Swimming with the coelacanth

The UK and export controls of technology and knowledge in the Cold War

Bibliographic Data

ID14800273
AuthorsJon Agar (Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS), University College London, London, UK, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume40
Issue1-2
Pages54-72
Publication date2024-04-02
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory and Technology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0734-1512 • E-ISSN: 1477-2620
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/07341512.2024.2377868
OpenAlexW4400988794
LanguageEN
References cited12

Export controls, such as through the lists of embargoed goods drawn up by the Co-ordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) from the 1950s until the 1980s, were a means by which the West sought to put economic and strategic pressures on the communist East. This paper explores a tension within the historiography of Cold War export controls provoked by the recent scholarship of Mario Daniels and John Krige, who place knowledge control as a central aim, by focusing on the perspective of the UK to the US-led system. The paper argues that British companies, civil servants and politicians worked within the export control system established by the United States but strained against its restrictions on trade; that the UK nevertheless had to balance a host of other demands, including encouraging trade, preservation of sterling, regulation of transborder movement of goods, widely understood; and that while the UK recognised the framing of export controls as a matter of knowledge control, the framing was not central to the complaints made against the system

Cold war · Political science · Law · Twentieth Century Scientific Developments

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