi Oreskes, John Krige, Jed Z. Buchwald

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2014
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780262326117
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The Cold War period saw a dramatic expansion of state-funded science and technology research. Government and military patronage shaped Cold War technoscientific practices, imposing methods that were project oriented, team based, and subject to national-security restrictions. These changes affected not just the arms race and the space race but also research in agriculture, biomedicine, computer science, ecology, meteorology, and other fields. This volume examines science and technology in the context of the Cold War, considering whether the new institutions and institutional arrangements that emerged globally constrained technoscientific inquiry or offered greater opportunities for it.

The contributors find that whatever the particular science, and whatever the political system in which that science was operating, the knowledge that was produced bore some relation to the goals of the nation-state. These goals varied from nation to nation; weapons research was emphasized in the United States and the Soviet Union, for example, but in France and China scientific independence and self-reliance dominated. The contributors also consider to what extent the changes to science and technology practices in this era were produced by the specific politics, anxieties, and aspirations of the Cold War.

Contributors
Elena Aronova, Erik M. Conway, Angela N. H. Creager, David Kaiser, John Krige, Naomi Oreskes, George Reisch, Sigrid Schmalzer, Sonja D. Schmid, Matthew Shindell, Asif A. Siddiqi, Zuoyue Wang, Benjamin Wilson

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• History of Science and Technology series
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Science in the Origins of the Cold War
• 2 Atomic Tracings
• 3 Self-Reliant Science
• 4 From the End of the World to the Age of the Earth
• 5 Changing the Mission
• 6 Fighting Each Other
• 7 Embedding the National in the Global
• 8 Bringing NASA Back to Earth
• 9 Calculating Times
• 10 Defining (Scientific) Direction
• 11 The Cold War and the Reshaping of Transnational Science in China
• 12 When Structure Met Sputnik
• 13 Big Science and "Big Science Studies" in the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War
• Concluding Remarks
• About the Authors
• Index