Environmental Histories of the Cold War (review)

Until lately, relating the environment to the Cold War has found little currency among historians. John McNeill’s chapter on “The Biosphere and the Cold War” in the massive three volume Cambridge History of the Cold War (2010) is but one chapter of seventy-two.¹ In their present volume McNeill and co-editor Unger have endeavored to correct this imbalance.

Environmental Histories focuses on two themes–the fragile global environment and the destructive impact which the long-lasting Cold War had on it. The authors present a dozen or more chapters in which the Cold War and environmentalism collided in the politics of the USSR, China, Europe, Oceana, and the USA during the second half of the twentieth century. Cold war, like hot war, proved ecologically destructive: technology once hailed for trumping nature showed during the Cold War a seamier side in its “war on nature.”

It is noteworthy that the present work is a publication of the German Historical Institute,

A center for advanced study and research whose [sic] purpose is to provide a permanent basis for scholarly cooperation among historians from the Federal Republic or Germany and the United States.

The McNeill/Unger book joins ten others in an Institute series that “conducts, promotes, and supports research into both American and German political, social, economic, and cultural history.” Of the contributing historians here, ten are from universities in the U.S. and Canada, three from Europe, one from China, and one from the U.S. State Department.

Environmental Histories, which begins with an editors’ introduction, consists of four parts, or thirteen chapters. Part I, Science and Planning, contains five of these; Part II, Geopolitics and the Environment, four; Part III, Environmentalism, three; and the fourth part is a single-chapter Epilogue.

In their “Big Picture” introduction McNeill and Unger offer a context, listing germane Cold War/ecological themes as “environmental effects of proxy wars,” “agriculture and the Green Revolution,” “Cold War infrastructure,” “military bases, nuclear weaponry, military-industrial complexes,” “respites for nature,” “Cold War environmentalism,” “environmentalism and diplomacy,” “environmental history, the Cold War, and science,” “mobilizing science,” “mobilizing the environment,” “transnational approaches,” and “scientific experts and environmentalism,” among others.

The following essays are indicative of the book’s scope and content. Paul Josephson’s is a searing indictment of Soviet environmental degradation over and above Chernobyl. Matthew Farish writes about “Creating Cold War Climates” intended for waging environmental warfare. Much the same is to be found in Jacob Darwin Hamblin’s “Global Contamination Zone”—research on radiological, chemical, and biological weaponry. Weather control is Kristine Harper’s and Ronald E. Doel’s contribution, while Richard Tucker’s “Containing Communism by Impounding Rivers” constitutes the final chapter in part I.

Mark D. Merlin and Ricardo M. Gonzalez describe the effects of British, French and American nuclear testing in remote Oceana, while Greg Bankoff’s fascinating “Curtain of Silence” gives a glimpse of the destruction of wildlife in Asia’s Cold Wars. Others examine ecocide and chemical warfare in Vietnam, the ecological intellectualism of the brothers Huxley, Julian and Aldous, atmospheric nuclear testing, and the evolution of China’s environmental problems and policy. In an epilogue the author Frank Uekoetter ponders whether the termination of the Cold War spelled a “turning point” in environmental history.

Environmental Histories of the Cold War’s value lay in its narratives and its linking the Cold War and the environment as no other work had previously done. As such, it invites additional studies into this rich and open field. Editor McNeill himself is presently engaged in writing a broader history.