Author Q&A: Audra Wolfe on the Cold War’s scientific and political legacy

Many of the institutions that guide science in the modern US, such as NSF or the national laboratories, have their roots in the Cold War. In Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science, historian of science Audra Wolfe argues that the Cold War left science another legacy: a widespread—and, in Wolfe’s view, misguided—belief that science is an inherently apolitical activity.

Freedom’s Laboratory examines US government propaganda about science during the Cold War and examines the ways that officials including James Webb and Vannevar Bush contributed to both public and covert efforts to promote the government’s vision. In the January issue of Physics Today, cosmologist and science, technology, and society scholar Chanda Prescod-Weinstein calls the book “essential reading for both students and scientists who have been immersed in the idea of science as an apolitical pursuit .”

Wolfe recently talked to Physics Today about the emergence of the modern US science enterprise during the Cold War and the trick to digging up information on covert programs.

PT: In your book you argue that the Cold War bolstered and spread a vision of science as a neutral, apolitical activity. Tell us a bit about how that happened.

WOLFE: The idea that science is neutral or somehow apolitical existed before the Cold War, but it took on new significance in the ideological struggle that pitted capitalism against communism. As they looked out at the international political landscape in 1947, US policymakers were alarmed at the evident appeal of communism, particularly in Western Europe. The Marshall Plan, the massive economic assistance program to rebuild war-torn Europe, was one response to that crisis.

The Soviet Union retaliated by relaunching its international propaganda operation, the Communist Information Bureau, usually known as the Cominform. That prompted the US to step up its own propaganda campaign, including everything from overt information programs like the Voice of America broadcasting agency to covert cultural campaigns like the CIA’s funding of the British literary magazine Encounter .

Science was just as much a part of those campaigns as art, music, literature, or sports. US propaganda boasted of an American commitment to empiricism, objectivity, basic research, and internationalism in science and contrasted that with a caricature of Soviet science as based on state authority, political litmus tests, practical applications, and nationalism.

We still hear echoes of those ideas nearly 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s an institutional legacy. Many of our most important scientific institutions took their modern form during this period. NSF’s commitment to evaluating proposals on scientific criteria, for instance, is a direct descendant of Cold War policies designed to highlight the US’s commitment to basic research. Even today, many scientists lack alternative language to describe how science should be practiced.

PT: Tell us about the research that went into your book. How do you trace the spread of an idea?

WOLFE: Understanding government officials’ vision for their Cold War propaganda campaigns requires the tools of policy and diplomatic history. That meant spending time in government archives and declassification sites. I found the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States series and the CIA’s Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room particularly useful.

Another trick to writing about the history of covert cultural diplomacy is knowing that the organization you’re writing about is, in fact, a cover. Successful cover organizations operate in plain sight. Organizations that received funding from the CIA’s instruments for covert cultural diplomacy, for instance, listed the grants in their annual reports. Fortunately for researchers, information about those covert programs has been released to the public many times, starting with blockbuster reports published in Ramparts and the New York Times in the late 1960s.

PT: Many historians of science, including you, have argued that science is inherently political. What do historians mean when they say that? Are they claiming that science is partisan or untrustworthy?

WOLFE: Any activity conducted by humans involves power relations, and science is no different. That claim makes people uncomfortable when they’ve assumed that science refers only to empirical facts. But science is much more than data. A society’s decisions about how science should be conducted are inherently and obviously political. They involve choices about access, representation, compensation, and expertise. I would argue, and I have, that claiming that science somehow has the unique ability to transcend that kind of politics increases distrust of science because the claim is so obviously not true.

PT: What are you reading?

WOLFE: I like to have multiple books on the same topic open at once. My current pairing is Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism and Virginia Eubanks’s Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. Both books ask us to reckon with the ways that contemporary technologies reinforce existing power structures while simultaneously claiming to be objective. It’s a different but closely related phenomenon to the one I describe in Freedom’s Laboratory. Those two books should be a wake-up call to technologists who may not have fully thought through the implications of their work.

PT: What is your next project?

WOLFE: Having now written two books on the relationship between science and the Cold War, I’m pausing for a moment to reflect on what’s next. I’m absolutely still interested in exploring the relationship between science and power, but I’m feeling more drawn to accounts that focus on liberation, resilience, and creativity than on privilege and destruction. In other words: Stay tuned.