Science And Technology In The Global Cold War

Author : Naomi Oreskes,John Krige
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 467 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2014-10-31
Category : History
ISBN : 9780262027953

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Science and Technology in the Global Cold War by Naomi Oreskes,John Krige Pdf

Investigations of how the global Cold War shaped national scientific and technological practices in fields from biomedicine to rocket science. 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

Author : Gabrielle Hecht
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2011-04-04
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9780262294751

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Entangled Geographies by Gabrielle Hecht Pdf

Investigations into how technologies became peculiar forms of politics in an expanded geography of the Cold War. The Cold War was not simply a duel of superpowers. It took place not just in Washington and Moscow but also in the social and political arenas of geographically far-flung countries emerging from colonial rule. Moreover, Cold War tensions were manifest not only in global political disputes but also in struggles over technology. Technological systems and expertise offered a powerful way to shape countries politically, economically, socially, and culturally. Entangled Geographies explores how Cold War politics, imperialism, and postcolonial nation building became entangled in technologies and considers the legacies of those entanglements for today's globalized world. The essays address such topics as the islands and atolls taken over for military and technological purposes by the supposedly non-imperial United States, apartheid-era South Africa's efforts to achieve international legitimacy as a nuclear nation, international technical assistance and Cold War politics, the Saudi irrigation system that spurred a Shi'i rebellion, and the momentary technopolitics of emergency as practiced by Medecins sans Frontières. The contributors to Entangled Geographies offer insights from the anthropology and history of development, from diplomatic history, and from science and technology studies. The book represents a unique synthesis of these three disciplines, providing new perspectives on the global Cold War.

Author : Andra Chastain,Timothy Lorek
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 331 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2020-03-17
Category : History
ISBN : 9780822987321

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Itineraries of Expertise by Andra Chastain,Timothy Lorek Pdf

Itineraries of Expertise contends that experts and expertise played fundamental roles in the Latin American Cold War. While traditional Cold War histories of the region have examined diplomatic, intelligence, and military operations and more recent studies have probed the cultural dimensions of the conflict, the experts who constitute the focus of this volume escaped these categories. Although they often portrayed themselves as removed from politics, their work contributed to the key geopolitical agendas of the day. The paths traveled by the experts in this volume not only traversed Latin America and connected Latin America to the Global North, they also stretch traditional chronologies of the Latin American Cold War to show how local experts in the early twentieth century laid the foundation for post–World War II development projects, and how Cold War knowledge of science, technology, and the environment continues to impact our world today. These essays unite environmental history and the history of science and technology to argue for the importance of expertise in the Latin American Cold War.

Author : Mark Solovey,Christian Dayé
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 413 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2021-05-13
Category : Science
ISBN : 9783030702465

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Cold War Social Science by Mark Solovey,Christian Dayé Pdf

This book explores how the social sciences became entangled with the global Cold War. While duly recognizing the realities of nation states, national power, and national aspirations, the studies gathered here open up new lines of transnational investigation. Considering developments in a wide array of fields – anthropology, development studies, economics, education, political science, psychology, science studies, and sociology – that involved the movement of people, projects, funding, and ideas across diverse national contexts, this volume pushes scholars to rethink certain fundamental points about how we should understand – and thus how we should study – Cold War social science itself.

Author : Gordon Barrett
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2022-08-25
Category : History
ISBN : 9781108956253

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China's Cold War Science Diplomacy by Gordon Barrett Pdf

During the early decades of the Cold War, the People's Republic of China remained outside much of mainstream international science. Nevertheless, Chinese scientists found alternative channels through which to communicate and interact with counterparts across the world, beyond simple East/West divides. By examining the international activities of elite Chinese scientists, Gordon Barrett demonstrates that these activities were deeply embedded in the Chinese Communist Party's wider efforts to win hearts and minds from the 1940s to the 1970s. Using a wide range of archival material, including declassified documents from China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archive, Barrett provides fresh insights into the relationship between science and foreign relations in the People's Republic of China.

Author : Ronald E. Doel,Kristine C. Harper,Matthias Heymann
Publisher : Springer
Page : 311 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2016-07-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9781137596888

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Exploring Greenland by Ronald E. Doel,Kristine C. Harper,Matthias Heymann Pdf

Using newly declassified documents, this book explores why U.S. military leaders after World War II sought to monitor the far north and understand the physical environment of Greenland, a crucial territory of Denmark. It reveals a fascinating yet little-known realm of Cold War intrigue and a delicate diplomatic duet between a smaller state and a superpower amid a time of intense global pressures. Written by scholars in Denmark and the United States, this book explores many compelling topics. What led to the creation of the U.S. Thule Air Base in Greenland, one of the world’s largest, and why did the U.S. build a nuclear-powered city under Greenland’s ice cap? How did Danish concern about sovereignty shape scientific research programs in Greenland? Also explored here: why did Denmark’s most famous scientist, Inge Lehmann, became involved in research in Greenland, and what international reverberations resulted from the crash of a U.S. B-52 bomber carrying four nuclear weapons near Thule in January 1968?

