Competing with the Soviets
Science, technology, and the state in Cold War America
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19915973 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Audra J Wolfe, Audra Wolfe (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Pages | 176 |
| Publication date | 2012-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | Competing with the Soviets (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Johns Hopkins University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.56021/9781421407692 |
| OpenAlex | W4312954711 |
| Open Library | OL35518936M |
| ISBN | 9781421407692 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 26 |
'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
Political science · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · 1945-1989 · 20th century · Cold war · History · Politics · Russia · Science · Soviet Union · Technology · united states · World politics
Counting One's Allies”
Science and American Foreign Relations since World War II
Generation Crisis
“Your genes, your choices” and public education about the ethical, legal and social issues of the Human Genome Project
Creating Space for Africa in International Relations? Contesting Ontological Security through Space Exploration
New and Old Cold Wars
Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Last Savage
Yugoslav science during the Cold War (1945–1960)
The Eagle, the Rocket, and the Moon
Centering future generations and sustaining our collective world
The emergence of university rankings
Conscription and the Color Line
Colonial legacies and the British geological survey in cold war South Asia
Imposing evenness, preventing combination
Innovation in the American Era of Industrial Preeminence
Branding the Earth
Evolution of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project
A different kind of synthesis
Science, geography, and nation
Technical assistance and socialist international health
Presenting Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer
The view from outer space
Development Capital
Dewey’s “Science as Method” a Century Later
The tentacles of surveillance
Traveling Concepts
| Unique citing works | 26 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2.17 |
| Citation span | 2014 - 2025 (12) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 25 |