Was the Nuclear Arms Race Deterministic?
Paul Forman’s energetic and provocative critique of the recent historiography of technology invites us to rethink technological determinism.1 Scholarly attention to this recurring chestnut had gone into quiescence since Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx published their edited collection of essays Does Technology Drive History? in 1994.2 Their qualified answer—not so much—seemed to convince most historians of technology that there was little chance of finding something new to say on the topic. Forman believes that was a mistake. In his view, the world passed from the modern into the post-modern around 1980. At that juncture, technology displaced science as the engine of material change. In short, it came to drive history more completely than ever before. While Forman stopped short of declaring an age of technological determinism, he nonetheless suggested that historians of technology had timidly ignored the primacy that the subject of their interest had achieved.
Nuclear weapons during the cold war provide a compelling test case of Forman’s assertion. Though “the bomb” had its roots in the pre-post-modern (i.e., the modern) world of science-based technology, it seemed to drive events in just the way Forman discerned. Nuclear weapons appeared to be deterministic in multiple ways. At one level of analysis, for example, they seem to have determined the length of the cold war, which John Lewis Gaddis has called “the long peace.”3 The absence of great-power war since 1945, says Gaddis, may be attributed, at least in part, to the conviction that a third world war, one with nuclear weapons, would be catastrophic for winners and losers alike. In short, the threat of Armageddon prevented Armageddon. The technology of mass destruction kept people from their hitherto unwavering pursuit of mass destruction.
Nuclear weapons also exhibited both kinds of technological determinism that Wiebe Bijker discerned in his analysis of the topic just a year after the publication of Does Technology Drive History?4 First, said Bijker, is the reflexive determinism of the technology on itself, the sense that some technologies become autonomous and shape their own development. An aura of inevitability surrounds the unfolding of certain technologies, this aura suggesting that human agency is powerless to restrain or redirect their evolution. From their first use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as fission weapons delivering the equivalent of ten or fifteen kilotons of TNT dropped from conventional bombers, nuclear weapons morphed into fusion weapons—hydrogen bombs—a thousand times more powerful delivered with unstoppable ballistic missiles. In the depths of the cold war, humanity seemed to be flirting with Dr. Strangelove’s doomsday machine, an autonomous Armageddon.
The mantle of determinism that hung over the evolution of these strategic nuclear weapons was reinforced by the proportionality and symmetry of the nuclear arsenals built up by the two superpowers. The two sides, so different in their political and economic systems, so different in their histories and cultures, so different in their worldviews and philosophies, indeed so different in their scientific and technological infrastructures, chose to confront each other with virtually identical arsenals. Unlike a duel, in which the antagonists are honor-bound to select identical weapons, states engaged in arms races may develop asymmetric arsenals. Not so the superpowers in the cold war. The arsenals built up by the United States and the Soviet Union were mirror-image twins, identical in both scale and kind. The mirror imaging derived in part from the Soviets’ penchant to simply mimic every weapon system deployed by the Americans. The Soviet arsenal was largely a knockoff of the American arsenal. But the weapons themselves seemed to have had a predisposition to evolve along a single trajectory. In the later stages of the cold war, the two sides codified the proportionality and symmetricality of their strategic arms in a series of bilateral treaties. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) produced two treaties, followed by START, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks of the Reagan/Gorbachev era. What the two sides built up in tandem, they would deconstruct in tandem.
In addition to making the superpower arsenals look alike, the instruments of strategic nuclear war also seemed to satisfy Bijker’s second form of determinism: The weapon systems appeared to make the superpowers themselves look alike. The Soviet Union was a command economy to begin with. The United States began to look like a command economy.5 In Paul Seabury’s pithy observation, the United States had a military-industrial complex, and the Soviet Union was a military-industrial complex. Michael Hogan and others have argued that the United States became a “national security state,” and Michael Sherry has argued that it became militarized.6 Aaron Friedberg counters that the arms race of the cold war helped drive the United States toward statism, but he believes that profoundly anti-statist institutions kept the country from going as far down that path as might have been expected.7 There is no denying, however, that the United States succumbed to the danger anticipated by George Kennan, the architect of containment: it began to look like the enemy.8
The mobilization of the two societies for strategic nuclear war is the more remarkable because of the insistence on both sides that they would win the cold war by non-military means. Both superpowers represented their struggle as a trial of their political-economic systems, a contest between free-enterprise capitalism under representative government on the one hand and a planned or command economy under Marxist-Leninist socialism on the other. Their strategic nuclear arsenals produced a “delicate balance of terror,” which allowed their systems to compete over “the long haul,” as President Dwight Eisenhower phrased it.9 For Eisenhower, the cold war would be determined by “the great equation,” balancing an adequate defense budget against sustainable economic growth.10 Nikita Khrushchev had the same kind of political economy in mind when he said “we will bury you.” Each leader intended that his country’s system would survive to witness the collapse of the other system.
