Cold War Research Articles

Cold Moves: Cryogenics in Indo-German Research Networks.

By unravelling the complexities and dynamics of a collaboration between scientists in India and West Germany to establish a cryogenic network, this paper intends to contribute to our understanding of the transnational movement of research technologies during the Cold War. In 1971, a cryogenic laboratory including a helium and a nitrogen liquefier was set up at the physics department of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras as part of the Indo-German partnership at IIT Madras between 1959 and 1974. As a generic research technology with many applications, cryogenics became crucial for a solid state research agenda for semiconductor development. After initial difficulties, Ramaswami Srinivasan at IIT Madras and Gustav Klipping of the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin built a successful collaboration based on mutual trust and on Indian and German scientists travelling and working in each other's laboratories. If the initial motivation of the Indo-German partnership was informed by the logic of Cold War development policy, Klipping and Srinivasan developed their collaboration into a vibrant cryogenic research network around different actors, instruments, and skills moving between India and the Federal Republic of Germany.

Polish-Austrian Relations at the End of the Cold War in the Light of Polish Diplomatic Sources

Przyjęte metody badań historycznych miały za zadanie odpowiedzieć na pytanie, czy państwa wschodnie sąsiadujące z Austrią, ograniczone swym systemem gospodarczym i politycznym, mogły liczyć na pomoc w zakresie inicjowania reform politycznych. Dysproporcje pomiędzy demokratycznym Zachodem i komunistycznym Wschodem wpływały na Wiedeń niekorzystnie. Przyjęta teza badawcza dotyczy możliwości i skali zaangażowania Austrii na rzecz reform gospodarczych w Polsce. Austriacy uznali, że równomierny rozwój wschodnich sąsiadów służył rozwojowi Drugiej Republiki i konsekwentnie go wzmacniali. Austria wielokrotnie potwierdzała chęć pomocy Polsce, nie tylko humanitarnej, ale także dyplomatycznej i gospodarczej, bez konieczności negatywnej oceny działań władz komunistycznych. Dlatego charakterystyka Austrii w polskich dokumentach dyplomatycznych i oficjalnych komunikatach prasowych z lat 1985–1989 to obraz sojusznika i partnera. Przykładem skrzętnie wykorzystywanym przez polskie władze było oficjalne stanowisko Austrii i jej negatywna ocena sankcji gospodarczych nałożonych na Polskę przez Zachód. Narracja została podzielona na dwa okresy. Pierwszy dotyczy lat 1985–1986 i relacjonuje odradzanie stosunków po wprowadzeniu stanu wojennego w Polsce. Drugi etap dotyczy wspólnych działań w latach prowadzących do przełomu i „jesieni ludów”. Polityka rządu austriackiego wzmocniła funkcjonujący reżim i przedłużyła rozkład polskiego systemu politycznego. W nieoficjalnych rozmowach reformy gospodarcze w Polsce oceniano w Austrii jako powierzchowne i przewidywano załamanie gospodarcze, mogące mieć katastrofalne skutki dla całej Europy. Władze polskie wykorzystywały wpływy i pozycję neutralnej republiki do realizacji własnych celów, zwłaszcza do legitymizacji swoich rządów. Bilans stosunków dwustronnych w końcowym etapie zimnej wojny okazał się dla obu krajów niekorzystny.

Dynamic clustering of Asian regionalisms: Empirical testing of United Nations multilateral treaty participation by social network analysis

This paper investigates the evolving clustering and historical progression of “Asian regionalisms” concerning their involvement in multilateral treaties deposited in the United Nations system. We employ criteria such as geographic proximity, historical connections, cultural affinities, and economic interdependencies to identify twenty-eight candidate countries from East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia for this empirical testing. Using a social network analysis approach, we model the network of these twenty-eight Asian state actors alongside 600 major treaties from the United Nations system, identifying clusters among Asian states by assessing similarities in their treaty participation behavior. Specifically, we observe dynamic changes in these clusters across three key historical eras: Post-war reconstruction and transformation (1945–1968), Cold War tensions and global transformations (1969–1989), and post-Cold War era and globalization (1990–present). Employing the Louvain cluster detection algorithm, the results reveal the evolution in cluster numbers and changes in membership status throughout the world timeline. The results also identify the current situation of six distinct Asian clusters based on states’ inclinations to engage or abstain from multilateral treaties across six policy domains. These findings provide a foundation for further research on the trajectories of Asian regionalisms amidst evolving global dynamics and offer insights into potential alliances, cooperation, or conflicts within the region.

