Debating the Cold War: What was Cold War Science?

#BirkbeckVoices

As part of a workshop hosted by the Reluctant Internationalists research group on Debating the Cold War, Alma Steingart (Harvard), Jonathan Oldfield (Birmingham), Jon Agar (UCL), Iris Borowy (Shanghai), Sarah Marks (Cambridge), Lukasz Stanek (Manchester) and Waqar Zaidi (Lums) discuss what was Cold War science? The panel, chaired by Dora Vargha (Birkbeck) asks: can we talk about ‘Cold War science’? Histories of Cold War science and medicine have focused on Big Science, nuclear and atomic science, and space exploration. But science in the two blocks has featured in the historiography in very different terms: on one side stand accounts of Western science funding, the relationships of science and the military, and health effects of nuclear programmes and accidents; on the other, studies of a terrain where science was led astray and corrupted by politics, and marked by crippling shortages of materials and expertise. A “declensionist narrative” of decline, desiccation and degradation (borrowing a term from the environmental historian Diana K. Davis) can be found in accounts of Eastern, but rarely of Western, approaches to knowledge and science. This panel will seek to identify possible ways of comparison, and consider the significance of collaborative projects, shared research agendas and other contact points between scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain. For more information – http://bit.ly/2nkGWiQ