Review John Krige: Sharing Knowledge, Shaping Europe. U.S. Technological Collaboration and Nonproliferation, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016. In: Technology & Culture 59:1 (2018): 188-190.

Sharing Knowledge, Shaping Europe: U.S. Technological Collaboration and Nonproliferation by John Krige (review) Silvia Berger Ziauddin Technology and Culture, Volume 59, Number 1, January 2018, pp. 188-190 (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/692184 Access provided by UZH Hauptbibliothek / Zentralbibliothek Zürich (2 May 2018 10:33 GMT) T E C H N O L O G Y JANUARY 2018 VOL. 59 A N D C U L T U R E some exceptions, the book favors complex technical details and esoteric discussions of bureaucratic structure over human interaction. One strength of the book is the ability of the contributors to express their understandings of the role of nuclear weapons in the world during and after the Cold War. The writings in Doomed to Cooperate show that weapons scientists believed that nuclear deterrence during the Cold War ensured peace and stability. The arms race, as U.S. scientist George Miller puts it, “helped generate a sense of caution in our relations” (vol. 1, p. 136). Scientists apparently felt responsible for the dangers of nuclear weapons; they “could not rest until they were dismantled,” writes Siegfried Hecker, the book’s editor and former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory (vol. 1, p. 50). But by no means were all of the nuclear weapons dismantled. Scientists’ shared identity made it easy for them to work together, but did little to question the wisdom of national security based on nuclear weapons. Ilkaev writes that nuclear weapons will continue to be fundamental to Russia’s security in the future. There are no disarmers here— another Russian writes of the need to develop environmentally friendly tactical nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, Hecker argues that the United States is not equipped for proper stockpile stewardship challenges, and that Russia is better prepared to fulfill its “nuclear mission” (vol. 2, p. 397). While nuclear weapons show no sign of disappearing, nearly every voice in Doomed to Cooperate testifies that U.S.-Russian scientific collaboration did a great deal to solve the most urgent nuclear problems of the 1990s. While lab-to-lab cooperation ended with the deterioration of U.S.Russian relations (due to Russian incursions in Ukraine and the Crimea), it is worth remembering that not too long ago the two countries managed to work together successfully to eliminate shared nuclear peril. PAUL RUBINSON Paul Rubinson is associate professor of history at Bridgewater State University. Sharing Knowledge, Shaping Europe: U.S. Technological Collaboration and Nonproliferation. By John Krige. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Pp. 240. $33. John Krige is a prolific scholar on the role of space and nuclear science and technology in U.S.-European relations during the Cold War. His body of work at the intersection of Cold War science and international history is widely acclaimed, most notably his book American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (2006). Sharing Knowledge, Shaping Europe forms a fascinating complement to this publication. Whereas American Hegemony focused on the United States’ efforts to Americanize scientific practices and institutions in post-1945 Europe and to establish a scientific order consistent with American political agendas, 188 B O O K R E V I E W S his new book draws attention to transatlantic technological collaboration as a crucial U.S. policy instrument. Mobilizing the term “soft power” (p. 5), coined by political scientist Joseph S. Nye, Krige analyzes how technological solutions were adopted by the Department of State in order to influence nuclear and space programs in Western Europe. The aims were manifold: to foster an integrated Europe as a bastion of anti-communist stability, to promote nonproliferation by backing the civilian side of dual-use technology, to narrow the transatlantic technological gap, and to open up new markets for American firms. The book centers around four case studies. In Chapters 1 and 2, Krige discusses the United States’ promotion of the European Energy Community EURATOM between 1955–58, a supranational organization meant to steer Western Europe onto a peaceful nuclear power course. Chapter 3 examines a space collaboration project between West Germany and the United States from the mid 1960s. American attempts to keep Britain within the framework of the European Launcher Development Organization (ELDO) in 1966 take center stage in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 finally focuses on the American efforts to regulate uranium-enriching gas centrifuges in Europe in the 1960s. Was technological collaboration a useful tool of U.S. “soft power”? The balance sheet is ambivalent. The original vision for EURATOM required the member states to renounce the development of nuclear weapons. This vision could not be upheld. Although the United States had promoted a joint program for nuclear reactor-construction and R&D, it could neither prevent the dilution of EURATOM’s supranational characteristics nor stop the construction of parallel nuclear weapons programs. As for the American efforts to use a joint space project—a probe to the sun—to divert West Germany’s resources, it is unlikely that this form of “positive disarmament” (p. 80) had any impact on the domestic debate over the FRG’s right to acquire nuclear weapons. Regarding ELDO, established to provide Europe with its own satellite launcher system, the promise of U.S. technological support did not have an effect on British policy. In 1966 Britain ultimately stuck with ELDO—as Krige shows, not because of “soft power” exercised by the United States, but simply to avoid financial penalties for pulling out. In the most captivating and complex case study, on AngloAmerican debates over the proliferation risks of gas-centrifuge enrichment, the Department of State, however, did succeed in using legal and technological policies to monitor and retard the development of centrifuge technology in Western Europe, while pressure on London to remain aligned with the Continent continued. While this overall meager outcome might frustrate readers accustomed to technological success stories, a major asset of Krige’s book is to convincingly demonstrate why technological collaboration often failed to achieve the desired result. One the one hand, disagreements within the 189 T E C H N O L O G Y JANUARY 2018 VOL. 59 A N D C U L T U R E American executive branch and interagency disputes (the Atomic Energy Commission as well as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration were major actors) undermined the exercise of “soft power” from the beginning. On the other hand, U.S. policy makers underestimated the demands for autonomy among European governments, industrialists, and technical experts and put “too much faith in technological leadership” (p. 152). As for the latter, it would have been interesting to read more about the general, possibly changing assessment of the efficacy of technological solutions within U.S. administrations from the 1950s to the late 1960s. To evaluate the actual weight attached to technological preeminence, the book could also have benefited from more insight into the use of technology-driven policy tools in combination with other non-coercive measures to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. As Krige mentions at various points, technological collaboration was “among the many instruments” (p. 150) the United States had at its disposal to curb proliferation. His new book project on export controls in Cold War America can represent a welcome addition to this issue. Finally, the geographical framework of the book opens the field for further inquiry. Krige focuses on Western European countries with firm ties to the United States. How does “soft power” work if one looks beyond, at say, Sweden, Japan, or India? Despite these minor points of critique, Krige masterfully succeeds in bridging the gap between the history of technology and diplomatic history. His book is an empirically rich and carefully narrated story on the intricate entanglement of U.S. technoscientific diplomacy, European integration, and nuclear nonproliferation in the Cold War. SILVIA BERGER ZIAUDDIN Silvia Berger Ziauddin is associate faculty member of the History of Knowledge Center of the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and the University of Zurich. She is also lecturer at the Department of History, University of Zurich. Her soon to be finished second book explores the scientific, social, and cultural history of nuclear bunkers in Cold War Switzerland and beyond. FastLane: Managing Science in the Internet World. By Thomas J. Misa and Jeffrey R. Yost. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Pp. 224. $34.95. If you conduct academic research in the United States, chances are good that you will eventually use FastLane, the National Science Foundation (NSF) internet portal for submitting, reviewing, and administering research proposals and grants. This book reveals how FastLane developed alongside the commercial Internet, explores the roles of user-centric and user-driven innovations, and shows how information infrastructure evolved together with an enormous research community, which was dispersed across the United States. 190