Black Marxism, Racial Capitalism, and Greek and Balkan Coloniality Studies: Toward an Abolitionist Perspective

The end of the Cold War marked the beginning of the Balkan and Greek postcolonial and de-colonial studies. The Yugoslav ethnic wars, the Greek “financial crisis,” and the European migration crisis generated a body of critical studies on regional nationalism, coloniality, and racialism and the Balkans and Greece's ambiguous relation to Europe. Cedric J. Robinson's Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition was missing from the large spectrum of postcolonial literature. This absence is surprising given that the book historicizes the simultaneous occurrence of colonialism, capitalism, racism, and modernity in the Balkan and the East Mediterranean during the late feudalism. The absence of this history from the Balkan's post and de-colonial studies deprives these studies of an abolitionist perspective; rather than opting for “provincializing Europe” empowered by this history of the native enslavements and colonization, these studies, much as Black radicalism should mobilize the region for the political culture for the abolition of “Europe.”

‘That is where the similarity ends’: refugee policies, communities, and connections between Cubans and Vietnamese

ABSTRACT This article explores US Cold War refugee policies toward Cubans and Vietnamese, as well as moments of connection between both communities in the United States. First, it identifies the legal and political scaffolding on which US government officials admitted and resettled Cuban and then Vietnamese refugees, since these bureaucracies often viewed Vietnamese refugees in light of, and in contrast to, their Cuban predecessors. Secondly, it explores diasporic connections, reflections, and refractions, highlighting where each community’s experience mirrored one another, differed, or directly crossed. These diasporic recognitions and misrecognitions demonstrate how Cold War refugee policy and politics played out on the ground through the often-unanticipated political actions of the Cuban and Vietnamese communities themselves.

EGO to ECO: Tracing the History of Radioecology from the 1950s to the Present Day.

This paper starts with a brief history of the birth of the field of radioecology during the Cold War with a focus on US activity. We review the establishment of the international system for radiation protection and the science underlying the guidelines. We then discuss the famous ICRP 60 statement that if "Man" is protected, so is everything else and show how this led to a focus in radioecology on pathways to "Man" rather than concern about impacts on environments or ecosystems. We then review the contributions of Radiation Research Society members and papers published in Radiation Research which contributed to the knowledge base about effects on non-human species. These fed into international databases and computer-based tools such as ERICA and ResRad Biota to guide regulators. We then examine the origins of the concern that ICRP 60 is not sufficient to protect ecosystems and discuss the establishment of ICRP Committee 5 and its recommendations to establish reference animals and plants. The review finishes with current concerns that reference animals and plants (RAPs) are not sufficient to protect ecosystems, given the complexity of interacting factors such as the climate emergency and discusses the efforts of ICRP, the International Union of Radioecologists and other bodies to capture the concepts of ecosystem services and ecosystem complexity modelling in radioecology.

Pecos Bill and the campaign against children’s Comics in Postwar Italy

ABSTRACT This essay studies the case of Pecos Bill: The Legendary Hero of Texas, a western comic published in Italy by Mondadori from 1949 to 1954. I analyze the series in the context of the widespread national campaign against comics and in relation to the cultural politics of Mondadori’s corporate partner Walt Disney. Both Catholic and Leftist critics condemned western fictions because of their violent and sexual content. Debates about children’s magazines and their educational purposes, on the other hand, were minimally concerned with how western narratives represented race, ethnicity, or gender. Pecos Bill was blacklisted,even though Mondadori’s cowboy is a wholesome hero who never fires a gun. Starting from this discrepancy, my analysis sheds light on the contradictions within the campaign against comics and explores issues of identity politics in Italian children’s readings. I demonstrate that representations of Mexican and African characters, as well as of whiteness and of American history, promoted the same anti-leftist and racist discourses of Disney’s western fictions at the time of the Cold War.

