Going Nuclear: Science, Diplomacy and Defence

Event Date: 8th November 2022
Location: Internet 21:00 GMT

  FEATURED | PERRY WORLD HOUSE EVENT Going Nuclear: Science, Diplomacy, and Defense Tuesday, November 8, 2022, 4:00pm-5:00pm ET | Hybrid Event Reflecting on a war against Ukraine that looks oddly familiar in the nuclearized history of global conflict since 1945, this event explores the legacies of the scientific excesses of the Cold War. As a “social scientists’ war,” the Cold War depended on psychology, persuasion, ideology, and propaganda in a conflict built around widely dispersed fear of nuclear weapons. The scientific and technological priorities of that era still resonate and still threaten the global order today in recursive ways.

During US President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program, scientific disciplines, like archaeology, benefitted from sophisticated atomic technologies and used the appeal of international heritage to collect intelligence and build informational networks for their own governments. Archaeologists at Penn played key roles in those strategies and deployed them internationally, advocating exchanges with Soviet Union scholars as an antidote to the Cold War nuclear threat.

This edition of “The World Today” will discuss these technological and military fusions. How do peace and violence come together to shape the global order? How do state interests shape technology, and science? What can these converging histories help us understand about contemporary and future wars? Read more