Review of "Redefining Science: Scientists, the National Security State, and Nuclear Weapons in Cold War America" by Paul Rubinson

The aim of this proposal is to offer an alternative perspective on the study of Cold War, since insufficient attention is usually paid to those organizations that mobilized against the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons. The antinuclear movement began to mobilize between the 1950s and the 1960s, when it finally gained the attention of public opinion, and helped to build a sort of global conscience about nuclear bombs. This was due to the activism of a significant part of the international scientific community, which offered powerful intellectual and political legitimization to the struggle, and to the combined actions of the scientific and organized protests. This antinuclear conscience is something we usually tend to consider as a fait accompli in contemporary world, but the question is to show its roots, and the way it influenced statesmen and political choices during the period of nuclear confrontation of the early Cold War. To understand what this conscience could be and how it should be defined, we have to look at the very meaning of the nuclear weapons that has deeply modified the sense of war. Nuclear weapons seemed to be able to destroy human beings everywhere with no realistic forms of control of the damages they could set off, and they represented the last resource in the wide range of means of mass destruction. Even if we tend to consider this idea fully rational and incontrovertible, it was not immediately born with the birth of nuclear weapons themselves. Or, better, not everyone in the world did immediately share it. Due to the particular climate of Cold War confrontation, deeply influenced by the persistence of realistic paradigms in international relations, British and U.S. governments looked at nuclear weapons simply as «a bullet». From the Trinity Test to the signature of the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, many things happened that helped to shift this view upon nuclear weapons. First of all, more than ten years of scientific protests provided a more concerned knowledge about consequences of nuclear tests and about the use of nuclear weapons. Many scientists devoted their social activities to inform public opinion and policy-makers about the real significance of the power of the atom and the related danger for human beings. Secondly, some public figures, as physicists, philosophers, biologists, chemists, and so on, appealed directly to the human community to «leave the folly and face reality», publicly sponsoring the antinuclear conscience. Then, several organizations leaded by political, religious or radical individuals gave to this protests a formal structure. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Great Britain, as well as the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy in the U.S., represented the voice of the masses against the attempts of governments to present nuclear arsenals as a fundamental part of the international equilibrium. Therefore, the antinuclear conscience could be defined as an opposite feeling to the development and the use of nuclear weapons, able to create a political issue oriented to the influence of military and foreign policies. Only taking into consideration the strength of this pressure, it seems possible to understand not only the beginning of nuclear negotiations, but also the reasons that permitted Cold War to remain cold.

My dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of the Korean War stories in America in relation to the history of the national security state of America from the Cold War to post-911 era. Categorizing the Korean War stories in three phases in parallel with three dramatic episodes in the national security of America, including the institutionalization of national security in the early Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bipolar Cold War system in the 1990s, and the institutionalization of homeland security after the 9/11 attacks, I argue that storytelling of the Korean War morphs with the changes of national security politics in America. Reading James Michener’s Korean War stories, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and The Manchurian Candidate (1962) in the 1950s and early 1960s, I argue that the first-phase Korean War stories cooperated with the state, translating and popularizing key themes in the national security policies through racial and gender tropes. Focusing on Helie Lee’s Still Life with Rice (1996), Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student (1998), and Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother (1996) in the 1990s, I maintain that the second-phase Korean War stories by Korean American writers form a narrative resistance against the ideology of national security and provide alternative histories of racial and gender violence in America’s national security programs. Further reading post-911 Korean War novels such as Toni Morrison’s Home (2012), Ha Jin’s War Trash (2005), and Chang-Rae Lee’s The Surrendered (2010), I contend that in the third-phase Korean War stories, the Korean War is deployed as a historical analogy to understand the War on Terror and diverse writers’ revisiting the war offers alternative perspectives on healing and understanding “homeland” for a traumatized American society. Taken together, these Korean War stories exemplify the politics of storytelling that engages with the national security state and the complex ways individual narratives interact with national narratives. Moreover, the continued morphing of the Korean War in literary representation demonstrates the vitality of the “forgotten war” and constantly reminds us the war’s legacy.

