Securitization and Secrecy in the Late Cold War: The View from Space

Thomas O. Paine—the scientist, General Electric (GE) executive, and former National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) administrator in the Nixon Administration—traveled to Moscow in October 1987 to attend the International Space Future Forum. He was shocked by the attitudes he encountered. US officials were “evasive about space goals, and suspicious of dealing with foreigners,” while the Soviets pursued projects of “cooperation with European and Japanese space capabilities.” He was struck by the “openness of Soviet scientists compared to the uncertainty, aimlessness, and … xenophobia of Washington space officials.”¹ Paine’s observations highlight a surprising turn of events: while the US space program was hostile to international collaboration, the Soviet Union was opening its space programs on numerous fronts—with France in 1966, with the United States through the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) in the first half of the 1970s, and with other communist and noncommunist nations. This article evaluates Cold War regimes of information management and secrecy through the prism of collaborative ventures in space. Its goal is to explain the surprising end point of the Cold War in which the Soviet Union, not the United States, had stepped into the role of defending more open information exchanges against the global forces of militarization and classification. The move toward greater openness in the Soviet Union originated in the late 1960s, suggesting that the Soviet system of the Brezhnev era was anything but stagnant as it developed orbital stations and extensive programs of scientific and technological collaboration with previously hostile foreign powers in the 1970s and 1980s. Those programs, and science and technology exchanges more generally, provided the Soviets with a seemingly neutral and technocratic sphere that transcended the binary ideological oppositions of the Cold War and paved the way for détente. As a result, the Soviets began to dismantle the elaborate system of secrecy for which their system was notorious, anticipating, at least in part, Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of new political thinking (novoe politicheskoe myshlenie) and glasnost in the late 1980s.²

Regimes of Secrecy across the Ideological Divide

During and after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union viewed science and technology as instruments of national power.³ Both countries, for example, devoted more funding to big science and technology projects, creating a closed model of scientific and technological research tied to national security. That Cold War model of secret science and technology, encouraged by the spectacular success of the US Manhattan Project and driven by the seeming ideological imperatives of the Cold War, often challenged Enlightenment conceptions of science as a transnational republic of learned scholars, whose commitment to knowledge supposedly transcended ideological and national differences. Both models of science and technology operated side by side during the Cold War, entangled at the actual level of individuals—who often worked as engineers, space travelers, and scientists in both the open and closed worlds—and at the level of rhetoric and ideology.⁴ As the New York Times noted in 1985: “In principle, science is international. Its borders are not meant to coincide with those of nations.” Yet such ideals were quickly abandoned, “when governments believe security risks outweigh scientific benefits.”⁵

The United States, for example, often claimed to be a bastion of free information exchange, supposedly directing its expertise toward the benefit of all humanity, as the US Space Act of 1958 had mandated. The United States televised shuttle missions live and described various international experiments and payloads in reporter press packets. Missing from those press releases, however, were the many secret shuttle payloads devoted to the Strategic Defensive Initiative (SDI). In 1985, the Pentagon, which funded 70 percent of all federal scientific research, began requiring security clearances for many scientists who attended international conferences.⁶ Classification, meanwhile, almost always trumped openness, as Casper Weinberger noted in a National Security Council memorandum in August 1986: “Our military space program is healthy and impressive, but this is not something we can go public with. If anything, our devotion to military space works against us abroad and with large segments...