Artigo Acesso aberto Revisado por pares

Soviet Nuclear Technoscience

2019; Éditions de l'EHESS; Volume: 60; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.4000/monderusse.11201

ISSN

1777-5388

Autores

Stefan Guth, Klaus Gestwa, Tanja Penter, Julia Richers,

Tópico(s)

Twentieth Century Scientific Developments

Resumo

weapons, believed that a time was coming "in which at any given moment we have the power to transform any given place on our planet, and even our planet itself, into a Hiroshima." 5The speculative anticipation of an atomic inferno created an atmosphere in which neither disarmament nor demobilization was possible and the "self-sustained conflict" 6 of the Cold War became a "radical age." 7 This state of "organized peacelessness" 8 increasingly came to shape research and development.The goal of the nuclear powers was not only to build weapons and disseminate knowledge.By waging a "brain warfare," in which laboratories, lecture halls, and planning institutes were the "first line of defense," 9 they wanted to anchor Cold War thought and action in technology and science. 10Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and a later recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, wrote that many researchers and engineers understood themselves as "soldiers in a war of science and technology."In this war, there "might not have been millions of dead on battlefields" but in its secret engineering offices and production facilities "the tension and in some cases the heroism was no less than during the years of the previous war." 11As the Soviet rocket scientist Boris Chertok put it, the Cold War took place here "at the speed of a hot war." 12 Experts on both sides of the Iron Curtain justified the development of ever more efficient weapons of mass destruction by clinging to the belief that because of their work, war would carry such a

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