Contesting American hegemony: attacks to US scientific initiatives in Cold War Europe (and means to secretly defy these challenges)

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the French communist scientists’ attack, executed in 1953, on US initiatives for the promotion of science in Europe. Collated in the anonymous booklet Un plan U.S.A. de mainmise sur la science, these accusations caused a sensation in the already tense political climate of the early 1950s by alleging that American initiatives offered cover to intelligence operations, and a chokehold on the development of European science. While US government agencies never offered an official comment on these indictments, in great secrecy their officials sought to find out about the booklet’s authors, identify potential leaks of restricted information that might have informed its completion, and reorient science initiatives in Europe because of what the communist propaganda exposed. This essay thus argues that US efforts to reduce the impact that the publication had in France (and Western Europe more generally) played a role in shaping American hegemony, since finding ways to deflate the influence of dissenting voices in European science, at times stealthily, was as decisive as consensus building through the strengthening of transatlantic scientific relations.

Melzer and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Anna Seghers’s GDR novel Die Entscheidung (1959)

Abstract This article is about German-Jewish author Anna Seghers (1900–1983), who spent half of her productive life in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Though Seghers is known for her works from the 1930s and 1940s such as The Seventh Cross (1942), about a prisoner who escapes from a concentration camp, little has been published about her writings under communism, after she returned from fourteen years of exile, having survived National Socialism while active in the resistance. Her mother and aunt were murdered in the Shoah, and Seghers ostensibly discontinued addressing the National Socialist German past once the GDR was founded (in 1949). However, as this article demonstrates, her ‘socialist realist’ novel, Die Entscheidung (1959), complicates this seeming erasure of Seghers's Jewish identity, which can be seen not only in response to the increasing antisemitism in eastern Europe during the Cold War, but also attests to her actual and continuous—albeit ‘hidden’—engagement with the Jewish culture and history of her childhood and youth. Through the autobiographical character Herbert Melzer, it becomes possible to identify secret references and allusions to the Dead Sea Scrolls, first discovered in Qumran in 1947–1953—the same time at which Seghers set the novel. While she was confronted with surveillance, travel restrictions, and censorship, Seghers maintained her own personal exploration of Judaica, as evidenced by her published letters and the contents of her personal library (now the Anna Seghers Archive). This article argues that Seghers persisted in retaining and expressing her original Jewish self-identification through fiction, even in this, her seemingly most ‘socialist realist’ novel.

Transnational socialist encounters in the Second Socialist World: the case of the Chilean Museum of Solidarity

ABSTRACT The objective of this article is to analyze from an interdisciplinary perspective, that uses transnational and cross-regional cultural studies of the Second Socialist World, the unique example of the Chilean Museum of Solidarity in the context of its relations with the socialist countries in Eastern Europe during the 1970s. The originality of this case study is that it has not been previously analyzed and it helps explain the threads uniting countries of the Second Socialist World and the role of cultural relations as they were established during the Cold War between socialist countries in the south and the east. As a methodology, this article uses a qualitative “small number” approach to analyze cultural relationships between socialist countries. The conclusions show that, for some countries, such as Romania, cultural relations were important in establishing an autonomous policy from Moscow, such as that of Nicolae Ceausescu, but the type of artistic exchanges promoted witnessed an aesthetic paradox, supporting a depoliticized version of art. Moreover, the path-dependency argument for cultural relationships between socialist countries is partially verified.

Beyond the Novel: Satire in Eastern Europe and Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s Mondegreen (2019)

ABSTRACT This essay’s theoretical goal is to examine the possibilities of conceptualizing literary cultures of Eastern Europe as a world-literary region in its own right. This region, formerly part of the so-called “Second World,” has virtually disappeared from the comparative literary scene after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. At the same time, the end of the Cold War coincided with the renewal of the debates about “world literature,” where the old opposition between “West” and “East” has been redrawn along the lines of “North” and “South.” This article focuses on a particular case in-between – Eastern Europe – as it takes on the double issue of “internal Orientalism” within Europe and the homogenizing effects of the privileged status of the novel in world-literary theory today. I draw on contemporary Ukrainian fiction to critique what I term a homogeneric vision of the contemporary world-literary field.