The military establishments built up by the two sides, organized around their strategic nuclear forces, jeopardized those calculations. President Eisenhower could balance the federal budget only once in his eight years in office. His successor, John F. Kennedy, raised defense spending to 10 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). The Soviets fared even worse. Their military spending reached an estimated 17 percent of GDP and suffocated economic development. At their peak, the nuclear arsenals of the two states numbered upward of 70,000 warheads. The Americans mounted 11,466 strategic warheads on 1,937 airplanes, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and land-based, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). In almost perfect symmetry and proportionality, the Soviets boasted 11,241 warheads on 2,801 airplanes, SLBMs, and ICBMs.11 Some observers divined that the Soviet Union was actually “ahead” in this MAD (“mutual assured destruction”) competition at the time of its collapse. Indeed, it may have been President Ronald Reagan’s plan to pursue ballistic missile defense that finally pushed the strangled Soviet economy into incipient collapse. The Soviets had been bankrupted, in a sense, by the ruinous excess of their military spending, by the tyranny of their own nuclear weapons.
Of course the superpowers competed in other realms besides strategic nuclear arms. Walter McDougall and many other scholars have seen the space race as an extension of the cold war. As Asif Siddiqi demonstrates in his essay in this issue of T&C, both sides invested heavily in converting ballistic missile technology from the cold war into launch vehicles for space activity. Behind the scenes, reconnaissance satellites provided the greatest military advantage. In public, however, the two sides settled on manned spaceflight as the standard of excellence. Men became the measure of machines. When Yuri Gagarin won the first round, the United States threw down the gauntlet of a manned landing on the Moon. Neither side had a compelling mission for people on the Moon, but both sides perceived a propaganda coup in getting there first. The two space programs built comparable technologies—launch vehicles, capsules, space stations, and even nearly identical space shuttles—to demonstrate the superiority of their political-economic system. The space race was a civil arms race, a moral equivalent of war.
Was the nuclear arms race of the cold war deterministic in the shaping of society? Did these arsenals call forth the national-security state, what some have called the military-industrial complex, and what David Edgerton has recently called the “warfare state”?12 Were the politics and economics of the cold war driven by the nuclear arms race? Did the superpowers suspend above the world a sword of Damocles that cast a shadow of war over all humankind on Earth?13 Was the mushroom cloud an icon of technological determinism, of the power of weapons to set policy?14
The proportionality and symmetricality of the nuclear arsenals suggest that the superpowers did not choose their weapons. Rather, the weapons chose themselves. The policy that came to dominate the cold war—MAD, or mutual assured destruction—suggests that the weapons were not tailored to strategy, but rather the strategy was shaped to suit the weapons. If the arms race was not deterministic, why did Soviet and American nuclear arsenals and manned spaceflight programs appear so similar? If the apparent determinism of the arms race was real, what was deterministic, the technology or the duel? Are all arms races deterministic? Are all duels deterministic? Does the determinism shape both the nature of the weapons and the nature of the contest? Is it only wars and weapons that are deterministic or are all competitions between material forces—say in markets or athletics or space programs—similarly driven by technology?
Twice before in human history, titanic arms races have seemed to determine not only the nature of the arsenals in play but also the political economies of the states involved. Some time in the eighteenth century BCE, the horse-drawn war chariot appeared on the battlefields of the Levant and swept all before it.15 States that wanted to contend for power had to invest in the vast and expensive infrastructure necessary to support fleets of chariots sometimes numbering in the thousands. The competition even bred an international chariot aristocracy, mercenaries who rented their skills and their equipment to the highest bidder.16 William H. McNeill has called the chariot the “superweapon” of its day, “the supreme arbiter of the battlefield in all Eurasia.”17 More recently he has called it the “master weapon” of the second millennium BCE, a linguistic turn that invests agency in the technology itself.18 And then, around 1200 BCE, the dominance of the war chariot evaporated in the West, even more quickly than it had materialized.19 Historians have advanced multiple explanations for the eclipse of the war chariot, but all agree that this queen of battle was quickly relegated to mundane transport and ceremonial duties. Within a matter of decades, it was hors de combat.
The Anglo-German naval race preceding World War I provides another instance in which the weapons systems in play seemed to dictate the course of events. Germany chose the scale of the race by challenging Britain’s command of the sea and forcing the Royal Navy both to abandon its Two-Power strategy—to maintain a fleet larger than the next two powers combined— and to recall ships from its worldwide commitments to beef up the Home Fleet in the North Sea. Britain drove the symmetry by introducing the all-big-gun battleship with the launching of HMS Dreadnought in 1905. Pre-Dreadnought battleships receded into obsolescence as Britain, Germany, and other would-be naval powers accelerated building programs to produce the new style of capital ship.20
Like the cold-war nuclear arms race, the naval standoff between Britain and Germany proved to be a war of deterrence, in this case between what American naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan called “fleets in being.” The British Home Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet met only once in World War I, at the inconclusive Battle of Jutland in 1915.21 Thereafter the German fleet stayed home but tied down British naval resources with the threat of sallying forth once more. The vast and symmetrical naval arsenals of the two powers cooled their guns for the duration of the war. The more telling naval contest between Britain and Germany was to revolve around a comparatively small number of German submarines and an asymmetrical campaign by the allied powers to meet this unexpected threat.
Meanwhile, says William H. McNeill, Great Britain invented the military-industrial complex. To get the British people to pay for the ruinously expensive battle fleets called forth by the competition with Germany and the qualitative escalation of the Dreadnought revolution, the Royal Navy allied itself with the arms industry and sympathetic members of the government to shape public policy. Germany, a more authoritarian state, almost a command economy, had less trouble channeling national treasure into the arms buildup, but it still had to simultaneously fund an army large enough to fight enemies on two fronts and sustain an economy capable of supporting such a military establishment.
