Oceanographers and the Cold War: Disciples of Marine Science (review)

In the author's words, this book deals with "one of the great paradoxes of oceanography during the first decades after World War II. Support for research was based on its usefulness for making war on other nations. At the same time oceanography retained an identity that tied it closely to international cooperation" (p. xviii). Those of us beginning to toil in those fields during the 1960s were aware, usually dimly, that we were participants in global affairs unfolding around us, and especially that an amazing expansion of the marine sciences was underway both scientifically and financially. It was, as one of my colleagues said at the time, a golden age. Hamblin makes it clear in this outstanding study of the relationship between oceanography (mainly, but not entirely, in the U.S.A.), the military, and international affairs in the 1950s and 1960s, what our unseen context was, and how the gold was alloyed with other metals. His book is the first to provide a deeply researched, historically sound, insightful and provocative view of how military goals, scientific motivations and global political forces interacted in the growth of oceanography between the end of World War II and the 1970s.

If the U.S. Navy could use the postwar growth of international cooperation in oceanography for its own ends, to get information from a wide range of sources, especially on physical oceanography and seafloor topography for antisubmarine warfare, at relatively low cost, scientists could benefit too. But there was no unanimity that cooperative science had unalloyed benefits. Some influential oceanographers, among them George Deacon in the U.K. and Henry Stommel in the U.S.A., believed that creating links between scientists and the military, and especially attempting to develop an international network of marine scientists by bureaucratic means, would dilute science and jeopardize the quality of scientific work on the oceans. That powerful myth of science, that it develops best from the bottom up, that is, from scientists and their work, rather than top down, from directives arrived at by committees and commissions, was under threat. Hamblin shows in detail how international cooperative enterprises and institutions such as the International Geophysical Year (1957–58), the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (established 1957), the NATO Science Committee (ca. 1958), UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (established 1960), the International Indian Ocean Expedition (1962–65), and the International Decade of Ocean Exploration (IDOE) (1970s), could work to the advantage of scientists, but once grasped, like the broom by the sorcerer's apprentice, could hardly be turned off. As Hamblin says of the IDOE (p. 264),

Like so many of the efforts of scientists to create "disciples of marine science" throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the IDOE resulted in a lot of money for scientific projects and can be judged a successful effort to induce a major government to appreciate oceanography. At the same time, that appreciation politicized science, threatened scientists' autonomy, and took the initiative for shaping the international scientific community out of the hands of scientists themselves.

By the early 1970s, where Hamblin's book ends, oceanography in the United States, and to a lesser extent, but still significantly, elsewhere, was inseparable from marine affairs.

Hamblin succeeds magnificently, within the bounds he sets, in making the recent history of oceanography intelligible for the first time. However, we do need more information on the development of the marine sciences in other countries, where the influence of the military has been much less than in the United States. I believe that there are good historical and political lessons to be learned from countries such as Canada, Norway, France, and India, where the marine sciences prospered at the same time as in the United States, partly because of their connections with the United States and its navy, but also for reasons endemic to those nations. It would be churlish to expect Hamblin...