Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2019
Volume 64, Number 3
Saturday–Tuesday, April 13–16, 2019; Denver, Colorado
Session D06: Secrecy and Espionage in ScienceInvited Undergraduate
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Sponsoring Units: FHP FPS Chair: Daniel Kennefick, University of Arkansas Room: Sheraton Governor's Square 15 |
Saturday, April 13, 2019 3:30PM - 4:06PM |
D06.00001: Scientific Internationalism, Scientific Intelligence, Or Both? Invited Speaker: Audra J Wolfe From the late 1940s through the late 1960s, the US foreign policy establishment saw a particularly American way of thinking about “scientific freedom” as essential to winning the Cold War. Emerging contemporaneously with the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), these ideas deeply influenced the United States’ approach to scientific intelligence in the early Cold War. In 1950, the State Department issued a report, Science in Foreign Relations, that proposed using science and scientists as tools for informal diplomacy. The public portion of the report outlined ways that the State Department could incorporate scientific expertise into its operations. A classified appendix proposed using civilian, unwitting American scientists to gather scientific intelligence. The CIA’s first science advisors meanwhile outlined ambitious plans for a “scientific order of battle” that envisioned the agency’s Scientific Branch as a global panopticon for science, absorbing all possible information on all possible topics produced by any scientist or technical professional anywhere in the world. Following the release of Science and Foreign Relations, both the State Department and the CIA briefly experimented with science advisors and attachés. Science attachés promoted the idea of American scientific institutions as uniquely open to international collaboration. Despite genuine enthusiasm for such programs within the State Department and the CIA, science attachés failed to gain a toehold in the foreign policy apparatus of the early 1950s. These early programs nevertheless established long-lasting relationships between U.S. scientific institutions and the intelligence establishment. The United States’ commitment to international scientific cooperation was never primarily about scientific values; it was scientific internationalism for the sake of anti-Communism. |
Saturday, April 13, 2019 4:06PM - 4:42PM |
D06.00002: The legacy of nuclear secrecy in the United States Invited Speaker: Alex Wellerstein The announcement of the discovery of nuclear fission in early 1939 heralded a new era of secrecy in American science, ushered in by physicists and centered around the discipline of physics. Nuclear weapons held out the possibility of both re-making the existing geopolitical order, while threatening national and even global destruction. Over the course of World War II and into the Cold War, American scientists, led largely by physicists, grappled with what they called the "problem of secrecy": how could the United States simultaneously promote national security while also allowing scientific research to flourish? In this talk, I will briefly sketch the long history of nuclear secrecy in the United States, with an emphasis on the interactions between scientists, policymakers, and their context. I will discuss the unique and lasting input that physicists in particular had on shaping and critiquing secrecy policy, and indicate some of the lessons that might be learned from this history for both thinking about our present scientific and security moment, as well as those that may aid in thinking about the use of information controls as a means of regulating other emerging technologies that may pose novel existential risks. |
Saturday, April 13, 2019 4:42PM - 5:18PM |
D06.00003: Stealing Nazi Science: Allied Efforts to Acquire German Science and Technology during and after the Second World War Invited Speaker: Douglas O'Reagan At the end of the Second World War, the US, UK, France, Soviet Union, and other Allied countries rushed to seize "intellectual reparations" from Nazi Germany in the form of science and technology. One aspect of this story is reasonably well known: that of the US military bringing German rocket scientists to the United States under the leadership of Wernher von Braun, and these scientists helping NASA reach the moon. However, Paperclip was only one small part of a much larger constellation of programs, both cooperative and competitive, aimed at taking German technology. The nations undertaking these programs were in very different situations in 1945, resulting in very different strategies for their scientific intelligence and espionage programs. In this talk, I will describe these how these nations' programs to take German science were alike and how they diverged, and why that mattered for shaping the postwar worlds of science. I will focus in particular on industrial and academic (not directly military) science and technology, to underline how state support for science (and interest in acquiring it by any means) spread well beyond realms of nuclear physics and aerospace. |
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