What made the arms races between Britain and Germany before World War I and between the United States and the Soviet Union in the cold war symmetrical and proportional? In choosing weapons, why did the two sides arm themselves with the same instruments in the same quantities? Perhaps the dynamics of great-power war in the twentieth century bred this kind of parallelism. Perhaps modern war promotes contests of industrial production. Perhaps such arms races reveal nothing more than a lack of imagination, a kind of copycat impulse that drives one state to match the arsenal of a potential competitor. Or maybe arms races are inherently deterministic. Perhaps potential combatants gravitate to a norm of “weapons symmetry,” and the very symmetricality dictates the proportionality.22 Having chosen the same weapons as the enemy, one is naturally drawn to match or exceed the enemy’s numbers. Perhaps certain weapons development, such as all-big-gun battleships or nuclear weapons—or even chariots—leave a potential adversary with no choice but to match the technology or get out of the game.
On the other hand, it may be, as Thomas Misa has argued, that this is a historiographical illusion; perhaps events look more deterministic at a distance than they do close up.23 Other arms races have been clearly asymmetrical and disproportional. For political, economic, and even cultural reasons, enemies have sometimes chosen to fight with dissimilar arsenals. Ground warfare in the twentieth century seemed to be driven first by one paradigm and then another. Machine war in the first half of the century gave way to asymmetric warfare in the second half. Indeed, “asymmetrical war” became a catchphrase of later-twentieth-century American military thought.24 Total war in the twentieth century, for example, demanded complete mobilization of the state and its industrial capacity. The wealthy, industrialized states fielded mechanized armies—planes, tanks, mobile artillery, logistics—capable of crushing any military force not comparably equipped.25 Like the chariot of old, this paradigm appeared to sweep all before it. Countries had to develop like arsenals or submit.
Not so, said Mao Tse-tung. Driven on the Long March of 1936 into the mountains of Shensi Province by the Western-styled and -equipped army of Chiang Kai-shek, Mao contemplated how his peasant army might resist such a force. His Soviet patrons had always doubted that a Marxist-Leninist revolution could succeed in an agrarian state; they imagined that the urban proletariat had to seize the capitalist means of production in order to overthrow the state. But Mao simply changed the paradigm. In constructivist terms, he restored agency to the people. What came to be called People’s War was nominally formulated to drive the invading Japanese from China but really designed to win the civil war with Chiang. The soldiers of People’s War avoided toe-to-toe confrontations with their enemy’s mechanized army. Instead, they attacked that army in the chinks in its armor and took advantage of the limitations imposed by reliance on machines.26
Through the remainder of the twentieth century, other states adapted Mao’s formula to their national military needs. The Vietnam War, especially its American phase from 1965 to 1973, offers the clearest example. But many other wars and insurrections in Asia, Africa, and Latin America pitted rural, agrarian insurgents against urban-based armies equipped with Western-style arms and armor.27 Because so many of these wars were proxy conflicts in the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States, it sometimes appeared that both sides enjoyed a kind of arms symmetry. Soviet-backed insurgents fired AK-47s at government forces armed with American M-16s. But in most cases the government forces had advantages in heavy weapons—airplanes, tanks, artillery—that the insurgents could not match. The rebels used the tactics of People’s War to level the playing field.
So must we conclude that sometimes arms races are deterministic and sometimes not? And if so, can we discern any patterns suggesting why they take one form or another? The problem appears to have two parts. First, the question may be formulated improperly. The categories of analysis—arms races, symmetry, proportionality—might be wrong. Also, the normal conceptual tools might be flawed. Perhaps “technological determinism” lacks explanatory power.
Despite an early fascination with technological determinism, the SHOT community has spent most of its fifty years disparaging the concept. As Forman noted with dismay, historians of technology have generally viewed technological determinism as “heresy.” Rosalind Williams calls it “forbidden fruit,” and Rachel Laudan has taken this rejection of the phenomenon to be our “official posture.”28 Misa has said that “no greater crime can be imagined” within our community than advocacy of technological determinism.29 Eric Schatzberg asserted in 1999 that “no prominent historian of technology today would admit belief in technological determinism,” a claim that seems to answer David Edgerton’s rhetorical question, “Who is the last ‘technological determinist of significance?’”30
Well, how about Rosalind Williams or Thomas Misa or Paul Ceruzzi? None of them would quite label themselves technological determinists (for reasons I will discuss shortly), but all of them have been willing in recent years to violate the taboo that seems to surround the subject.31 The public at large seems increasingly enamored of technological determinism, as do practitioners in some other disciplines.32 Indeed, Forman believes that historians of technology in general, and SHOT members in particular, have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. In our compulsion to dismiss and discredit technological determinism, he says, we have failed to appreciate and illuminate the enormous impact of technology on modern (and postmodern) life.