danger of nuclear weapon usage. January this year, the well known doomsday clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was set at 11.55 the closest to doomsday since the end of the cold war. The rising anxieties about nuclear weapons are rooted in two major and parallel developments in recent years: the so-called renaissance of nuclear power and a resurgence of oldfashioned national security threats that supposedly had ebbed with the end of the cold war. After the well publicised accidents at Three Mile Island (us 1979) and Chernobyl (Ukraine but at the time of the former Soviet Union 1986), public and political opposition to nuclear power was so strong that many existing reactor plants were shut down, plans for new ones were cancelled, and virtually no new reactor was built over the last decade. With the spiralling price of oil, caused by a spike in demand from booming major economies like China and India and disruptions to supply because of conflicts in west Asia, the economics of even risk-discounted nuclear

‘Your Vigilance is the Price of Your Freedom! Volunteer for Civil Defense Now!’: Shaping U.S. Public Opinion Using Television as a Propaganda Tool By Manivone Sayasone T he conclusive year of World War II showcased a terrifying reality that the people of the United States were forced to confront. Once they entered the Cold War in 1947, Americans faced an era where oceanic barriers could no longer prevent “potential aggressors” from devastating the United States with “long-range bombers, aircraft carriers, and atomic weapons.” 1 The majority of Americans perceived the Soviet Union as a major aggressor because the incompatibilities of their political and economic ideologies could have led the Soviet Union to attack the United States with nuclear weapons. Since the Soviet Union also felt the need to defend against the United States’ nuclear weapons, the two global powers compete to establish a national security state by creating alliances through foreign intervention and by increasing the quantity and quality of their weapons. The ability to establish a national security state was dependent on the utilization of a nation’s domestic resources including raw materials and the labor of its “citizen soldiers in farms and factories.” 2 Therefore, the U.S. government augmented its efforts to generate public support for the development of a national security state by using various forms of propaganda. One of the effective forms of propaganda the government used to shape public opinion about the Cold War in the 1950s was televised, informational films with themes that emphasized the United States’ vulnerability to communist threats, the importance of civic duty, and the preconceived undertones of capitalist and communist societies. National Security Ideologies of the Truman Administration Many of the informational propaganda films released during the early years of the Cold War featured themes based on ideologies that are found in political documents including George Kennan’s 1946 long telegram, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct;” Clark Clifford’s and George Elsey’s 1946 Clifford-Elsey Report, and President Harry Truman’s 1947 speech, the “Truman Doctrine.” 3 As modern viewers would notice in U.S. televised propaganda, each document had an ideology that depicted the Soviet Union and its communist regime as terrifying and tremendous threats that must be contained by the United States before they “encroach upon the interest of a peaceful and stable world.” 4 If the U.S. failed to contain communism globally, Harry Truman stressed in the Truman Doctrine that the U.S. risks endangering the “welfare of [its] own nation” as well. 5 Many propaganda films also depicted the Soviet Union and Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945- 1954 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2. Ibid., 12. Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945- 1954 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10-12. George Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, (New York, Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.:July 1947), n.p. Harry Truman, “Address Before Join Session of Congress (Truman Doctrine Speech)” (Washington, D.C., U.S. Congress: March 12, 1947), n.p.

In the wake of 9/11, many Americans have deplored the dangers to liberty posed by a growing surveillance state. In this book, Andrea Friedman moves beyond the standard security/liberty dichotomy, weaving together often forgotten episodes of early Cold War history to reveal how the obsession with national security enabled dissent and fostered new imaginings of democracy. The stories told here capture a wide-ranging debate about the workings of the national security state and the meaning of American citizenship. Some of the participants in this debate - women like war bride Ellen Knauff and Pentagon employee Annie Lee Moss - were able to make their own experiences compelling examples of the threats posed by the national security regime. Others, such as Ruth Reynolds and Lolita Lebron, who advocated an end to American empire in Puerto Rico, or the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who sought to change the very definition of national security, were less successful. Together, however, they exposed the gap between democratic ideals and government policies. Friedman traverses immigration law and loyalty boards, popular culture and theoretical treatises, U.S. courtrooms and Puerto Rican jails, to demonstrate how Cold War repression made visible in new ways the unevenness and limitations of American citizenship. Highlighting the ways that race and gender shaped critiques and defences of the national security regime, she offers new insight into the contradictions of Cold War political culture.

