The Consultants

2015 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 758-804 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nonlinear Optics ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Laser Pulses ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ballistic Missiles ◽  
Major Branch ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Nicolaas Bloembergen ◽  
The Cold War

After the laser was first demonstrated in 1960, many American defense officials hoped it would become a revolutionary new weapon. At the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a nonprofit advisory corporation contracted to the Defense Department, experts studied the possibility of using lasers to defend against nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. A few academic consultants for IDA (among them physicists Nicolaas Bloembergen, Charles Townes, Keith Brueckner, and Norman Kroll) began to think about how to generate laser pulses of enormous power and propagate them through the atmosphere. Along the way, in a mix of classified discussions and reports, and through a series of important publications in the open literature, the consultants laid the foundations of a new field: nonlinear optics. Nonlinear optics is the science of the interaction between matter and intense light, and it became a major branch of physics in the 1960s. The field’s history calls for deeper consideration of the ways in which powerful institutions and the production of knowledge were joined in the Cold War era. Though nonlinear optics was every bit “Cold War science,” the conventional and widely used concept of “patronage” seems inadequate for understanding the origins and development of the field. A product of neither government contracts nor innovations in technology alone, nonlinear optics was fashioned by a close-knit and elite community of experts straddling the classified and unclassified domains. The field took its peculiar shape and content within this unique social space—the social world of the Cold War defense consultant.

Women and Gender

2019 ◽  
pp. 178-207
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
American Life ◽  
Family Tradition ◽  
The Social ◽  
Women's Equality ◽  
Social Liberalism ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

Benson’s views on women’s roles might be dismissed as simply the old-fashioned vestiges of Mormon patriarchy and generational sexism. Certainly, “Motherhood to the exclusion of all else” and the redirecting of feminine ambition back toward the home had been a rhetorical line from LDS leaders since early in the twentieth century, especially in reaction to the gender shifts of World War II and beyond. Like other anxieties within Mormonism about postwar disruptions in American life, the movement for women’s equality--and church leaders’ reactions to it--can best be understood against the backdrop of Cold War fears about the infiltration of communism, atheism, sexual liberation, and expressions of anti-authority impulses into American life. For Benson, as this essay argues, Mormonism’s emphasis on family, tradition, children, and maternity offered a reliable counterinfluence to the Cold War and the social liberalism of the 1960s that brought sexual debauchery, crime, and the degradation of women.

Mind Bending, Mental Seduction and Menticide: Brainwashing in British Spy Dramas of the 1960s

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Burton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Thought Control ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Scientific Background ◽  
Mind Control ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Cultural Fantasy

Brainwashing assumed the proportions of a cultural fantasy during the Cold War period. The article examines the various political, scientific and cultural contexts of brainwashing, and proceeds to a consideration of the place of mind control in British spy dramas made for cinema and television in the 1960s and 1970s. Particular attention is given to the films The Mind Benders (1963) and The Ipcress File (1965), and to the television dramas Man in a Suitcase (1967–8), The Prisoner (1967–8) and Callan (1967–81), which gave expression to the anxieties surrounding thought-control. Attention is given to the scientific background to the representations of brainwashing, and the significance of spy scandals, treasons and treacheries as a distinct context to the appearance of brainwashing on British screens.

Nasser's Gamble

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Ferris
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Original Material ◽  
Egyptian Revolution ◽  
Arab Nationalism ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Arab Spring

This book draws on declassified documents from six countries and original material in Arabic, German, Hebrew, and Russian to present a new understanding of Egypt's disastrous five-year intervention in Yemen, which Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser later referred to as “my Vietnam.” The book argues that Nasser's attempt to export the Egyptian revolution to Yemen played a decisive role in destabilizing Egypt's relations with the Cold War powers, tarnishing its image in the Arab world, ruining its economy, and driving its rulers to instigate the fatal series of missteps that led to war with Israel in 1967. Viewing the Six Day War as an unintended consequence of the Saudi–Egyptian struggle over Yemen, the book demonstrates that the most important Cold War conflict in the Middle East was not the clash between Israel and its neighbors. It was the inter-Arab struggle between monarchies and republics over power and legitimacy. Egypt's defeat in the “Arab Cold War” set the stage for the rise of Saudi Arabia and political Islam. Bold and provocative, this book brings to life a critical phase in the modern history of the Middle East. Its compelling analysis of Egypt's fall from power in the 1960s offers new insights into the decline of Arab nationalism, exposing the deep historical roots of the Arab Spring of 2011.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Critical Systems Thinking ◽  
Critical Systems ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Future Visions

The book proposes that the Cold War period saw a key debate about the future as singular or plural. Forms of Cold War science depicted the future as a closed sphere defined by delimited probabilities, but were challenged by alternative notions of the future as a potentially open realm with limits set only by human creativity. The Cold War was a struggle for temporality between the two different future visions of the two blocs, each armed with its set of predictive technologies, but these were rivaled, from the 1960s on, by future visions emerging from decolonization and the emergence of a set of alternative world futures. Futures research has reflected and enacted this debate. In so doing, it offers a window to the post-war history of the social sciences and of contemporary political ideologies of liberalism and neoliberalism, Marxism and revisionist Marxism, critical-systems thinking, ecologism, and postcolonialism.

