Competing with the Soviets

Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America
Erscheinungsjahr 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4214-0769-2
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 176 Seiten, Format (B × H): 154 mm x 269 mm, Gewicht: 365 g

Reihe: Johns Hopkins Introductory Studies in the History of Science

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wolfe, Audra J

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Studien zu einzelnen Ländern und Gebieten
• Technische Wissenschaften Technik Allgemein Technikgeschichte
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Atomic Age
Chapter 2. The Military-Industrial Complex
Chapter 3. Big Science
Chapter 4. Hearts and Minds and Markets
Chapter 5. Science and the General Welfare
Chapter 6. The Race to the Moon
Chapter 7. The End of Consensus
Chapter 8. Cold War Redux
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Suggested Further Reading
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Wolfe, Audra J
Audra J. Wolfe is a writer and editor based in Philadelphia.