Author : Paul N. Edwards
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 468 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 1996
Category : Computers
ISBN : 0262550288

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The Closed World by Paul N. Edwards Pdf

The Closed World offers a radically new alternative to the canonical histories of computers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology--and were transformed, in turn, by information machines. The Closed World explores three apparently disparate histories--the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture--through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate links between the military projects of the Cold War, the evolution of digital computers, and the origins of cybernetics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence. Edwards begins by describing the emergence of a "closed-world discourse" of global surveillance and control through high-technology military power. The Cold War political goal of "containment" led to the SAGE continental air defense system, Rand Corporation studies of nuclear strategy, and the advanced technologies of the Vietnam War. These and other centralized, computerized military command and control projects--for containing world-scale conflicts--helped closed-world discourse dominate Cold War political decisions. Their apotheosis was the Reagan-era plan for a " Star Wars" space-based ballistic missile defense. Edwards then shows how these military projects helped computers become axial metaphors in psychological theory. Analyzing the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, the Harvard Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, and the early history of artificial intelligence, he describes the formation of a "cyborg discourse." By constructing both human minds and artificial intelligences as information machines, cyborg discourse assisted in integrating people into the hyper-complex technological systems of the closed world. Finally, Edwards explores the cyborg as political identity in science fiction--from the disembodied, panoptic AI of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the mechanical robots of Star Wars and the engineered biological androids of Blade Runner--where Information Age culture and subjectivity were both reflected and constructed. Inside Technology series

Author : Audra J. Wolfe
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 177 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2013-01-01
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781421409016

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Competing with the Soviets by Audra J. Wolfe Pdf

A synthetic account of how science became a central weapon in the ideological Cold War. Honorable Mention for the Forum for the History of Science in America Book Prize of the Forum for the History of Science in America For most of the second half of the twentieth century, the United States and its allies competed with a hostile Soviet Union in almost every way imaginable except open military engagement. The Cold War placed two opposite conceptions of the good society before the uncommitted world and history itself, and science figured prominently in the picture. Competing with the Soviets offers a short, accessible introduction to the special role that science and technology played in maintaining state power during the Cold War, from the atomic bomb to the Human Genome Project. The high-tech machinery of nuclear physics and the space race are at the center of this story, but Audra J. Wolfe also examines the surrogate battlefield of scientific achievement in such diverse fields as urban planning, biology, and economics; explains how defense-driven federal investments created vast laboratories and research programs; and shows how unfamiliar worries about national security and corrosive questions of loyalty crept into the supposedly objective scholarly enterprise. Based on the assumption that scientists are participants in the culture in which they live, Competing with the Soviets looks beyond the debate about whether military influence distorted science in the Cold War. Scientists’ choices and opportunities have always been shaped by the ideological assumptions, political mandates, and social mores of their times. The idea that American science ever operated in a free zone outside of politics is, Wolfe argues, itself a legacy of the ideological Cold War that held up American science, and scientists, as beacons of freedom in contrast to their peers in the Soviet Union. Arranged chronologically and thematically, the book highlights how ideas about the appropriate relationships among science, scientists, and the state changed over time.

Author : Arthur P. Molella,Scott Gabriel Knowles
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 313 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2019-10-11
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780822987086

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World's Fairs in the Cold War by Arthur P. Molella,Scott Gabriel Knowles Pdf

The post–World War II science-based technological revolution inevitably found its way into almost all international expositions with displays on atomic energy, space exploration, transportation, communications, and computers. Major advancements in Cold War science and technology helped to shape new visions of utopian futures, the stock-in-trade of world’s fairs. From the 1940s to the 1980s, expositions in the United States and around the world, from Brussels to Osaka to Brisbane, mirrored Cold War culture in a variety of ways, and also played an active role in shaping it. This volume illustrates the cultural change and strain spurred by the Cold War, a disruptive period of scientific and technological progress that ignited growing concern over the impact of such progress on the environment and humanistic and spiritual values. Through the lens of world’s fairs, contributors across disciplines offer an integrated exploration of the US–USSR rivalry from a global perspective and in the context of broader social and cultural phenomena—faith and religion, gender and family relations, urbanization and urban planning, fashion, modernization, and national identity—all of which were fundamentally reshaped by tensions and anxieties of the Atomic Age.

