Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America by Mario Daniels and John Krige

Abstract

Reviewed by: Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America by Mario Daniels and John Krige Torsten Kathke (bio) Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America By Mario Daniels and John Krige. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. 440. Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America is Mario Daniels and John Krige's foray into a subject heretofore seldom explored: How did knowledge regulation—in the form of export controls for otherwise unclassified material, objects, and the movement of people with know-how—shape U.S. foreign policy from World War II on? And how did the complex rules governing the exportation of technologies and technical knowledge shape not only the sharing but also the creation of knowledge? Daniels and Krige's attempt is remarkable because of the breadth of the research required, but also because it breaks new ground. Academic insularity has previously precluded the further exploration of the category of "knowledge regulation" that they here propose as one of the central tenets of the national security state. Daniels and Krige especially single out the fields of economics, economic history, international relations, and security studies as "basically separate scholarly universes that barely overlap" (p. 15), echoing older critiques by Susan Strange and Michael Mastanduno. Knowledge regulation as defined by the authors traces its origins to the Espionage Act of 1917, which created a template that the United States would come back to in World War II and more permanently during the Cold War. Differing from other regimes of informational and economic control, like sanctions, export controls comprised information and "know-how"—a term emerging in the early Cold War to describe complete apparatuses of technological creation, including the researchers and engineers that operated them and their tacit knowledge—that were not directly classified but still considered as providing the United States with a valuable advantage over its rivals. This became known as "lead time," positing the United States as a technological leader that needed to use its technological prowess to keep Soviet Russia and its larger reserves of materiel and human power at bay. Even though it begins in fits and starts and remains contested between three departments of the U.S. government and their specialists (Commerce, State, and Defense), as well as Congress, the White House, companies, universities, and various adjacent bureaucracies, knowledge regulation, according to the authors, is one of the defining, if not the defining way in which U.S. foreign policy and the American scientific landscape developed since the 1940s. [End Page 636] The authors move chronologically through the development of this category, beginning with the lead-up to the Cold War from 1917 to 1945 and the early regulatory regime in the United States, as well as the development of knowledge regulation through the 1950s and 1960s. They then discuss the changes wrought on export controls beginning in the 1970s, including in academia. The second half of the book shifts geographically to Asia, addressing technology transfers to Japan in the 1980s and the challenges of the U.S.–Chinese relationship, with an epilogue about U.S.–Chinese relations and academia during the Trump administration concluding the study. Daniels and Krige offer up diligent and at times quite creative source work, and their argument that we should look at the category of "knowledge regulation" as one—though contradictory and hard to grasp—whole is a useful intervention. Framing the history of U.S. foreign policy in the second half of the twentieth century as concerned with hegemony through (military and commercial) technology, and therefore by extension its restriction, is a lens that scholars might do well to mount more often. What is somewhat missing from this book is the level of actors. While some individuals—mainly in government—do get attention, further studies should consider how academics and their institutions responded to the regulations they were faced with. Questions of whether restrictions applied to certain academics or engineers more than others, for example, would be an important aspect to explore. Were white, male, senior engineers considered more trustworthy than minorities, women, or junior ones? Did McCarthyite paranoia figure into the sanctioning of some individuals with know-how while others remained unencumbered? Knowledge...