A Cold War Crisis: Finding Meaning in a Most Uncertain Term

In 1955, in the midst of the Cold War, most Americans found it difficult to define exactly what they were living through. This ambiguity was reflected in a Gallup poll that winter, in which adults were asked what “the Cold War” meant to them. Most respondents agreed that this new war was different from wars that had come before: one asserted that it was “not a hot war.” Many agreed that these new tensions were “subtle,” “diplomatic,” “a war of nerves,” “a political war” and a perpetual state of “bickering.” The Gallup organization had thought enough on the topic to categorize the answers it received as “correct” (those listed above) and “incorrect.” The latter included more biased and personal views: “fighting slow [so that] no one knows what they are doing,” “fighting for nothing,” and, most personal of all: the Cold War “means my brothers’ lives as they are in the service.”¹

Neither the passage of time nor hundreds of thousands of pages written on the subject have done much to clarify the meaning of the “Cold War.” When I ask undergraduate students today what the term means, I usually get a smattering of responses as disparate—and “correct”—as those that the pollsters received in 1955: “superpower rivalry,” “conformity and containment at home,” “Communism and capitalism,” “arms race,” “something that ended with the Berlin Wall,” “McCarthyism,” “proxy wars” and “ideological battle.” The resulting muddle seems to prove precisely what Anders Stephanson asserts in his provocative essay “Cold War Degree Zero”: “the cold war [is] little more than an empty container of time, a homogeneous stretch when sundry things happen in sundry places for sundry reasons” (p. 21).

Do we use the “Cold War” to explain so much that it has come to mean nothing at all?

The goal of Uncertain Empire is to rescue the term and very idea of “Cold War” from the intellectual inanity that Stephanson envisions. Joel Isaac and Duncan Bell, the volume’s editors, aim not to criticize existing Cold War scholarship, but rather to open new avenues of inquiry and perhaps reinvigorate what is already a very large and rich field. That is because, while there is no shortage of writing on the topic, there is a surprising lack of attention to its meaning. Cold War historians, the editors argue, need to “make the acts of labeling and periodization as self-conscious as possible” (p. 8). “Cold War” is not a neutral term but carries with it burdens of the past, of historical interpretation and of moral judgment. To choose but one small and incomplete example, “Cold War Science,” the subject of a few essays in the volume, can be both description and interpretation: science done during the Cold War or science undertaken as part of a Cold War project. The job of the scholar is to rigorously define and question those meanings. The twelve essays that make up the volume are meant to demonstrate the power and possibility in doing just that.

Aimed at scholars of the Cold War, Uncertain Empire is in some ways a model for an edited volume. The introduction and twelve essays can be read in parts or as a cohesive whole. Isaac and Bell, Lecturers at the University of Cambridge, provide a succinct overview that explains the stakes in rethinking the Cold War and serves as a guide to the rest of the volume. The essays remain in conversation with one another through the rather simple but surprisingly underutilized device of having each essay refer directly to others. The four selections that make up part one, “Prisms,” establish the project’s conceptual issues (and will thus be the focus of this review essay). Stephanson and Odd Arne...