Overt Research

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neal White ◽  
John Beck
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Experimental Research ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Manhattan Project ◽  
Industrial Enterprise ◽  
Scientific Knowledge Production ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Material Evidence

One of the major consequences of the Cold War and the commingling of scientific and military interests by world powers was the increasingly secretive nature of scientific research. From the Manhattan Project onwards, the free exchange implicit in the collective enterprise of scientific knowledge production became regulated and increasingly clandestine. Neal White's artistic research is explicitly engaged in interrogating both the investigative procedures of science as method and the ways in which these procedures can be turned toward an investigation of secrecy itself. In their discussion, Beck and White explore the ideas and practices that inform White's conception of art as a mode of experimental research. Central to this project is what White calls 'overt research,' whereby the spaces of techno-scientific and military-industrial enterprise are explored through the documentation of physical sites and material evidence. In the exhibition Dark Places (Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 2009), White and others explored the ways in which such places are both embedded and imaginatively narrated as part of a contemporary UK landscape. White’s projects are discussed in relation to issues shaped by Cold War research: secrecy, surveillance, accountability, participation, and the power relations implicit in knowledge production.

‘If They Say Bomb at One O’clock …’

2019 ◽  
pp. 199-230
Author(s):  
Alan Bollard
Keyword(s):  
Game Theory ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Manhattan Project ◽  
Mathematical Approach ◽  
John Von Neumann ◽  
Von Neumann ◽  
Dynamic Economy ◽  
Atom Bomb ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War

In Japan conventional bombing had not proved sufficient: it was the atom bomb that ultimately brought surrender. The brilliant Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann had worked on the Manhattan Project and identified Hiroshima as a bombing target. He went on to design computers that helped build bigger bombs. In addition he developed an original mathematical approach to modelling a dynamic economy that helped economists advance their modelling. With the Cold War looming, he and colleague Oskar Morgenstern pioneered the new subject of game theory which the big powers used to model their post-war defence tactics, and led to the classic 1950s strategy of ‘mutually-assured destruction’.

Deconstructing the bomb: recent perspectives on nuclear history

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. HUGHES
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Manhattan Project ◽  
International Terrorism ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Nuclear History ◽  
The Cold War

John Canaday,The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Pp. xviii+310. ISBN 0-299-16854-9. £19.50.Septimus H. Paul,Nuclear Rivals: Anglo-American Atomic Relations 1941–1952. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000. Pp. ix+266. ISBN 0-8142-0852-5. £31.95.Peter Bacon Hales,Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Pp. 448. ISBN 0-252-02296-3. £22.00.A decade after the end of the Cold War, the culture and technology of nuclear weapons had lost much of the overt sense of dread they once inspired. The decline in international tension following the end of the communist regimes of the Soviet bloc produced a massive shift in the ideology of the nuclear in the 1990s. The de-targeting and dismantling of large numbers of nuclear weapons and the demise of the threat of nuclear annihilation created new conditions both for international security and for the writing of nuclear history. With the declassification and release of large quantities of official documentation from the former adversaries, as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1995, a burst of histories of various aspects of the nuclear age have appeared over the last ten years, exploring not just the technopolitics, strategy and operational logistics of the Cold War and the arms race, but the cultural history of the nuclear age, its imagery, its architecture, its oppositional politics and its effects on the landscape, national and regional economies and cultures and indeed everyday life. At a time of global economic and political uncertainty and the emergent threat of capricious international terrorism and new nuclear proliferation, the apparent certainties of the Cold War now even evoke a certain nostalgia, and its artefacts and structures are being recast as ‘heritage’.

The emergence of lethal surveillance: Watching and killing in the history of drone technology

2016 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine Hall Kindervater
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Targeted Killing ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
History Of ◽  
Drone Warfare ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
And Control

This article examines the history of the development of drone technology to understand the longer histories of surveillance and targeting that shape contemporary drone warfare. Drawing on archival research, the article focuses on three periods in the history of the drone: the early years during World Wars I and II, the Cold War, and the 1990s. The history of the drone reveals two key trends in Western warfare: the increasing importance of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and the development of dynamic targeting. These trends converge today in a practice of lethal surveillance where ISR capabilities are directly linked to targeted killing, effectively merging mechanisms of surveillance and knowledge production with decisions on life and death. Taking this history of lethal surveillance into account not only reframes current debates on drone warfare, but also connects the drone to other practices of security and control.

scholarly journals TOWARDS A POSTCOLONIAL COMPARATIVE AND INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-34
Author(s):  
KEITA TAKAYAMA ◽  
ARATHI SRIPRAKASH ◽  
RAEWYN CONNELL
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Education ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
World Culture ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Comparative And International Education ◽  
The Cold War

This article, which serves to introduce the special issue on “Contesting Coloniality: Re- thinking Knowledge Production and Circulation in Comparative and International Edu- cation,” brings to the fore the rarely acknowledged colonial entanglements of knowledge in the field of comparative and international education (CIE). We begin by showing how colonial logics underpin the scholarship of one of the field’s founding figures, Isaac L. Kandel. These logics gainedlegitimacy through the Cold War geopolitical contexts in which the field was established and have shaped subsequent approaches including the much-debated world-culture approach to globalization in education. 

Power Relations during the Transition from Nazi to Post-Nazi Rule

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gareth Pritchard
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
World War ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

Europe’s mid-century crisis of the 1940s destabilized power relations due to the simultaneous expansion and erosion of state power relative to society. This in turn unleashed a process of paramilitarization that eroded the state’s monopoly over the use of force. Ferocious struggles for power broke out at a local level between a wide range of gangs and armed bands. Paramilitarization reached a high point during the chaotic transitional period between Nazi and post-Nazi rule when the day-to-day authority of the state broke down almost completely. In order to gain an advantage over their rivals, actors on the ground established client–patron relationships with one or other of the great powers. Local struggles in Europe thereby became internationalized, which in turn contributed significantly both to the course of the Second World War and to the outbreak of the Cold War.

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