Controlling Knowledge, Controlling People: Travel Restrictions of U.S. Scientists and National Security*

Abstract

In the early Cold War, the production, dissemination, and control over scientific-technological knowledge became a central concern of the fledgling national security state. Soviet scientific and technological achievements posed a severe threat to American military power and global political hegemony. Maintaining the United States’ competitive edge required both a major injection of federal resources to stimulate the national Research and Development (R & D) system, and a clamp down on the international circulation of knowledge, including the travel of scientists in both directions across the U.S. border. The U.S. security agencies began to monitor the international travel of scientists in order to control the knowledge they carried in their heads and in their hands. Passport denials and restrictions became one of the main instruments of control and surveillance. Jessica Wang and others have described important aspects of Cold War travel restrictions. Scholars have argued that because such impediments were based on political criteria and seen through the lens of McCarthyism, they constituted “the worst excesses of Cold War political repression.” These studies focus on the struggle of individual scientists against the “discrimination and harassment” of red-baiters and a national security state that overreached its authority.1 Admittedly analyzing the restrictions from the scientists’ point of view does throw some light on the government’s disregard for civil rights and the values of scientific freedom. However, this emphasis on the scientist as victim misses at least four crucial dimensions.