The Challenge of Technological Uncertainty

To hold incompatible truths in tension is to adopt an attitude of wisdom. . . . It is also to treat ambivalence as the optimal compromise, to equate hypocrisy with adaptability, and to equate paradox with effectiveness. Ambivalence, hypocrisy, inconsistency, and equivocality may be pejorative labels in times of stability, but they are markers of heightened awareness in times of transition. In times of transition people are especially sensitive to the fact that they talk reality into existence and [that they] need plausible stories to retain their success in doing so.

—Karl Weick, “Commentary on Czarniawska”¹

Among other things, the cold war was an era of transition, ornamented with ambivalence, hypocrisy, inconsistency, and paradox. Bringing these issues into focus matters now because we arguably again inhabit an era of transition—from cold war to placeless conflicts, from nation-based structures to global flows, from American ascendance to American declension, from just plain weather to global warming, etc. Amid these puzzling shifts, scholars, policy makers, managers, and citizens are increasingly aware of, and uneasy about, our limited understanding of that sort of technology on which contemporary society relies to address complex problems, themselves often poorly specified. So perhaps revisiting an earlier technologically robust transition period, the cold war, focusing on military innovation and uncertainty, might provide a helpful perspective.

Realistically, there were two transitions in the half-century after 1939, one into and another out of the cold war. Neither was smooth, neither was a sharp and decisive event—the first Soviet atom test came well after severe East-West tensions had arced, whereas the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the final punctuation mark to a decade-long process of unraveling. Here I will focus on the “into the cold war” transition, with special attention to military-related technologies.

Though many compelling shifts entwined with the cold war’s onset, at least four are worth noting for our purposes: the establishment of a bipolar, global, politico-technical competition; the creation in the United States of a large, permanent standing army, fed by a restored draft; the parallel implantation of a permanent international intelligence arm of the executive branch; and the U.S. military’s increasing fascination with and embrace of technological innovations for warfare. These are all familiar to cold war scholars, but it is the fourth element that centrally animates this discussion. Until World War II and its aftermath, as Bart Hacker has argued, the U.S. Army and Navy were cautious to a fault in entertaining, testing, and introducing new technological elements into military operations. Few U.S. interwar military leaders welcomed new technologies, not least insofar as they unsettled basic operations and assumptions for army or navy practice. Regarding tanks, which Erich Ludendorff argued had been critical to Allied successes late in World War I, the U.S. Army stalled and stumbled, lagging the relatively few European innovations during these decades. Nonetheless, this conservatism collapsed by degrees during World War II. Why? The simplest explanation might center on competition. For twenty-three years after 1918, American military technologies were rarely and barely tested against “real time” competition. Starting in the later 1930s, military planners began realizing that thin funding of air, land, and seaborne technological development could be placing the United States several steps behind militant nations that had begun investing in advancing their technical capabilities. Blitzkrieg in Europe and the attack on Pearl Harbor confirmed this.

World War II altered the military’s technological mindset, given rapid design and implementation of radar and proximity fuses, innovations in code-breaking (particularly Enigma) and in communications, control, and instrumentation capabilities, along with the decisive feedback from military field operations that pushed redesign of aircraft, tanks, and special-purpose ships, and of course the Manhattan Project’s atomic bombs. Pursuing the competition motif, Russian T-34-85 tanks that overmatched Germany’s Tigers and the Nazis’ rocket-powered V-1 and V-2 flying bombs doubtless played a substantial role. This shift plunged military planners and procurement officers into increasingly difficult territory, the domain of technological uncertainty. The balkiness and erratic reliability of innovative and unproven technologies had offered persistent...