BIKINI ATOLL, NEVADA, MOSCOW. WASHINGTON’S LONG ROAD TO THE PARTIAL TEST BAN TREATY (1958–1963)

The conclusion of the 1963 Moscow Treaty banning nuclear weapon tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water is an important milestone in the history of the Cold War. It was preceded by long and complex negotiations between the USSR and the US. Measures to impose a moratorium on tests (August 1958 — August 1961) did not yield signifi cant results either in reducing harmful environmental consequences or in reducing the risk of nuclear conflict. In addition, the issue of at least partial test ban was closely linked to the political contradictions between the superpowers, in particular, regarding the status of Berlin. On 9 September 1961, the negotiations were stopped. In the fall, the USSR conducted a large series of explosions, and advances in weapons development required new tests. Moscow’s decision to withdraw from the moratorium was dictated by the desire to demonstrate to its opponents the readiness for any emergency. In 1962, the events around Cuba led not only to intensified testing by both powers, but also to the acute Cuban Missile Crisis in October, when the danger of using nuclear weapons became quite real. The August 1963 treaty was one of the immediate outcomes of the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, it is also important that the superpowers came to the signing of the Moscow Treaty only after their scientific and technological achievements (including, above all, the results of nuclear tests) had been able to ensure a confident strategic deterrence of each other. The tests of nuclear devices conducted by both powers in 1961 and 1962 allowed them to equip all types of carriers with warheads as part of their planned programs to renew strategic nuclear arsenals. At the same time, the Moscow Treaty created a basis for harmonizing the positions of the US and the USSR with regard to nuclear nonproliferation for many years to come.

Back to the future: re-examining John Mearsheimer’s idea of hypernationalism in the context of the Russian–Ukrainian war

ABSTRACT Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine is an opportunity for readdressing a crucial theoretical question: How to understand the role of hypernationalism in the run-up to war? Given the participation of Ukrainian ultranationalist militias and Russia’s goal of de-Nazifying Ukraine, a need emerges to provide a greater understanding of hypernationalism and its relation to this war’s origins. By going back to John Mearsheimer’s 1990 article ‘Back to the future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War’, this article examines Mearsheimer’s idea of hypernationalism and the problem of how states can signify other nations most negatively in the run-up to war. Drawing on a problem-driven strategy, it tackles this problem by applying ‘Essex School’ poststructuralist discourse theory. It argues that Ukrainian hypernationalism played a vital role in the genesis of this war, although not as a stable set of principles that possess a causal force but as a political subjectivity that the Russian government signified as a threat to its national identity. I use this distinction to theorise the role of hypernationalism by examining Russian official statements about Ukrainian neo-Nazism.

Unsuccessful Effort of the Superpowers to Settle the Arab-Israeli Conflict in the Aftermath of the Six-Day War: The Gromyko-Goldberg Agreement

ABSTRACT In the aftermath of the Six-Day War between Israel and Arab countries, the Soviets and the Americans were locked in a diplomatic and propaganda battle in the UN over the future of the vast territories that Israel had conquered. Fearing that their Middle-Eastern clients, namely Egypt and Israel, could drag them into a direct clash, the two superpowers maintained secret contacts parallel to their power struggle in the UN in an effort to reach an agreement on principles to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Studies that analyze the diplomatic and political consequences of the Six-Day War tend to belittle or even ignore the tentative agreement reached between Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko and Arthur Goldberg, the US ambassador to the UN. This article offers a new perspective on the neglected Gromyko-Goldberg agreement and a new interpretation of its indirect role in bringing the two superpowers to support UN Resolution 242 that formed the foundation for future diplomatic efforts to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict, including the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt signed in March 1979. The article also illustrates the negative impact of the Cold War on the two superpowers’ attempts to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Transition of Bulgarian Military Intelligence in the Post–Cold War Era: From Warsaw Pact to NATO (1989–2004)

The reconstruction of the history of the Bulgarian military intelligence services in the first fifteen years of post–Cold War democratic transition until the accession of the country to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been rarely discussed in contemporary historiography so far. The proposed publication was based on various newly declassified archival sources, as well as on some personal recollections. The transformation of the Bulgarian military intelligence services in those years could be separated into three basic stages, in parallel with the transformation of the Armed Forces and the society as a whole.

Soldiers of Fortune, Soldiers of God: Evangelical Mercenaries and the Making of the Rhodesian-American Religious Lobby, 1965–1980

ABSTRACT This article tracks the emergence, evolution, and decline of the Rhodesian-American religious lobby, a transnational network of churches, magazines, lobbying groups, and other non-state actors that operated during the Rhodesian Bush War from 1965 to 1980. Voicing its concerns in religious, racial, and anticommunist terms, the lobby recruited US combatants into the Rhodesian Security Forces and mobilised US evangelicals to press political leaders to recognise Rhodesian sovereignty. By threading together the post-Vietnam mercenary diaspora with waning segregationist groups and the emerging Christian Right in the United States, the lobby significantly shaped US-Rhodesia relations and global far-right politics in the late Cold War.