The reason that “technological determinism” so vexes historians of technology is, I think, more rhetorical than substantive. Technological determinism is not really a category of analysis, but an intentionally opprobrious term of scorn. It is invoked not to illuminate, but to demean. It is not a tool, but a weapon. “Technological determinist” is not a title one claims for oneself, but an epithet that one casts at an opponent.33 “Technological determinism” is not a historical phenomenon so much as a vile slander, used to caricature someone’s historiographical position. As Gabrielle Hecht and Michael Allen have suggested:
Instead of continuing to ask “Does technology drive history?” we should ask questions such as “When or why do historical actors believe or argue that technology drives history?” Addressing such questions leads us to view technological determinism—and other beliefs about the relationships between technology and social change—as political practices.34
“Technological determinism” is a trope because “determinism” is a trope. Nothing in human experience is deterministic. Nothing makes an outcome of collective human activity inevitable. Just as we doubt single-causation explanations of any human phenomenon, so are we loath to accept that anything is predetermined. Inevitability implies some natural law pushing events. Until a technological determinist can articulate and prove such a law, historians will dismiss determinism with the disdain it deserves. It is not just that historians of technology reject technological determinism. All historians reject all determinism, and rightly so.
Then why have this discussion at all? Why not simply aver that arms races are not deterministic because no human activity is deterministic? Well, because there really is something about technology that can, under certain circumstances, exert a powerful force on the course of historical events. That something takes on the two separate forms described by Bijker. There is, first of all, a sense in which some technologies in some contexts shape society and push historical events in directions they would not otherwise have taken. Many historians have suggested terms for this phenomenon other than “technological determinism.” Thomas Hughes has called it “momentum.”35 Rosalind Williams recently recommended Raymond Williams’s formulation of “setting bounds and exerting pressures.”36 Some have suggested “soft determinism,” a mirror image of the semantic debate taking place at the other end of the ideological spectrum in the realm of “hard SCOT” (Social Construction of Technology) and “soft SCOT” (contextualization).37 Lynn White jr., in an essay widely denounced as advocating technological determinism, invoked a metaphor. He said that technologies can open doors to new human possibilities, but they cannot make anyone walk through.38
Some scholars have suggested “technological imperative.” This has the great virtue of implying that the force is obligatory, that it commands some action. The internal-combustion engine, for example, commands us to scour the world for petroleum. But rules were meant to be broken, and commands are bound to be disobeyed. Human agency still exists. People can choose whether or not they want to pass through the door opened by a device such as Lynn White’s stirrup. By removing inevitability from the formulation, the imperative captures something of the force that technology can exert on society without insisting that the force is irresistible.
Alas, “technological imperative” has also been used to describe that other meaning of “technological determinism.” This is determinism not of technology’s impact on society, but of the trajectory along which the technology will develop. “Technological imperative” in this sense means that airplanes will fly higher, faster, and farther; computer chips will keep getting smaller and more powerful; genetic engineering will move toward human cloning whether we want it or not; and nuclear superpowers will choose bombers, ICBMs, and SLBMs. This is the technological determinism that Donald MacKenzie was deconstructing in Inventing Accuracy.39 It is the determinism of Langdon Winner’s “autonomous technology.”40 It is the phenomenon that economic historians have called “path independence.”41 It is the determinism that John Staudenmaier and other scholars warn against when describing the advances of Western science and technology as “progress.”42 As a category of analysis, it is teleological and circular; seldom can we say where a technology is bound to go until it has gone there. Scholars of modern medicine see both determinisms at work in their field of study: medical technology keeps getting more sophisticated and more expensive (technological imperative), and doctors cannot resist prescribing the latest procedures and interventions (technological determinism).43 But historians of technology have treated the concept “technological imperative” with almost the same opprobrium that they attach to “technological determinism” in the form of technology bending society to its purposes.
So, what is to be done? The cold-war arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States suggests that something in the nature of strategic nuclear weapons drove both sides toward the development of proportional and symmetrical arsenals and that the development of these arsenals bred national-security states, what Harold Lasswell called “garrison states.”44 Historians of technology have neither a vocabulary nor a paradigm to explain this phenomenon, however. The various alternative terms and concepts have been helpful in articulating the impact of technology, but none has captured the two ways in which “technological determinism” has been used—or misused. If we are to believe Forman, this lack of conceptual tools flows from our ideological predispositions and our institutional parochialism.
At the risk of appearing anti-intellectual, I would like to suggest that we stop using labels such as “technological determinism” and simply examine the social force and directional force of specific technologies in specific historical contexts. Social force is the impact of technology on society. It may be strong or weak, depending on the circumstances. Directional force is the tendency of a technology to develop along a particular trajectory. This, too, may be strong or weak, depending on the historical context. The race to produce ever more powerful computer chips has been strongly directional over the decades since Gordon Moore hypothesized his law. This is no guarantee that it will continue on that trajectory very far into the future. Meanwhile, other technological developments, such as home entertainment and personal communication, have been far more volatile and contingent. Sometimes, from some perspectives, the social force may appear deterministic, but let us resist the temptation to label it as such. And sometimes, from some perspectives, the directional force may appear linear and self-governing, as if obeying some technological imperative. But let us resist that formulation as well. As microfilm recedes before digitalization, as television succumbs to the internet, and as the CD gives way to the MP3, we are surrounded by reminders of the ephemerality of inevitability.45
Viewed in this light, the cold-war nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union was a unique historical event. Technology was a powerful driver, both of the way the two societies organized themselves to compete and the direction in which their arsenals evolved. But their decisions in both cases were not determined by the technology of nuclear weapons and strategic delivery systems. Rather, those technologies opened doors that the two sides evaluated by their own lights. They walked through some and turned away from others. In every case, their decisions were similar but not identical.46
The social force, i.e., the impact of nuclear weapons on society, acted along multiple axes. The deterrent effect of the nuclear arsenals amassed by the United States and the Soviet Union offers the best explanation for Gaddis’s “long peace.”47 Great-power war ended with World War II and seems unlikely to resume in any foreseeable future.48 With nuclear weapons and the array of delivery systems developed during the cold war, hostilities between nuclear states became, in Herman Kahn’s word, “unthinkable.”49 Of course, other factors contributed to the eclipse of great-power war: the United Nations, globalization, regional security compacts, and the sheer destructiveness of even conventional war. But the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union nonetheless represents the first time in history when two superpowers with conflicting international agendas came within reach of each other without using war to resolve their differences. It is not unreasonable to conclude that their arsenals of deterrence deterred.