Author : Per Lundin,Niklas Stenlås,Johan Gribbe
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2010
Category : Industrial policy
ISBN : 0881354252

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Science for Welfare and Warfare by Per Lundin,Niklas Stenlås,Johan Gribbe Pdf

Author : William A.T. Logan
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2021-11-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9783030787677

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A Technological History of Cold-War India, 1947–⁠1969 by William A.T. Logan Pdf

This book provides a technological history of modern India, in particular the Nehruvian development in the context of the Cold War. Through a series of case studies about military modernization, transportation infrastructure, and electric power, it examines how the ideals of autarky and technological indigenization conflicted with the economic and political realities of the Cold War world. Where other studies tend to focus on the political leaders and economists who oversaw development, this book demonstrates how the perspective of the engineers, government bureaucrats, and aid workers informed and ultimately implemented development.

Author : Elena Aronova,Simone Turchetti
Publisher : Springer
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2016-09-24
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781137559432

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Science Studies during the Cold War and Beyond by Elena Aronova,Simone Turchetti Pdf

This book examines the ways in which studies of science intertwined with Cold War politics, in both familiar and less familiar “battlefields” of the Cold War. Taken together, the essays highlight two primary roles for science studies as a new field of expertise institutionalized during the Cold War in different political regimes. Firstly, science studies played a political role in cultural Cold War in sustaining as well as destabilizing political ideologies in different political and national contexts. Secondly, it was an instrument of science policies in the early Cold War: the studies of science were promoted as the underpinning for the national policies framed with regard to both global geopolitics and local national priorities. As this book demonstrates, however, the wider we cast our net, extending our histories beyond the more researched developments in the Anglophone West, the more complex and ambivalent both the “science studies” and “the Cold War” become outside these more familiar spaces. The national stories collected in this book may appear incommensurable with what we know as science studies today, but these stories present a vantage point from which to pluralize some of the visions that were constitutive to the construction of “Cold War” as a juxtaposition of the liberal democracies in the “West” and the communist “East.”

Author : Jacob Darwin Hamblin
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2011-07-01
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780295801858

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Oceanographers and the Cold War by Jacob Darwin Hamblin Pdf

Oceanographers and the Cold War is about patronage, politics, and the community of scientists. It is the first book to examine the study of the oceans during the Cold War era and explore the international focus of American oceanographers, taking into account the roles of the U.S. Navy, United States foreign policy, and scientists throughout the world. Jacob Hamblin demonstrates that to understand the history of American oceanography, one must consider its role in both conflict and cooperation with other nations. Paradoxically, American oceanography after World War II was enmeshed in the military-industrial complex while characterized by close international cooperation. The military dimension of marine science--with its involvement in submarine acoustics, fleet operations, and sea-launched nuclear missiles--coexisted with data exchange programs with the Soviet Union and global operations in seas without borders. From an uneasy cooperation with the Soviet bloc in the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58, to the NATO Science Committee in the late 1960s, which excluded the Soviet Union, to the U.S. Marine Sciences Council, which served as an important national link between scientists and the government, Oceanographers and the Cold War reveals the military and foreign policy goals served by U.S. government involvement in cooperative activities between scientists, such as joint cruises and expeditions. It demonstrates as well the extent to which oceanographers used international cooperation as a vehicle to pursue patronage from military, government, and commercial sponsors during the Cold War, as they sought support for their work by creating "disciples of marine science" wherever they could.

Author : Eglė Rindzevičiūtė
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 307 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2016-12-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781501706783

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The Power of Systems by Eglė Rindzevičiūtė Pdf

In The Power of Systems, Egle Rindzeviciute introduces readers to one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War: the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, an international think tank established by the U.S. and Soviet governments to advance scientific collaboration. From 1972 until the late 1980s IIASA in Austria was one of the very few permanent platforms where policy scientists from both sides of the Cold War divide could work together to articulate and solve world problems. This think tank was a rare zone of freedom, communication, and negotiation, where leading Soviet scientists could try out their innovative ideas, benefit from access to Western literature, and develop social networks, thus paving the way for some of the key science and policy breakthroughs of the twentieth century.Ambitious diplomatic, scientific, and organizational strategies were employed to make this arena for cooperation work for global change. Under the umbrella of the systems approach, East-West scientists co-produced computer simulations of the long-term world future and the anthropogenic impact on the environment, using global modeling to explore the possible effects of climate change and nuclear winter. Their concern with global issues also became a vehicle for transformation inside the Soviet Union. The book shows how computer modeling, cybernetics, and the systems approach challenged Soviet governance by undermining the linear notions of control on which Soviet governance was based and creating new objects and techniques of government.

Author : Allan A. Needell
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 420 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2013-02-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781135852795

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Science, Cold War and the American State by Allan A. Needell Pdf

This book illuminates how Berkner became a model that produced the scientist/advisor/policymaker that helped build post-war America. It does so by providing a detailed account of the personal and professional beliefs of one of the most influential figures in the American scientific community; a figure that helped define the political and social climates that existed in the United States during the Cold War.