National Internationalists: British and West German Protests against Nuclear Weapons, the Politics of Transnational Communications and the Social History of the Cold War, 1957–1964

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
HOLGER NEHRING
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social History ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This article examines the politics of communication between British and West German protesters against nuclear weapons in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The interpretation suggested here historicises the assumptions of ‘transnational history’ and shows the nationalist and internationalist dimensions of the protest movements' histories to be inextricably connected. Both movements related their own aims to global and international problems. Yet they continued to observe the world from their individual perspectives: national, regional and local forms thus remained important. By illuminating the interaction between political traditions, social developments and international relations in shaping important political movements within two European societies, this article can provide one element of a new connective social history of the cold war.

Global Britain's strategic problem East of Suez

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
William D. James
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Military Bases ◽  
Political Incentives ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Permanent Presence

Abstract Why did Britain withdraw from its military bases in the Arabian Peninsula and Southeast Asia midway through the Cold War? Existing accounts tend to focus on Britain's weak economic position, as well as the domestic political incentives of retrenchment for the ruling Labour Party. This article offers an alternative explanation: the strategic rationale for retaining a permanent presence East of Suez dissolved during the 1960s, as policymakers realised that these military bases were consuming more security than they could generate. These findings have resonance for British officials charting a return East of Suez today under the banner of ‘Global Britain’.

Five progressive responses to the grand challenges of the 21st century – An introduction

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110592
Author(s):  
Lars Bo Kaspersen ◽  
Liv Egholm
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Young Generation ◽  
Grand Challenges ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Cold War

We are living in a world which is severely crisis-ridden and faces some major challenges. The fact that we are currently facing a genuine global pandemic (COVID-19) brings about even more uncertainty. The social and political institutions, which emerged and consolidated during the 20th century, and which created stability, have become fragile. The young generation born in the 1990s and onwards have experienced 9/11 and the ‘war against terrorism’, the financial crisis of 2008, changes to climate, environmental degradation, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. The generation born between 1960 and 1990 have had the same experiences along with severe economic crises in the 1970s and 1980s and the Cold War. Some of these challenges are in different ways intertwined with capitalism and its crises, while others are linked to the rapid development of new technologies, in particular innovations within communication and information technologies. This introduction lists the most important grand challenges facing the world as they have emerged more recently. The five articles following this introduction address some of these challenges, with particular attention to the problems of capitalism and democracy and the relation between these two areas. Most authors agree that climate change and the destruction of the environment are the biggest and most pertinent problems to address, but it is their stance that we can only meet these challenges if democracy is functioning well.

Democracy and Dictatorship in the Cold War: the Two Germanies, 1949–1961

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew I. Port
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
German States ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

The ‘long 1950s’ was a decade of conspicuous contrasts: a time of dismantling and reconstruction, economic and political, as well as cultural and moral; a time of Americanization and Sovietization; a time of upheaval amid a desperate search for stability. But above all, it was a time for both forgetting and coming to terms with the recent past. This article focuses on the two forms of government that controlled Germany, democracy, and dictatorship. The Cold War was without doubt the main reason for the rapid rehabilitation and integration of the two German states, which more or less took place within a decade following the end of the Second World War. This article further elaborates upon the political conditions under dictatorship and its effect on the social life. East Germany, under the Soviet control underwent as much political upheaval. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that Germany became a democracy.

Tropical Russian Bears: Jews and Soviet Animation During The Cold War

Images ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-90
Author(s):  
Maya Balakirsky Katz
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Social Geography ◽  
Mickey Mouse ◽  
Social Mapping ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

After Stalin consolidated the major animation studios and closed down smaller regional studios to create a single Moscow-based drawn and puppet animation studio in 1934–36, the animation studio Soyuzmultfilm became the largest animation studio in Eastern Europe. In the 1960s, Soviet Jewish animators focused on the theme of social geography and developed individual characters in relationship to social mapping. This essay analyses the enigmatic Cheburashka, the Soviet Mickey Mouse, whose popularity as a Communist ideal led to his starring role as Soyuzmultfilm’s most enduring logo. It is particularly concerned with the development of the ethnically-unidentifiable Cheburashka against the history of the Moscow Zoo and its inter-species exhibitions.

The Death of Caucasus Philology: Towards a Discipline Beyond Areal Divides

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-293
Author(s):  
Rebecca Gould
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cold War ◽  
American Academy ◽  
North American ◽  
Institutional Capacity ◽  
The Caucasus ◽  
The North ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
The Cold War

This essay investigates the challenges facing Caucasus philology, by which I mean the institutional capacity to conduct deep research into the literary cultures of Azerbaijan Republic, Georgia, Daghestan, and Chechnya. I argue that the philological approach to the literary cultures of the Caucasus has been a casualty of the rise of areas studies in the North American academy during the Cold War, and that Cold War legacies continue to shape Caucasus Studies to this day. I conclude by offering three proposals for opening exchanges between the humanities and the social sciences within Caucasus Studies. More broadly, this essay argues for a rapprochement between the social sciences and philological inquiry vis-à-vis the Caucasus.

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