A second social force unleashed by the nuclear arms race was what Spencer Weart has called “nuclear fear.”50 The devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the increased destructiveness of thermonuclear weapons, the brinksmanship culminating in the Cuban missile crisis, and the spread of nuclear capabilities to other countries such as China heightened the sense in many quarters that nuclear war was inevitable and it might well extinguish human life on Earth. It is clear in retrospect that both fears were exaggerated, but they were nonetheless real. Furthermore, they spread into other realms—helping to shape, for example, the response to commercial nuclear power in many countries around the world.
Third, the nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States taxed the economies of both countries and diverted national resources from other, more fruitful lines of public investment.51 Stephen I. Schwartz and his colleagues at the Brookings Institution estimate that the United States spent almost $5.5 trillion (in 2006 dollars) on nuclear weapons development, production, and deployment between 1940 and 1996. The meaning of such numbers is unfathomable except by comparison. This investment represents less than the United States spent on defense in total and on social security in the same period, slightly more than the country spent on welfare and interest on the national debt. In the realm of national security, however, it was a comparative bargain, accounting for only about 15 percent of the $18.7 trillion the United States spent in the same period. Because the Soviet Union had a much smaller economy than that of the United States, it had to invest a much larger percentage of its national treasure in the arms race, no doubt contributing to its ultimate collapse. On both sides, the major cost was not the nuclear weapons themselves, which consumed only 7 percent of American nuclear spending, but the delivery systems, which consumed more than 70 percent of that spending.52
A comparable impact on society of the nuclear arms race was environmental. Schwartz and his colleagues estimate that the price of environmental recovery from the nuclear weapons programs of the United States and the Soviet Union will equal or exceed by 2070 the costs of producing and deploying the weapons. And some of the environmental impact is irreversible, including the effects on humans and animals from the fallout from atmospheric testing in the 1950s and early 1960s. The equivalent of 16,250 Hiroshima-sized bombs was exploded aboveground by the Soviet Union and the United States before the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 went into effect.53
The other major impact on society of the nuclear arms race was cultural. The mushroom cloud became something of an icon of the nuclear age, and the prospect that the human race might bomb itself into extinction fed—if it did not provoke—the post-modern malaise of the late twentieth century.54
Most of these phenomena—spiraling defense spending, nuclear fear, post-modern malaise—contributed to the sense in the late twentieth century that bombs were in the saddle and society had to follow, even to the ends of the Earth. The memorable image at the end of the movie Dr. Strangelove in which Slim Pickens rode his nuclear bomb to oblivion on its target in the Soviet Union dripped with irony for just this reason. He was not steering the bomb, of course, but riding it toward a sunset scripted by the weapons themselves. Only toward the end of the cold war did the world begin to grasp the enormity of the environmental consequences of the nuclear arms race. And only after that have some scholars come to see that the arms race may well have saved the world from a worse fate: World War III. But for good or ill, there was no denying that the weapons piped a compelling tune for society through much of the cold war, that their social force seemed irresistible.
On the other hand, an equally compelling argument can be made for social construction. After all, humanity did manage to keep its nuclear weapons sheathed throughout the cold war and beyond. It did manage to impose on them safeguards that averted the nightmarish accidents often predicted by their critics. It did manage to put in place a surprisingly successful nonproliferation regime that retarded the spread of these weapons and their associated technologies. The superpowers did conduct a series of arms-reduction agreements that have shrunken the world’s stockpile of nuclear warheads from more than 70,000 in 1986 to less than 29,000 in 2006.55 One may wish that human agency had asserted itself sooner and more forcefully, and that it would move in the future toward elimination of these weapons, but it can hardly be said in retrospect that the nuclear arms race was deterministic. People designed, built, deployed, safeguarded, and partially dismantled these weapons without the catastrophe that many technological determinists had predicted.56
What about directional force? Were nuclear weapons autonomous? Was their development somehow path-independent, moving inexorably to the enormous, parallel strategic systems deployed by the United States and the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war? Were they driven by some technological imperative to mimic each other in size and type? Well, yes and no. As with Misa’s concept of perspective, this phenomenon looks deterministic or imperative from afar, much less so on closer inspection. This holds true for both the nature of the launch systems and the size of the arsenals.
