The virtual seminar will be held from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. (E.T.)
According to a compelling and even inspiring narrative from the Cold War, a cadre of natural and social scientists serving as government advisors on nuclear strategy and arms control fought against irrational policymakers, greedy contractors, and military hawks who wanted more, bigger, and better nuclear weapons. Using the language of stability and restraint, the scientists became voices for moderation and rationality. This presentation will argue that this story is largely a myth, and that ideas of arms control—introduced at the end of the 1950s—were not about taming the military-industrial complex. Instead, they were about taming the politics of disarmament: the reduction or elimination of weapons and the means of producing them. The presentation will suggest that the scientists who offered arms control as a challenge to the Cold War military-industrial complex were agents of the very institutions and economic structures that made the Cold War possible.
About the speaker: Benjamin Wilson is Associate Professor of History of Science at Harvard University. He is the author of Strange Stability: How Cold War Scientists Set Out to Control the Arms Race and Ended Up Serving the Military-Industrial Complex (Harvard University Press, 2025). Wilson holds a PhD in history of science from MIT and master's degrees in physics from Yale University and the University of Toronto.