Soldiers of Fortune, Soldiers of God: Evangelical Mercenaries and the Making of the Rhodesian-American Religious Lobby, 1965–1980

ABSTRACT This article tracks the emergence, evolution, and decline of the Rhodesian-American religious lobby, a transnational network of churches, magazines, lobbying groups, and other non-state actors that operated during the Rhodesian Bush War from 1965 to 1980. Voicing its concerns in religious, racial, and anticommunist terms, the lobby recruited US combatants into the Rhodesian Security Forces and mobilised US evangelicals to press political leaders to recognise Rhodesian sovereignty. By threading together the post-Vietnam mercenary diaspora with waning segregationist groups and the emerging Christian Right in the United States, the lobby significantly shaped US-Rhodesia relations and global far-right politics in the late Cold War.

Refuge in Revolution: Chilean and Uruguayan Exiles in Cuba, 1973-1990

ABSTRACT This article examines the refuge revolutionary Cuba offered to Chilean and Uruguayan exiles. Fleeing dictatorships during Latin America’s Cold War, thousands arrived in, or passed through, Cuba. Cuba was a logical refuge, representing a revolution suffused with promises of solidarity, internationalism and socialist modernity. It was also conceived as a route of resistance and return. Centring the memories of former exiles, this article examines expectations and reality of refuge in Cuba. Revealing a diversity of exile experiences, it asks what different forms of refuge existed in Cuba, how these evolved and with what significance for understanding the Cold War.

Cybernetic States: Communication, Control, and State-Space in the Advanced Research Projects Agency

While political geographers have researched state restructuring extensively over the past forty years, few have explored the role of cybernetics in this process. Conversely, although a wide spectrum of scholars outside of geography have shed light on aspects of cybernetic governance, they have yet to incorporate insights from political geography. In both cases, the political geography of cybernetic state power remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, the article explores the nexus of cybernetics and state restructuring in the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a Cold War US defense research agency, circa 1958 to 1969. It analyzes Congressional testimonies by ARPA-sponsored scientists and engineers alongside their academic publications and other papers to grasp how they conceived of and actively sought to transform state-space. The article makes two arguments. First, while geographers treat state restructuring as a function of neoliberalization or War on Terror securitization, the process was set in motion near the start of the Cold War. It was then that ARPA's appeal to cybernetics to resolve geopolitical conflicts cemented the logical, organizational, and technical foundations for neoliberal and War on Terror state mutations. Second, the main thrust of ARPA responses to Cold War crises involved restructuring state-power in the mode of a cybernetic feedback control system. These efforts bring into relief a distinct object of analysis, the state control system (SCS), which offers geographers fresh perspectives on state restructuring and opens new pathways for interdisciplinary research.

Forward defense – concept, plan, and action for solving russian aggression at Nato's easternd border

Forward defense is not a new concept. It is rather traditional, coming from the Cold War and implying, originally, the nuclear posture and strategy. Following the issuance of the Madrid NATO Strategic Concept and Vilnius statement that not an inch of the Alliance’s territory will fall under the control of the opponents, a new approach to forward defense is needed to cope with the multiple shifts in the security environment: Russian war of aggression, the change of technological generation, dilemmas of resources and apabilities, limits and multiple challenges from the international environment with superposed simultaneous crises. The perspective of possible attacks on NATO territory – in the next 2-3-5-8 years – requires a review of the concept and, consequently, of the political decisions, strategic planning, enforcement of those decisions, and development of forces and capabilities on the ground. Combining nuclear flexible capabilities, a strategy of massive retaliation with conventional forces and deterrence by reinforcement, deterrence by denial, forward presence, rapid projection capabilities, resolution, effective decisionmaking, and forward posture, we could build a new, updated doctrine of forward defense. However, the debate has to consider what is theoretically developed, technically feasible, politically acceptable, financially sustainable, and strategically credible in the „new forward defense” for granting inviolability of allied territory. The basic limitation is to define and refine forward defense without a reconsideration beyond existing means.