As noted, both sides developed a triad of strategic nuclear systems: bombers, ICBMs, and SLBMs. The development of these arsenals, however, was path-dependent. The United States took the lead in bomber development, because it had built up that technology for conventional war in the 1930s and 1940s. Furthermore, it ended World War II with a ring of overseas air bases from which it could bomb targets deep within the Soviet Union. The Soviets imitated the American weapons system, though their bombers never had the range or the forward bases to make this threat credible.57
For these reasons, when the Americans and the Soviets captured the German rocket scientists and their hardware at the end of World War II, they chose to use these assets differently. The Soviets began in 1947 to develop a ballistic missile that could reach the United States. The Americans deferred development of the ICBM, relying instead on its incomparable bomber fleet and bases and its monopoly of atomic weaponry. When American intelligence discovered in the mid-1950s that the Soviets were nearing success with an ICBM, the United States launched its own crash program to catch up. Thereafter, the Soviets always had the advantage over the United States in the power (“throw-weight”) of its missiles—they were designed to carry the heavy atomic weapons of the 1940s and early 1950s, not the comparatively light thermonuclear weapons introduced in 1952 and 1953—while the United States had smaller but more sophisticated missiles.
The third leg of the triad, SLBMs, was primarily an American invention, largely a product of interservice competition between the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy. The air force (newly created in 1947) was funded through the first decade of the cold war at a significantly higher rate than the army and navy. The navy concluded that it would have to capture some share of the strategic nuclear mission if it was to compete for appropriations. So, it developed a radical, solid-fuel ballistic missile, the Polaris, which could be carried aboard nuclear-powered submarines and launched underwater. Once the technical problems of solid-fuel rockets were overcome, even the air force changed over to that technology. More important, the Soviet Union developed its own fleet of ballistic-missile submarines, to ensure that the United States did not enjoy exclusive possession of a delivery system of war-winning potential. The dueling superpowers behaved like racing yachts, tacking in unison to ensure that the opponent did not sail off into some fresh wind or smooth seas.
Thus, the three main arms of each nation’s strategic arsenal came to resemble each other, not so much because of the inevitability of these weapons systems as because of the impulse of each side to match the other. Throughout the cold war, however, the United States tried to break out of the stalemate. It perfected cruise missiles, which flew close to the ground (below radar) instead of in ballistic arcs, and mounted them on airplanes, ships, and even land vehicles. The Americans experimented with space-based weaponry, until both sides agreed in the space treaty of 1967 not to place weapons of mass destruction in space. The Americans improved the accuracy of their ICBMs and matched the capability with unparalleled targeting information gleaned from reconnaissance satellites. They placed multiple warheads on the same missile (MIRVs) and made some of the multiple warheads maneuverable (MARVs). And finally, in the climax of the cold war, they undertook a major development program for ballistic missile defense.58 In almost all of these cases, the United States innovated and the Soviet Union imitated, or tried to. Despite these permutations, the two arsenals still looked very similar at the end of the cold war. Nevertheless, it is clear that no technological imperative drove those similarities. They were driven by the nature of the competition between the two superpowers, especially the faith of the United States in advanced technology as the key to security.
In the search for a technological imperative, a better case can be made for the thermonuclear bomb than for the delivery systems that carried it. Both sides understood in the 1940s that a fusion bomb had far greater energy potential than the fission weapons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and each side began a development program independently of whether the other side could or would do the same. It is a nice question whether the Soviets imitated the American hydrogen bomb the way they imitated the atomic bomb and so many of their delivery systems. But the two sides succeeded in exploding their first thermonuclear weapons within months of each other. The lure of this technology proved irresistible to both. In economic terms, the development of the hydrogen bomb appears to have been path-independent, at least after the failure of the Baruch Plan in 1946. Still, it is more temperate and more accurate to say that the hydrogen bomb exerted a strong directional force on weapons development.
Nor did the enormous scale of the superpowers’ arsenals flow from the nature of the technology. It flowed from the nature of arms competition. Deterrence had its own MAD logic. Security came from vulnerability. As long as each side was vulnerable to retaliation, neither side would launch a first strike. The weapons would be successful only if they were never used. Each side had to believe that no matter what it did to the other side, even a sneak attack, retaliation would follow. Since there was no realistic defense against ballistic missiles and no sure way to neutralize all the enemy’s weapons before they were fired, security came in numbers. The more weapons each side had, the greater the chance that there would be enough left after a first strike to retaliate decisively. Thus, each side had an independent incentive to increase the number of its warheads, and each increase by one side bred a comparable increase by the other. This was driven in part by the nature of the technologies and in larger part by human nature.59
In sum, the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union exerted a social force on each country and a directional force in the development of their arsenals. But the two countries shaped the arms race more than they were shaped by it, and the two arsenals had more to do with human nature and competition than they did with the autonomy of the technologies themselves. As in all arms races, as indeed in all human competition—military, economic, athletic—the technologies in play shaped their environment and shaped their own evolution, but they did not determine either one. This arms race was not deterministic. No arms race is deterministic. No technology is deterministic. No historical phenomenon is deterministic. “Technological determinism” is a rhetorical, not an analytical, tool.
1. Paul Forman, “The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the History of Technology,” History and Technology 23 (March/ June 2007): 1–152.
2. Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
3. John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York, 1987).
4. Wiebe Bijker, “Sociohistorical Technology Studies,” in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila Jasanoff et al. (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1995), 238. Others have observed the same dual nature. For a different and thought-provoking taxonomy of technological determinism, see Sally Wyatt, “Technological Determinism Is Dead: Long Live Technological Determinism,” in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Edward J. Hackett et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), 165–80.
