Strange Stability: How Cold War Scientists Set Out to Control the Arms Race and Ended Up Serving the Military-Industrial Complex

Popular histories paint Cold War–era scientists as impartial actors who stood against the excesses of warmongers in government, but Wilson, a history of science professor at Harvard, argues in this eye-opening debut study that such stories elide the fact that these scientists had a financial incentive to escalate the arms race. The cadre of scientists who advised the U.S. government and issued warnings to the public, he shows, was the same one developing the weapons for private companies and federally funded projects. Wilson traces how, even as the antiwar press relied on scientists’ expertise, these “R&D elites” offered limited rhetorical resistance to arms escalation, instead criticizing government policies on technical grounds that were geared toward proving the necessity of continued funding for their own research. Their talking points frequently shifted antiwar debates away from disarmament toward “strategic stability,” a technical-sounding concept employed to justify investment in weaponry. (In fact, the R&D elites could be quite hostile to those who suggested doing away with weapons. “I don’t think finding ways of killing people is necessarily bad for society,” one told a student protester in 1974.) As Wilson unbraids the circuitous logic of strategic stability, he also casts a critical eye on Cold War historiography for cementing scientists’ reputation as regulators, instead of enablers, of the U.S. military-industrial complex. It’s a sharp puncturing of Cold War mythology. (Nov.)