Strange Stability
How Cold War Scientists Set Out to Control the Arms Race and Ended Up Serving the Military-Industrial Complex
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- $49.99
Publisher Description
An eye-opening reconsideration of the Cold War arms control movement, showing how scientists who presented themselves as independent-minded opponents of the arms race in fact functioned as agents of the military-industrial complex that profited from it.
Do scientists speak truth to power? During the Cold War, a group of elite American strategists and science advisors claimed to do precisely that. Styling themselves as figures of rationality and restraint, they insisted that mutual assured destruction was the natural logic of the atomic age: as long as nuclear deterrence was credible, no one would ever shoot first. This doctrine, known as “strategic stability,” became the foundation of the arms control movement, earning its promoters widespread admiration as independent thinkers and steadfast peacemakers. But in this crucial counterhistory, Benjamin Wilson shows that we have misunderstood them and their efforts. Arms controllers, he reveals, worked not to restrain the nuclear arms race but to marginalize more radical approaches to disarmament.
As Wilson makes clear, strategic stability was never the objective condition the analysts presented it as. It was a flexible, contested metaphor based on ideas from physics, economics, and cybernetics, capable of justifying a wide range of policies. Yet the advisors insisted on one upshot above all: constant military research and development and the continuous upgrading of America’s strategic arsenal. That these policies benefited the military-industrial complex is no surprise, since many arms control thinkers were creatures of the Pentagon and corporate defense contractors. Some even spoke out against missile development in public while backing lavish funding behind closed doors.
Strange Stability powerfully corrects decades of mythmaking surrounding arms control. At the same time, Wilson offers a sobering reflection on the dream of technocratic restraint. The well-placed insider who resists powerful institutions is an enticing character, but more fictional than real.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
