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

Covering 70 percent of the planet, the ocean's benign blue suggests to the extraterrestrial viewer a natural unity that humankind has sought, but never found. Most of us grew up regarding the word ocean not as part of a dynamic whole, but rather as the sum of more particular regional parts. Too often, we understand one or two trees, but have little sense of how they relate to the forest.

In Oceanographers and the Cold War, Jacob Hamblin would have us appreciate the history of the ocean sciences in the same way. He claims that postwar oceanography had a "cold war" side and then quite another face with an international focus that was driven by individual scientists. He also informs us that international initiatives represented the most ambitious efforts in oceanography during the first two cold war decades. The sources necessary for this study will support neither of these statements. Most of them are not classified. I have seen them. Hamblin has not.

As historians, we cannot understand the Atlantic Ocean in isolation. Neither can we separate the international from the national, or from the cold war that plagued them both, or from the scientists who searched for truth while serving multiple, often conflicting civilian and military masters. Hamblin repeatedly cites the role of the Soviet–United States conflict as a challenge to the international programs he describes, but we are never treated to an analysis of the very tight scientific-political-military dynamic driving it all. More importantly for the present review is the inescapable conclusion that he cannot treat his international programs as part of an already potent dynamic because he did not take the time to look at the fundamental sources that would compel him to do so.

Although the Office of Naval Research (ONR) correctly and frequently appears in his story as a major influence, Hamblin never consulted the ONR records in RG-298 at the U.S. National Archives and the Washington National Records Center in Suitland, Maryland. Large portions of them are critical, applicable, and unclassified. Neither did he tap the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office files in RG-37 at the National Archives. That collection holds the primary source material for ocean-bottom surveys conducted by civilian and naval teams worldwide during the cold war.

Much of this emerged from classification even as I studied the collection during the late 1990s. Here, for example, Hamblin would have found Project Cabot, Richard Fleming's collaboration with the Canadians in one of the first truly synoptic studies of the Gulf Stream. Save for some strategic plans files available at the Naval Historical Center, naval records played no role in Hamblin's study, even though the ONR reigned as the premier patron of U.S. oceanography both nationally and internationally from 1946 to well after the foundation of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Neither did he take advantage of nearly a dozen oral histories at the Naval Historical Center by major figures in his story.

This reaches the level of the absurd when Hamblin calls James Wakelin an "admiral" even though this physicist and policy maker never served in the navy. Wakelin's professional biography is available at the Naval Historical Center because of his tenure as assistant secretary of the navy for research and development. Is Hamblin aware, however, that the eminent Harry Hess was an admiral in the naval reserve?

This problem extends beyond naval sources. The time spent defining both oceanography's nature and its future helped determine the dynamic that drove ocean science and its international ambitions after 1945. The war had prompted leaders in the field to refine the definition beyond that crafted by Henry Bigelow in 1930. The National Academy of Sciences' archive holds a verbatim transcript of the so-called Wardman Park Meeting in 1949, the source for Oceanography 1951, written primarily by Carl Eckart. This gathering defined a great many of oceanography's identity problems domestically...