Science, politics and the cold war

Many historians have treated science as an established fact, as something existing independently of political history. However, in an era in which so much state planning, so many techniques of social organisation and political control are based upon science, it can no longer be treated as a politically neutral 'given'. The extent to which science and scientists are implicated in every aspect of the political process is demonstrated by this history of the cold-war era. It discusses how politically aware scientists involved them selves in controversies relating to atomic technology and genetics, and how the science world became a battleground between com peting ideologies. The politicisation of science is shown to go deeper than any individual issue: right-wing critics of the Soviet Union argued that true science and socialism were incompatible, whilst their opponents for warded similar arguments about science and capitalism. At the same time the science world always contained a powerful lobby for political non-alignment, a faction which saw and continues to see science as a force for internationalism. This book analyses all these positions and draws out the main contours of the politics/science debate in this period.

Greta Jones is Reader in History at the University of Ulster at Jordanstown.