Technology and the Arms Race

Technology and the Arms Race Review: Innovation and the Arms Race: How the United States and the Soviet Union Develop New Military Technologies by Matthew Evangelista Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988, 300 pp. Donald MacKenzie I F o r at least the last two decades-and in many senses longer-scholars have struggled to come to grips with the role of technological change in the arms race. There is more to weaponry than high technology, more to the competition of the Soviet Union and the United States than weaponry, and more to the relationship of the superpowers than the simplistic competition implied in the metaphor of a race. Yet the basic question continues to press itself on us, not just because no wholly compellinganswer to it has been formulated, but because it matters. Matthew Evangelista prefaces Innovation and the Arms Race by quoting Robert 0.Keohane: We think about world politicsnot because it is aestheticallybeautiful, because we believe that it is governable by simple, knowable laws, or because it provides rich, easily accessible data for the testing of empirical hypotheses. Were those concerns paramount, we would look elsewhere. We study world politics because we think it will determine the fate of the earth.’ Evangelista’s concerns are made no less relevant by the publication of his book at a moment of almost unprecedented hope for an end, or at least a significant lessening, of weapons competition between East and West. For one could argue that it was changing technology-and particularly MIRV, making possible the destruction of several missile silos by one attacking Donald MacKenzie is Reader in Sociology, University of Edinburgh, and author of the forthcoming Inventing Accuracy: An Historical Sociologyof Nuclear Missile Guidance. 1. Quoted by Matthew Evangelista, Innovation and the Arms Race: How the United States and the Soviet Union Develop New Military Technologies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. viii. Subsequent references to Evangelista’s book will be included parenthetically in the text and footnotes. There is a useful summary of some of the book‘s main arguments in Evangelista, ”How Technology Fuels the Arms Race,” Technology Review,Vol. 91, No. 5 (July 1988), pp. 4249 . International Security, Summer 1989 (Vol. 14, No. 1) 0 1989by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 161 lnternational Security 14:l I 162 missile-that undermined the major previous attempt to stabilizesuperpower relations, the detente of the Nixon-Brezhnev era.* Theorizing “Technology” What one might term the “officialview” of weapons development, West and East, denies there is a problem-or, at any rate, banishes the problem to the other side of the superpower divide. In this official view, technology is what social scientists call a dependent variable. Political and military leaders, at least on “our” side, assess the threats to the security of their nations and alliances. They then select amongst the technologies available, or provide resources for the creation of new technologies, in order to meet these threats rationally. Strategic goals come first; technology follow^.^ This view has seemed to many just too optimistic and rationalistic to be true. In reaction to it, many scholars of strategic studies and international politics have reached for versions of technological determinism, though normally in isolation from the wider debates around this latter p~sition.~ Ralph Lapp‘s Arms Beyond Doubt: The Tyranny of Weapons Te~hnology,~ and works by other authors as influential as Hans Bethe, Herbert York, and Lord Zuckerman ,6all reversed the causal order implicit in the official view. Although the 2. It would be far too simplistic to argue that MIRV (multiple independently-targetable reentry vehicle) was the only cause of the end of this earlier detente. For one attempt at a more rounded account see Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War (London: Verso, 1983). 3. The most significant departure from the official view amongst elite groups has been the result of the influence on Soviet orthodoxy of a technologically determinist form of Marxism. See David Holloway, ”Doctrine and Technology in Soviet Armaments Policy,” in Derek Leebaert, ed., Soviet Military Thinking (London: Allen and Unwin, 1977), pp. 259-291. 4. A measure of that isolation is the infrequency...