Cold War, Hot Science: Applied Research in Britain's Defence Laboratories, 1945-1990 (review)

In the last decade or so historians of technology have made the study of cold war technologies in the United States into an active and exciting research site. Far less has been published on cold war technologies developed in Europe, however. This book seeks to help fill that gap. The outgrowth of a 1995 agreement between the Science Museum in London and the British Defence Research Agency, it focuses on the history of key parts of the postwar military research enterprise in Britain concerned with conventional weapons. Nuclear weapons are not discussed.

The authors cover a wide range of technologies and research programs: rotary-wing aircraft, ground-based air defense and ABM systems, armored fighting vehicles, ground and airborne radar, applications of thermal radiation, naval command and control equipment, laser research and development, chemical and biological warfare, defense physiology, and civilian spinoffs. There also are discussions of the governance of defense research and of the Royal Aircraft Establishment—at its peak perhaps the largest research establishment in Europe.

Contributions range from accounts written in the style of technical reports and little connected to any wider historical literature to—in the case of Jon Agar and Jeff Hughes's chapter on ground and airborne radar in the United Kingdom—an empirically rich account framed by broad questions having to do with the relations between the various British radar research establishments and their service users, as well as the trend toward ever more integrated systems.

As is often the case in histories of the institutions and products of postwar research and development, acronyms are thick on the ground. One result of the agreement between the Science Museum and the Defence Research Agency has been greater access to bureaucratic reports and minutes of committee meetings than might otherwise have been the case. But the nature of most of these primary sources, plus the proliferation of acronyms, has yielded some rather dense prose. Nor do the authors all move convincingly in their narratives between describing the actions of individuals or small groups and the various institutions in which they played a part. More efforts to adopt comparative approaches could well have been enlightening, too.

But the volume's editors, Robert Bud and Philip Gummett, provide an insightful introduction that largely succeeds in pulling together all thirteen chapters. The two chief themes are the "relations between science, technology and the military environment, in a historical context; and issues in applied science and technology" (p. 22). The first theme is clear enough. The second is problematical. It raises the question of how useful a qualifier "applied" is for the purposes of historical analysis. Few of the authors reflect on the notion of applied research and instead take it as a given, stable category.

These, however, are minor criticisms. Every chapter contains material of considerable interest, and some of very great interest. Cold War, Hot Science is an ambitious pioneering work. It adds much to our knowledge of Britain's Defence Laboratories and the fruits of the researches conducted therein between 1945 and 1990. As the editors note, the book's most significant effect is likely to be to assist in opening up a range of new lines of research.