Competing with the Soviets

Competing with the Soviets
Author :
Publisher : JHU Press
Total Pages : 177
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781421409016
ISBN-13 : 1421409011
Rating : 4/5 (16 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Competing with the Soviets by : Audra J. Wolfe

Download or read book Competing with the Soviets written by Audra J. Wolfe and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A synthetic account of how science became a central weapon in the ideological Cold War. Honorable Mention for the Forum for the History of Science in America Book Prize of the Forum for the History of Science in America For most of the second half of the twentieth century, the United States and its allies competed with a hostile Soviet Union in almost every way imaginable except open military engagement. The Cold War placed two opposite conceptions of the good society before the uncommitted world and history itself, and science figured prominently in the picture. Competing with the Soviets offers a short, accessible introduction to the special role that science and technology played in maintaining state power during the Cold War, from the atomic bomb to the Human Genome Project. The high-tech machinery of nuclear physics and the space race are at the center of this story, but Audra J. Wolfe also examines the surrogate battlefield of scientific achievement in such diverse fields as urban planning, biology, and economics; explains how defense-driven federal investments created vast laboratories and research programs; and shows how unfamiliar worries about national security and corrosive questions of loyalty crept into the supposedly objective scholarly enterprise. Based on the assumption that scientists are participants in the culture in which they live, Competing with the Soviets looks beyond the debate about whether military influence distorted science in the Cold War. Scientists’ choices and opportunities have always been shaped by the ideological assumptions, political mandates, and social mores of their times. The idea that American science ever operated in a free zone outside of politics is, Wolfe argues, itself a legacy of the ideological Cold War that held up American science, and scientists, as beacons of freedom in contrast to their peers in the Soviet Union. Arranged chronologically and thematically, the book highlights how ideas about the appropriate relationships among science, scientists, and the state changed over time.


Competing with the Soviets Related Books

Science in Russia and the Soviet Union
Language: en
Pages: 354
Authors: Loren R. Graham
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 1993 - Publisher: Cambridge University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

By the 1980s the Soviet scientific establishment had become the largest in the world, but very little of its history was known in the West. What has been needed
Competing with the Soviets
Language: en
Pages: 177
Authors: Audra J. Wolfe
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2013-01-01 - Publisher: JHU Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A synthetic account of how science became a central weapon in the ideological Cold War. Honorable Mention for the Forum for the History of Science in America Bo
Science, Technology and the Future
Language: en
Pages: 489
Authors: E. P. Velikhov
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2013-10-22 - Publisher: Elsevier

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Science, Technology and the Future is an analysis of the problems of and prospects for the development of science and technology and their role in society. Draw
Stalin and the Scientists
Language: en
Pages: 491
Authors: Simon Ings
Categories: Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-02-21 - Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“One of the finest, most gripping surveys of the history of Russian science in the twentieth century.” —Douglas Smith, author of Former People: The Final
Science and Technology in the USSR
Language: en
Pages: 432
Authors: Michael J. Berry
Categories: Inventions
Type: BOOK - Published: 1988 - Publisher: Longman Publishing Group

DOWNLOAD EBOOK