Science, Politics and the Cold War

First published in 1988, Science, Politics and the Cold War is a history of the cold-war era that demonstrates the extent to which science and scientists have been implicated in every aspect of the political process.

The book discusses how politically aware scientists involved themselves in controversies relating to atomic technology and genetics, and how the science world became a battleground between competing ideologies. The politicisation of science is shown to go deeper than any individual issue―right-wing critics of the Soviet Union argued that true science and socialism were incompatible, whilst their opponents forwarded similar arguments about science and capitalism. At the same time, the science world always contained a powerful lobby for political non-alignment, a faction which saw and continues to see science as a force for internationalism. This volume analyses all these positions and draws out the main contours of the politics/science debate in this period.

Greta Jones is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Ulster, UK.