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| The MIKE EVENT, part of Operation Ivy, was the first successful detonation in the testing of experimental thermonuclear weapons. It was exploded on Oct. 31, 1952 at the Pacific atoll Enewetak. Public domain photo courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office. |
Thomas Kuhn’s seminal 1962
book, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, argued that normal scientific practice is periodically
interrupted by shifts in thinking, or paradigms, that change the nature of the
entire practice. Paradigms are structures that form the cognitive environments
in which science operates on a day-to-day basis.[i]
The Cold War was not in
itself a scientific discovery or endeavor. However, the ideology and
competition of this perpetual standoff so enveloped the American mindset, and
especially scientists, during the latter half of the twentieth century that it
became a paradigm of its own. Cold War military strategy became the primary
impetus for nearly all major scientific projects, first in the physical
sciences and soon after also in the social sciences.
The building of the first
atomic bomb had little to do with U.S. worries about the Soviets. But nuclear
technology quickly became the dominant tool of early Cold War policy. In 1950, U.S.
foreign policy shifted strongly toward the threat of military force as a means
of preventing Communist hegemony. President Truman announced that the country
would pursue thermonuclear weapons, and despite some high-profile scientific
opposition, the Soviet’s own development of such bombs kept the U.S. in an arms
race to build bigger and more destructive weaponry.[ii]
An obsession with
military-related research and development in the early Cold War led to an
imbalance in science funding. In 1952, for instance, the civilian-oriented
fledgling National Science Foundation’s budget was $3.5 million. The single
military branch of the Navy, on the other hand, spent nearly $600 million
between 1946 and 1950, or an average of $120 million per year.[iii]
The security mindset permeated well into scientific circles. Because many
scientific documents in specialties such as physics, electronics and
oceanography were classified, most scientists needed security clearances, tying
them inexorably to national defense interests and Cold War politics.[iv]
The securitization and
politicization of scientific information also affected close U.S. allies in
Western Europe. When the U.S. State Department decided to pursue policies in
favor of a “United States of Europe,” one of the main impetuses was to provide
a strong front against the Soviet Bloc next door and take some pressure off the
U.S. in defending against Communism. To attain this goal, the U.S. threw its
weight behind a concept to unite a group of six continental nations under a
single peaceful nuclear energy regime called Euratom, and restricted scientific
information (and other nuclear resources) to potential member states unless
they signed on. Though Euratom became a reality in 1958, it failed to create a
united Europe and injured U.S. relations with such allies as France, Britain
and Germany.[v]
Euratom was part of the
prevailing paradigm of Cold War – that science and technology had the power to
resolve all problems, no matter how intractable. Yet Euratom did not achieve
the goals of the U.S., nor was it the only scientifically-infused foreign
policy project that ended in debacle.
By the end of the 1950’s, the
social sciences were being graced with the state’s largesse, too. Development
theorist W. W. Rostow laid out his theory of economic takeoff, which suggested
among other things that poor countries could be modernized through a
combination of technology, foreign investment and the insertion of Western
liberal values. The federal government seized on this, with Rostow’s support,
as a way to win third-world countries over from Communist influence.[vi]
Some of the resultant development programs met with mixed success, while others
resulted in utter failure.[vii]
Rostow’s theory and others
like it fall into what Richard Feynman dubbed “Cargo Cult science:” they have
all the trappings of science, but they don’t work because their proponents fail
to consider other possible explanations.[viii]
At the height of the Cold War, ideological presumptions trumped attempts to ask
fundamental questions about the uses of science and technology, for both good
and ill. The flawed reasoning that science could fix foreign nations was also
applied domestically in what became known as the “War on Poverty,” which was
also largely abandoned after producing tepid results.[ix]
Although the Cold War would
not end for more than another decade, the militarized science paradigm
unraveled precipitously in the 1970’s. A low return on investment, growing
social opposition, and health and environmental concerns largely led to what
Kuhn would have called a crisis period, and then a revolution: a large-scale
decoupling of the security and scientific establishments.[x]
Cold War tensions would flare
up once more before the Soviet Union collapsed.[xi] But
never again would science and the military be so closely and unquestioningly
wed.
[i] Sergio Sismondo, “Fifty years of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, twenty-five of Science in Action,” Social Studies of Science 42 (2012), 415-41, http://sss.sagepub.com/content/42/3/415, 9-1-13;
[ii] Audra J. Wolfe, Competingwith the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 20-2;
[iii] Wolfe, Competing with the Soviets, 25;
[iv] Ibid., 33-35;
[v] John Krige, “The
Peaceful Atom as Political Weapon: Euratom and American Foreign Policy in the
Late 1950s,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 30, 1 (Winter
2008), 5-44, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hsns.2008.38.1.5,
9-12-13;
[vii] Ibid., 72-73;
[viii] Richard Feynman,
"Cargo Cult Science," http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/cargocul.htm,
8-26-13;
[x] Ibid., 106-115;
[xi] Ibid., 121-124.
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