5. This was the argument of William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago, 1982), esp. chap. 10.
6. Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (Cambridge, 1998); Michael Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s (New Haven, Conn., 1995).
7. Aaron Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, N.J., 2000).
8. George Kennan ended his famous article on “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” (Foreign Affairs 25 [July 1947]: 566–82) by warning “the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”
9. Albert Wohlstetter, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” RAND P-1472 (Santa Monica, Calif., 1958); Robert R. Bowie and Richard Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (Oxford, 1998), 5, 40, and passim.
10. Samuel P. Huntington, The Common Defense: Strategic Programs in National Politics (New York, 1961), chap. 4.
11. Lawrence Martin, The Changing Face of Nuclear Warfare (New York, 1983).
12. David Edgerton, The Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge, 2006).
13. Sherry (n. 6 above); Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York, 1982).
14. In A Study of War (Chicago, 1965), Quincy Wright suggested that technology has been the main driver of war in the last half-millennium. A. J. P. Taylor demonstrated how military technologies could pipe the tune in War by Timetable: How the First World War Began (London, 1969).
15. Arthur Cottrell, Chariot: The Astounding Rise and Fall of the World’s First War Machine (London, 2004).
16. A. F. Rainey, “The Military Personnel at Ugarit,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24 (1965): 17–27; W. F. Albright, “Mitannian Maryannu, ‘Chariot-Warrior,’ and the Canaanite and Egyptian Equivalents,” Archiv für Orientforschung 6 (1930–31): 217–21.
17. William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago, 1991 [1963]), 102–9, quotes at 106 and 104.
18. William H. McNeill, A World History, 4th ed. (New York, 1999).
19. Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C. (Princeton, N.J., 1993).
20. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London, 1983), 215–37. Jon Sumida has shown that Fisher actually used recent technological advances to shift Britain away from battleships and toward cruisers. See Jon Tetsuro Sumida, In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology, and British Naval Policy, 1889–1914 (Boston, 1989), and Jon Tetsuro Sumida, “Sir John Fisher and the Dreadnought: The Sources of Naval Mythology,” Journal of Military History 59 (1995): 619–38.
21. Not counting the comparatively minor skirmish at Dogger Bank in 1915.
22. Robert L. O’Connell, Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression (New York, 1989).
23. Thomas J. Misa, “Retrieving Sociotechnical Change from Technological Determinism,” in Does Technology Drive History? (n. 2 above), 115–41.
24. Roger W. Barnett, Asymmetrical Warfare: Today’s Challenge to U.S. Military Power (Washington, 2003). It is just as often called “asymmetric” war or warfare.
25. Walter Millis asserted in Arms and Men that the internal-combustion engine was the dominant technology of World War II, but one would hardly call it deterministic. Millis, “The Mechanization of War,” in Arms and Men: A Study in American Military History (New Brunswick, N.J., 1986 [1956]), 211–64.
26. Mao Tse-tung, “On Protracted War” (May 1938) at http://www.marxists.org/ reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_09.htm (accessed 7 January 2010).
27. Patrick Brogan, The Fighting Never Stopped (New York, 1990).
28. Forman, “The Primacy of Science in Modernity” (n. 1 above), 65; Rosalind Williams, “Opening the Big Box,” Technology and Culture 48 (2007): 104–16, at 104; Rachel Laudan, “Natural Alliance or Forced Marriage? Changing Relations between the Histories of Science and Technology,” Technology and Culture 36 (1995): S17–28, at S19.
29. Thomas Misa, “Beyond Linear Models: Science, Technology, and Processes of Change,” in The Science-Industry Nexus: History, Policy, Implications, Nobel Symposium 123, ed. Karl Grandin, Nina Wormbs, and Sven Widmalm (Sagamore Beach, Mass., 2004), 263.
30. Eric Schatzberg, “Undermining Common Sense: The Critique of Technological Determinism in History of Technology Courses,” at http://www.cals.wisc.edu/iic/inno vation/schatzberg.html (accessed 7 January 2010); Edgerton (n. 12 above), 333n.
31. Williams; Misa, “Beyond Linear Models,” 262–64; Paul Ceruzzi, “Moore’s Law and Technological Determinism: Reflections on the History of Technology,” Technology and Culture 46 (2005): 584–93.
32. Langdon Winner, “Where Technological Determinism Went,” in Visions of STS: Counterpoints in Science, Technology, and Society Studies, ed. Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Carl Mitcham (Albany, N.Y., 2001), 11–17; Langdon Winner, “Technological Determinism: Alive and Kicking?” Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society 17 (1997): 1–2; Christopher Freeman, “The Case for Technological Determinism,” in Information Technology: Social Issues: A Reader, ed. Ruth Finnegan, Graeme Salaman, and Kenneth Thompson (Sevenoaks, Kent, UK, 1987), 5–18; Cyrus C. M. Mody, “Small, but Determined: Technological Determinism in Nanoscience,” Hyle: International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry 10 (2004): 99–128.
33. Misa says that we historians of technology have “a pervasive wariness of being branded by our peers as a technological determinist.” See Misa, “Beyond Linear Models,” 263.
