Project Vista, Caltech, and the dilemmas of Lee DuBridge

2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. PATRICK McCRAY
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Air Force ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
California Institute ◽  
California Institute Of Technology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Institute Of Technology ◽  
Soviet Invasion ◽  
The Cold War

ABSTRACT: In the summer of 1951, more than one hundred scientists and other academics participated in Project Vista, a secret study hosted by the California Institute of Technology. Its purpose was to determine how existing technologies as well as ones soon to be available——tactical nuclear weapons, in particular——could offset NATO's weaker conventional forces and repel a massive Soviet invasion of Europe many perceived as likely if not imminent. Despite the best efforts of scientists like William Fowler, Lee DuBridge, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Vista's recommendations were eventually suppressed by the Air Force. This article examines the history of Project Vista as a circumstance of the early Cold War period. By focusing primarily on the local level, the article presents a detailed examination of how people were recruited to Project Vista, how their work was organized and managed, and the relations between Caltech's administration and trustees. Finally, this article considers the history of postwar universities as they struggled to adapt to the Cold War environment and scientists' efforts to provide counsel to the U.S. government and military.

The Ground Observer Corps: Public Relations and the Cold War in the 1950s

2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenton Clymer
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Air Force ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Air Defense ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Homeland Defense

This essay examines the development and demise of one of the least studied elements of U.S. homeland defense efforts in the 1950s: the Ground Observer Corps (GOC). The article recounts the history of the GOC from its founding in the mid-1950s until its deactivation in 1959 and concludes that it never came close to achieving its goals for recruitment and effectiveness. Yet, despite the major shortcomings of the GOC, the U.S. Air Force continued to support it, primarily because it was seen as helpful for the public relations interests of the Air Force, continental air defense, and, more generally, U.S. Cold War policies. The lack of widespread public support for the GOC raises questions about the view that Americans were deeply fearful of an imminent Soviet nuclear strike in the 1950s.

Why did We Get the End of the Cold War Wrong?

2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Cox
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Soviet System ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
International Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Market Capitalism ◽  
Dominant Paradigm

In many important ways the history of modern international relations (IR) begins at the point when the international order collapses in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed, the withering of communism in Central and Eastern Europe followed by the break–up of the USSR two years later, posed what many in the field saw then (and continue to regard now) as a series of problems to which the hitherto dominant paradigm in IR—realism—had no ready or easy answers. This article neither seeks to defend nor criticize realism. Rather it shifts the debate about the end of the cold war—and why most experts failed to anticipate it—away from the field of IR to the more specific study undertaken in the West of the Soviet system. It goes on to argue that the source of so much academic embarrassment may be better explained not through a rehearsal of realism's supposed flaws as an international theory, but rather through a detailed examination of the different ways that different writers understood, or more precisely failed to understand, the operation of the Soviet system itself. The conclusion reached is that few analysts could have predicted what happened between 1989 and 1991. In fact, as the article seeks to show, their often complicated and diverse theories about the USSR as the living alternative to market capitalism led most of them (with one or two notable exceptions) to the conclusion that whatever problems faced the Soviet Union as a power in the 1980s, the system as such was likely to endure.

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