The growth of science and of technological knowhow throughout the twentieth century shaped much of the format for the Cold War. To many people, the conflict was about the products of the new science, and first and foremost about nuclear weapons and the threat their use posed to all humanity. The remarkable level of investment both superpowers made into research and technology gives credence to this view. But, as in the earlier conflicts of the century, the relationship between science, political ideology, and social structure is a complex one, in which these fields of human activity influence each other. Science did not create the Cold War, but it helped shape it into a distinctive conflict, and into one that was more dangerous and harder to end than other great-power rivalries in history.
Most Cold War science has its starting point in one of the two main discoveries of the early twentieth century: the Cambridge physicist Ernest Rutherford’s reporting on the structure of the atom in 1911 and the Columbia University biologist Thomas Morgan’s outline of the hereditary role of genes the following year. Together with breakthroughs in technological innovation, such as Guglielmo Marconi’s sending radio signals across the Atlantic in 1901 and Orville and Wilbur Wright’s flying of the first aircraft on the beaches of North Carolina in 1903, the beginning of atomic and genetic science furnished many of the means of competition that fueled the Cold War and made it into a global phenomenon. By 1945, all of the basic building blocks for the scientific cultivation of the Cold War were in place and already fitted into the political purposes for which the American and Soviet systems wanted to use them.
The increase in energy supplies available for industrial production and industrial-scale destruction was at the core of the Cold War; it could be said that energy drove the conflict in more than one sense. Oil and nuclear power increased the potential for military production, but cheap energy also promised a new life for ordinary people, by making industrial jobs more widely available and less burdensome, and by making goods cheaper. For the United States, especially, access to inexpensive energy became both a Cold War aim (through US control of the Middle East oil supplies) and an aim of the development of science. For both superpowers, the production of nuclear weapons defined their military capabilities and the state of the rivalry between them. While the Cold War arms race was not structurally different from earlier arms races between great powers, the destructive energy that it quite literally contained made its significance greater relative to diplomacy and strategy.
Other main applications of the advances in science and technology in the early part of the century were in transport and communication. By the 1940s, the United States could project its military power all over the globe through its navy and its air force. Twenty years later the Soviet Union could do the same. The combination of cheap energy and radio communications allowed the superpowers to keep large navies at sea at any time, or in bases abroad. It also, of course, allowed them to build nuclear missiles and guidance systems to train on each other and each other’s allies. But, especially in the capitalist world, many ofthe advances in transport and communication were also put to civilian use, such as in the globalization of air traffic, entertainment through television, and the internet. The global market revolution ofthe late twentieth century, which did much to end the Cold War, would have been impossible without these advances.
Third, the advances in biology and medicine contributed strongly to the Cold War competition of social systems. The twentieth-century invention of health care that influenced people’s daily lives - such as vaccinations, reproductive health, and infant care - meant that achieving the right form of modernity was literally a matter of life or death. In Europe in the 1940s and 1950s, and later on in the Third World, the competition between socialism and capitalism was as much about which system could deliver better health care as about principles of liberty or justice. In agricultural production, most countries were eager to replicate the gains made by the Soviet Union and the United States in the early part of the Cold War through crossbreeding and artificial selection, even though the Soviets were long held back in genetics by the politically motivated resistance against "Mendel-Morganism."
The expansion of science and technology motivated the unprecedented increase in school and university education that took place during the Cold War. Both the United States and the Soviet Union placed education at the center of their social systems in a way never before seen among great powers. Instead ofeducating just an elite, both countries tried to achieve a higher level of modernity - and advantages in their Cold War competition - by educating more of their populations to a high level of knowledge. By the 1960s, they also educated large numbers of young people from other countries, especially from Europe and the Third World. Even though many of these students returned to their countries with social and political ideas that were very different from the ones their hosts had intended, the expansion and internationalization of education helped create a global intellectual agenda, in which ideas were more easily transferable - and transmutable - than ever before.
World History
