Vol. 39, No.3, July 2010
Printer friendly version of Newsletter
How the Cold War Transformed Science
Francis Bacon Conference: California Institute of Technology, 7–9 May 2010
Matthew Shindell, University of California, San Diego
For any time period, characterizing the effects of political or social context on the knowledge produced is neither a straightforward nor an uncontentious affair. This problem is particularly messy for the second half of the 20th century, the full legacy of which remains unsettled. Nonetheless, this was the task given to the thirteen participants of this spring’s Francis Bacon Conference: How the Cold War Transformed Science. The University of California, San Diego’s Naomi Oreskes organized the conference, which was sponsored by the California Institute of Technology, where Oreskes is in residence as the recipient of the Institute’s 2008 Francis Bacon Prize. Oreskes and John Krige (Georgia Institute of Technology) framed the proceedings of the conference.
Quick Links....
Zhu Kezhen and His Contributions to the History of Science in China
-------------------------------------
Notes from the Inside
-------------------------------------
News and Inquiries
-------------------------------------
Member News
-------------------------------------
Cold War Transformed Science: A Report on the Francis Bacon Conference at Cal Tech
-------------------------------------
Conversing in a Cyberspace Community: The Growth of
HPS Blogging
-------------------------------------
Multiple Ways to Salvation: Tenure and Teaching-Intensive Appointments
-------------------------------------
Jobs, Conferences, Grants
In her opening remarks, Oreskes encouraged the group not to shy away from making strong claims relating the context of Cold War science to its content. Such hesitancy has caused what Oreskes termed “the miasma problem”: although we readily describe the context within which mid- to late-20th century science was practiced, we stop short of drawing any causal lines. This seems ironic inasmuch as we work with the historical presumption that the demands, desires, and expectations of patrons and of society at large must have impacts on science. “Such impacts are to be expected,” said Oreskes, “and it is the historian’s job to determine what they are and how they came to be.” Oreskes went on to suggest that the group could address the question of the Cold War’s impacts by examining changes in the structure(s) of science and in the foci of research agendas–including the question of who was setting these agendas, as well as how and why–paying primary attention to the content of scientific research activity. She also suggested that we should inform our discussions of the choices made by scientists during the Cold War with a consideration of what constraints might have been placed upon the available choices.
Krige asked the participants to think about science and technology in a global framework, by de-centering the nation state, dissolving boundaries, and treating those lines that we do draw upon the Cold War world map as “porous membranes permitting a two-way flow of the stuff of knowledge.” Because national actors are embedded in networks of relationships that are not confined to individual nations, we cannot ignore the continuous movements of people and knowledge across national boundaries. In order to study these movements during the Cold War, Krige encouraged the group to consider the American and Soviet competition for leadership in science and technology. While competing with one another over leadership, both the United States and the Soviet Union had to remain involved in international dialogue. Even the highly secure National Labs, established by the US Atomic Energy Commission, could not have remained relevant had they not maintained their connection to a global network of visitors and collaborators; their story demonstrates the inseparability of knowledge production and circulation in ways that defy the traditional center-periphery model.
For the group as a whole, Krige advocated not just producing a collection or collage of histories of Cold War science and technology in particular labs or nations, but highlighting wherever possible the interconnectedness of those histories. About half of the remaining papers did go beyond American borders to explore the effects of the Cold War on science and technology in the Soviet Union and China. Sonja Schmid, Asif Siddiqi, and Elena Aronova respectively took on Soviet nuclear science and reactor engineering, Soviet lunar rocket development, and the emergence of a distinctly Soviet brand of science studies. Taken together, these papers demonstrated deficiencies in existing distinctions between science and technology, characterizations of the differences between East and West, as well as images of the oppressed Soviet scientist, engineer, or philosopher. Pushing this exploration beyond the two Cold War “Superpowers,” Zuoyue Wang and Sigrid Schmalzer explored how the Cold War context allowed simultaneously the flowering of self-reliant science in China and the strengthening of transnationalism in Chinese science.
Regarding causal agency, eight major themes emerged from the two-day discussion. First among these was the issue of funding. Although it is obvious that funding plays an important role in the directions that research takes (and doesn’t take), the group agreed that this was a non-trivial issue that still needs more emphasis in the historiography of Cold War science. Opportunities (and opportunism), by no means unrelated to funding but not necessarily dependent upon it, also topped the list. Several of the papers presented at the conference discussed episodes in which scientists or engineers seemed to take advantage of the Cold War context in order to undertake projects that might not otherwise have been possible. These ranged from the development of large-scale radar equipment, as described in the paper by David Kaiser and Benjamin Wilson, to the use of isotopic tracers in the biological sciences and their stable isotope counterparts in the geological sciences, as described in separate contributions by Angela Creager and myself.
The third theme, which also overlapped with the first two (in a way perhaps indicating that we are dealing with a causal “web” rather than a set of discreet causes), was materiel. Isotopes and the equipment used to study them became available as a result of the Cold War pressure to find peaceful applications for nuclear research, were promoted by scientists who jumped at the opportunity to nudge scientific practice in particular directions, and in addition became affordable to universities via Cold War research contracts. Erik Conway’s discussion of NASA’s development of space-based earth science research platforms also demonstrated the interplay among these three causal factors.
On a less tangible level, the group also indicated that work on Cold War science should look more seriously at the metaphors employed in discussing science and technology in the Cold War. These metaphors may have structured the ways in which actors thought about what they were doing. George Reisch’s paper, for example, demonstrated how the metaphors and tactics devised in McCarthyist attacks on Communism remain at work in today’s anti-evolution campaigns. Metaphors also led to a discussion of the different ways of thinking that proliferated during the Cold War–one prevalent example being systems theory. Beyond metaphors and ways of thinking, the group also pointed to the metaphor makers themselves–those who occupied the mediating roles of managers during the Cold War. These managers often belonged to two or more camps–be they scientific, political, or otherwise–and often moved, at least in their own view, unproblematically between arenas that our analyses have tended to treat as distinct.
The final theme, intensification, was one of the most common themes in all of the papers presented in Pasadena. In every case, historians found pre-Cold War antecedents to the scientific and technological developments they described. But they also saw the Cold War as an accelerating force that selectively stimulated some existing trends, often at the expense of others. Exactly how and why some trends accelerated while others withered on the vine will be a question for each participant to endeavor to answer as the conference’s task carries over into the edited volume to be published in the near future.
Matthew Shindell is a PhD Candidate at the UCSD Department of History and Science Studies Program. He can be contacted at mshindel@ucsd.edu. He was also a participant in the conference.