Aaron Bateman

Aaron Bateman is an assistant professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University. His research explores how science and technology shaped U.S. foreign relations, Western alliance dynamics, nuclear strategy, and superpower competition during the Cold War.

Aaron’s first book, Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative, is an international history of Ronald Reagan’s controversial missile defense effort: the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Using recently declassified documents, he situates SDI within intensifying U.S. - Soviet military space competition in the final two decades of the Cold War that emerged as détente collapsed. Moreover, he shows how the international political conditions in the 1980s shaped U.S. decisions about strategic defense technologies. Finally, he details SDI’s enduring consequences for arms control and its connections with resurgent anxieties about an arms race in space.

Aaron’s work has been published in the International History Review, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Diplomacy & Statecraft, Intelligence and National Security, the Oxford Handbook of Space Security, the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Science & Diplomacy, the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Engelsberg Ideas, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Physics Today, and Foreign Affairs.

Aaron received his PhD in history of science from Johns Hopkins University. While in graduate school he held a Guggenheim predoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.