Challenging widely held assumptions about postwar gay male culture and politics, Homosexuality in Cold War America examines how gay men in the 1950s resisted pressures to remain in the closet. Robert J. Corber argues that a form of gay male identity emerged in the 1950s that simultaneously drew on and transcended left-wing opposition to the Cold War cultural and political consensus. Combining readings of novels, plays, and films of the period with historical research into the national security state, the growth of the suburbs, and postwar consumer culture, Corber examines how gay men resisted the organization man model of masculinity that rose to dominance in the wake of World War II. By exploring the representation of gay men in film noir, Corber suggests that even as this Hollywood genre reinforced homophobic stereotypes, it legitimized the gay male gaze. He emphasizes how film noir’s introduction of homosexual characters countered the national project to render gay men invisible, and marked a deep subversion of the Cold War mentality. Corber then considers the work of gay male writers Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin, demonstrating how these authors declined to represent homosexuality as a discrete subculture and instead promoted a model of political solidarity rooted in the shared experience of oppression. Homosexuality in Cold War America reveals that the ideological critique of the dominant culture made by gay male authors of the 1950s laid the foundation for the gay liberation movement of the following decade.

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was opened for signature on July 1st, 1968, after a long, difficult and complex process of negotiation, in which important events in the history of the Cold War were involved. The NPT entered into force on March 1970. At that time, there were only five nuclear-weapon States (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France and China). One aim of the Treaty was to prevent any increase in the number of nuclear-armed States, in order to avoid the risk of a nuclear conflict. Another goal was to foster peaceful uses of nuclear energy. For this reason, a safeguards system was established under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Defined by President Johnson as a “triumph of sanity and man’s will to survive”, today the Non-Proliferation Treaty is considered a milestone in the history of arms control and nuclear disarmament. This article examines the important role of President Johnson and his Administration during the process of negotiation and the impact of the MLF question and China’s detonation of a nuclear device (1964) on the NPT.

In the wake of the Cold War era, researchers have begun to theorize the US national security state. This article is a preliminary attempt to theorize the place of children and childhood in the American `Cold War Consensus' of the 1950s and early 1960s. Children were widely depicted in the Cold War era as innocent beings at the heart of the contained domestic world, as objects of strictly gender-divided parental care and protection, and as the vulnerable core of American society, whose protection from foreign enemies required the construction of a vast and powerful nuclear defense system. The article counterposes dominant Cold War images of abstract, generic children (invariably presented as white and middle class) to the actual children most vulnerable to risks associated with nuclear weapons production and testing, and with government-sponsored radiation experiments. In various ways, these were all seen as `deviant' children, whose lives could legitimately be put at risk in the interests of safeguarding `normal' children at the heart of Cold War visions of American society.

Introduction: Global Order, Cooperation between the Superpowers, and Alliance Politics in the Making of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime

The gridlock imposed by the Cold. War over South Asian relationships meant that an unprecedented number of lethal weapons were introduced into the region in the 1970s and 1980s.1 The Cold War also contributed directly to the introduction of technology associated with nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. The most obvious example was the case of Pakistan. Because the United States needed Pakistan as a front-line state in its efforts to dislodge the Soviet Union from Mghanistan, Washington turned a blind-eye to Pakistan’s nuclear activities and continued to supply it with sophisticated conventional weapons throughout the 1980s.2 Similarly, the close relationship that developed between China and Pakistan under the structure of the Cold War assisted the transfer of ballistic missiles, ballistic missile technology and possibly also nuclear weapons technology between the two.3