34. Gabrielle Hecht and Michael Thad Allen, “Introduction: Authority, Political Machines, and Technology’s History,” in Technologies of Power: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes, ed. Gabrielle Hecht and Michael Thad Allen (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 14–15. This quote also draws on the contribution of Edmund Todd to the same volume, “Engineering Politics, Technological Fundamentalism, and German Power Technology, 1900–1936,” 145–74.
35. Thomas Parke Hughes, “Technological Momentum in History: Hydrogenation in Germany, 1900–1933,” Past and Present 44 (August 1969): 106–32; Thomas Parke Hughes, “Technological Momentum,” in Does Technology Drive History? (n. 2 above), 101–13.
36. Williams (n. 28 above), 114.
37. At the 1993 conference at Oxford on technological change, Trevor Pinch challenged his audience to name a single technology that was not socially constructed. Walter Vincenti rose to propose retractable landing gear. The logic behind Pinch’s challenge was that all technologies are made by people; they are socially constructed by definition. Vincenti’s point was that regardless of time, place, or individuals involved, all aviation designers and manufacturers have settled on the same technology for landing gear on aircraft. Retractable landing gear have arguably exerted an irresistible technological imperative to the aeronautical community around the world. Note that Hughes made determinism and social construction polar opposites in what was almost a confession of faith, distancing himself from Karl Marx, Lynn White jr., and Jacques Ellul, who he defined as determinists. See Hughes, “Technological Momentum,” 103.
38. Lynn White jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (London, 1962). See also Alex Roland, “Once More into the Stirrups: Lynn White jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change,” Technology and Culture 44 (2003): 574–85.
39. Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: An Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
40. Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).
41. R. Nelson and S. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); W. Brian Arthur, Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1994); Paul A. David, “Path Dependence, Its Critics and the Quest for ‘Historical Economics,’” in Evolution and Path Dependence in Economic Ideas: Past and Present, ed. P. Garrouste and S. Ioannides (Cheltenham, UK, 2000).
42. John M. Staudenmaier, S.J., “Perils of Progress Talk: Some Historical Considerations,” in Science, Technology and Social Progress, ed. Stephen L. Goldman (Bethlehem, Pa., 1989), 268–93. Some scholars and some disciplines use “technological imperative” to refer to technology’s impact on society. See, for example, M. Lynne Markus and Daniel Robey, “Information Technology and Organizational Change: Causal Structure in Theory and Research,” Management Science 34 (1988): 583–98.
43. The concept appears to have particular appeal in the medical and educational communities. See, for example, Barbara A. Koenig, “The Technological Imperative in Medical Practice: The Social Creation of a ‘Routine’ Treatment,” in Biomedicine Examined, ed. Margaret Lock and Deborah Gordon (Dordrecht, 1988), 465–96.
44. Alex Roland, “The Grim Paraphernalia: Eisenhower and the Garrison State,” in Forging the Shield: Eisenhower and National Security in the 21st Century, ed. Dennis Showalter (Carson City, Nev., 2005) 13–22.
45. It may well be that we will one day look back on our current enthusiasm for digitalization of data with the same wonderment.
46. There are not really that many cases analogous to Walter Vincenti’s retractable landing gear.
47. Gaddis (n. 3 above); Alex Roland, “Keep the Bomb,” Technology Review, August/ September 1995, 67–69.
48. Jack S. Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495–1975 (Lexington, Ky., 1983).
49. Herman Kahn, Thinking about the Unthinkable (New York, 1962); and see Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).
50. Spencer Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, Mass., 1988).
51. Paul Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 18 (1987): 149–229; Paul Forman and José M. Sánchez-Ron, eds., National Military Establishments and the Advancement of Science and Technology (Dordrecht, 1996).
52. Stephen I. Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons since 1940 (Washington, D.C., 1998). See also Schwartz, “The Hidden Costs of Our Nuclear Arsenal,” Global Politics (1998), at http://www.brook.edu/fp/proj ects/nucwcost/schwartz.htm (accessed 7 January 2010).
53. Schwartz, “Hidden Costs,” 5.
54. Peggy Rosenthal, “The Nuclear Mushroom Cloud as Cultural Image,” American Literary History 3 (spring 1991): 63–92.
55. National Resources Defense Council, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2006,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2006, 64–66.
56. Admiral Noel Gayler argued in the 1980s that nuclear war was inevitable if the weapons were not eliminated. His logic was that the risk of nuclear accident or attack, however small, was finite. Therefore, mathematically, if nuclear weapons existed long enough, a disaster would occur. This surmise neglects the fact that the Sun might die before the catastrophe occurred, or the human race might have gone extinct. For the context of this conversation between Gayler and the author, 26 October 1987 in Washington, D.C., see Martin Harwit, An Exhibit Denied: Lobbying the History of Enola Gay (New York, 1996), 30–34.
57. Save, of course, for the famous “bomber gap” of 1955–57, in which the Soviets tricked American intelligence into believing they had a massive fleet of bombers by flying the same planes repeatedly over events attended by Western observers. See Abram N. Shulsky and Gary James Schmitt, Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence, 3d ed. (Washington, D.C., 2002), 23–24.
58. Frances FitzGerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War (New York, 2000); Donald R. Baucom, The Origins of SDI, 1944–1983 (Lawrence, Kans., 1992).
59. Robert Jervis, “Was the Cold War a Security Dilemma?” Journal of Cold War Studies 3 (winter 2001): 36–60.
©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.
Filed under: Vol. 51 No. 2 (April 2010)
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