Nuclear weapons play an essential role in United States (U.S.) National Security Policy and a succession of official reviews has concluded that nuclear weapons will continue to have a role for the foreseeable future. Under the evolving U.S. government policy, it is clear that role will be quite different from what it was during the Cold War. The nuclear-weapons stockpile as well as the nuclear-weapons enterprise needs to continue to change to reflect this evolving role. Stockpile reductions in the early 1990s and the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP), established after the cessation of nuclear testing in 1992, began this process of change. Further evolution is needed to address changing security environments, to enable further reductions in the number of stockpiled weapons, and to create a nuclear enterprise that is cost effective and sustainable for the long term. The SSP has successfully maintained the U.S. nuclear stockpile for more than a decade, since the end of nuclear testing. Current plans foresee maintaining warheads produced in the 1980s until about 2040. These warheads continue to age and they are expensive to refurbish. The current Life Extension Program plans for these legacy warheads are straining both the nuclear-weapons production and certification infrastructure makingmore » it difficult to respond rapidly to problems or changes in requirements. Furthermore, refurbishing and preserving Cold-War-era nuclear weapons requires refurbishing and preserving an infrastructure geared to support old technology. Stockpile Stewardship could continue this refurbishment approach, but an alternative approach could be considered that is more focused on sustainable technologies, and developing a more responsive nuclear weapons infrastructure. Guided by what we have learned from SSP during the last decade, the stewardship program can be evolved to address this increasing challenge using its computational and experimental tools and capabilities. This approach must start with an improved vision of the future stockpile and enterprise, and find a path that moves us toward that future. The goal of this approach is to achieve a more affordable, sustainable, and responsive enterprise. In order to transform the enterprise in this way, the SSP warhead designs that drive the enterprise must change. Designs that emphasize manufacturability, certifiability, and increased safety and security can enable enterprise transformation. It is anticipated that such warheads can be certified and sustained with high confidence without nuclear testing. The SSP provides the tools to provide such designs, and can develop replacement designs and produce them for the stockpile. The Cold War currency of optimizing warhead yield-to-weight can be replaced by SSP designs optimizing margin-to-uncertainty. The immediate challenge facing the nuclear weapons enterprise is to find a credible path that leads to this vision of the future stockpile and enterprise. Reliable warheads within a sustainable enterprise can best be achieved by shifting from a program of legacy-warhead refurbishment to one of warhead replacement. The nuclear weapons stockpile and the nuclear weapons enterprise must transform together to achieve this vision. The current Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program represents an approach that can begin this process of transformation. If the RRW program succeeds, the designs, manufacturing complex, and certification strategy can evolve together and in so doing come up with a more cost-efficient solution that meets today's and tomorrow's national security requirements.« less

The object of the research is intelligent systems for collecting, processing and analyzing information about the state of national security. Investigated problem: The problem that is solved in the research is the problem of building intelligent systems for collecting, processing and analyzing information about the state of national security with limitations on the available computing resources, reliability and given speed of processing of various types of data circulating in it. The main scientific results obtained during the study by the authors are: proposed approach to the development of intelligent systems for the collection, processing and analysis of information on the state of the state's national security. The proposed approach takes into account the security of the system, available forces and means, purpose, system effect, method of formation, resource composition, structure, management, the process of functioning according to the purpose, resource consumption and the specified efficiency criterion. This will allow to justify the requirements for software and hardware of intelligent systems for collecting, processing and analyzing information about the state of the state's national security. proposed architecture of intelligent systems for collecting, processing and analyzing information about the state of national security of the state. Its approximate composition, functional purpose and structure of the database management system are substantiated. The area of practical use of the research results: It is advisable to use the proposed scientific results when conducting research and development works on the creation of intelligent systems for collecting, processing and analyzing information about the state of national security of the state, and developing requirements for hardware and software of this type of systems. Field of application: software, information systems, decision support systems.

This is an arresting book, grounded in truly formidable archival research, illuminated by well-chosen and diverting case studies, and written with deft and elegant use of the English language. Its central preoccupation is with the complex tensions between the demands of national security and the claims of citizenship. When the George W. Bush administration beefed up the surveillance of American citizens in the wake of 9/11, civil liberties groups worried that American freedoms were being eroded. Measures designed to protect the American public thus triggered a heightened concern about the rights of citizens, but those rights arguably depended on the protections afforded by the Patriot Act and other state measures. It is this conundrum that makes this book so timely, as it examines the contradictions inherent in a democracy protecting itself from subversion during the Cold War years. These contradictions throw the focus on the meaning of citizenship, itself subject to a range of ideological, constitutional, and social pressures. This book is thus more an exercise in political theory than in history as commonly understood, but its subtle analysis adds insight to our understanding of a critical period.

Redefining Science: Scientists, the National Security State, and Nuclear Weapons in Cold War America

Presidential Candidates Speak Out on Science Policies