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Totalitarian Science and Technology Colby College Digital Commons @ Colby Faculty Books 2005 Totalitarian Science and Technology Paul R. Josephson Colby College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/facultybooks Part of the Asian History Commons, European History Commons, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons, Political History Commons, and the Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies Commons Recommended Citation Josephson, Paul R., "Totalitarian Science and Technology" (2005). Faculty Books. 2. https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/facultybooks/2 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Books by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Colby. Totalitarian Science and Technology CONTROL OF NATURE Series Editors Morton L. Schagrin State University of New York at Fredonia Michael Ruse Florida State University Robert Hollinger Iowa State University Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present Diane B. Paul Einstein and Our World, second edition David C. Cassidy Evolutionary Theory and Victorian Culture Martin Fichman The Lysenko Effect: The Politics of Science Nils Roll-Hansen Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacob The Scientific Revolution: Aspirations and Achievements, 1500–1700 James R. Jacob Scientists and the Development of Nuclear Weapons: From Fission to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, 1939–1963 Lawrence Badash Technology and Science in the Industrializing Nations, 1500–1914 Eric Dorn Brose Totalitarian Science and Technology, second edition Paul R. Josephson Second Edition Totalitarian Science and Technology Paul R. Josephson an imprint of Prometheus Books 59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, NewYork 14228-2197 Published 2005 by Humanity Books, an imprint of Prometheus Books Totalitarian Science and Technology. Copyright © 2005 by Paul R. Josephson. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a Web site without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quota- tions embodied in critical articles and reviews. Inquiries should be addressed to Humanity Books 59 John Glenn Drive Amherst, New York 14228–2197 VOICE: 716–691–0133, ext. 207 FAX: 716–564–2711 0908070605 54321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Josephson, Paul R. Totalitarian science and technology / Paul R. Josephson.—2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–59102–321–1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Science—Social aspects—Germany—History—20th century. 2. Science— Political aspects—Germany—History—20th century. 3. Technology—Social aspects—Germany—History—20th century. 4. Technology—Political aspects— Germany—History—20th century. 5. Totalitarianism. I. Title. Q175.52.G3J67 2005 306.4'5’094309043—dc22 2005001942 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper CONTENTS 5. Acknowledgments 7 1. Totalitarian Science 9 2. Transformationist Visions: The Biological Sciences in Totalitarian Regimes 33 3. The Physical Sciences under Totalitarian Regimes: The Ideologization of Science 71 4. Technology and Politics in Totalitarian Regimes 117 5. Conclusion: Totalitarian Science? 155 5. References 163 5. Index 175 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS y thanks to Spencer Weart and Peg Jacob for encouraging me to Mwrite this book and providing extensive comments that helped improve the final product. Thanks also to Katie Lippa, who contributed to the first edition; Kaitlin McCafferty and Margaux Leonard for their magnif- icent research help on the second edition; and Haid Garrett, who prepared the index. Love to Isaac, my son. 7 1 TOTALITARIAN SCIENCE dolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin enlisted scientists and engineers in their Aefforts to build strong states. These dictators desired industrial power and military might. To these ends they underwrote expensive research and development (R and D) in scientific institutes. Hitler loved “superweapons.” Stalin closely followed the Soviet atomic bomb project. Some of the scien- tists who toiled for Stalin were Nikolai Vavilov, an internationally renowned biologist who died in a labor camp while his brother became president of the Academy of Sciences, and Andrei Sakharov, father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and later a political dissident. Hitler’s stable of specialists included Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. When one thinks about science and technology in totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany, horrible images of doctors undertaking concentration camp experiments on unwilling prisoners come to mind. Another image of the kind of science possible under a dictatorship is that of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, named after Trofim Lysenko, who controlled biolog- ical research from 1935 until 1965 and used his power to require the rejec- tion of modern genetics. We recall how Andrei Sakharov and the leading Chinese theoretical physicist, Fang Lizhi, spent years in exile or under 9 10 TOTALITARIAN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY house arrest for openly criticizing their governments’ human rights records (Fang 1990). But are these cases representative of what constitutes science in totali- tarian regimes, or are they anomalies? Several leading historians and soci- ologists of science maintain that science operates according to democratic principles. They claim that these principles prevent any members of the sci- entific community from establishing their views about the phenomena at hand as sacrosanct and ensure that scientific discovery is an adversarial and cumulative process that brings us ever closer to the “truth.” In an essay published in 1942 directed in part against the anti-intellectualism of total- itarian regimes, Robert Merton argued that the ethos of science—its univer- salism, communal character, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism— militated against particular dogmas of church, economy, and state. Twenty years later, Michael Polanyi acknowledged that orthodoxy existed in sci- ence but called it a “dynamic orthodoxy.” He argued that “the authority in scientific opinion remains essentially mutual; it is established between sci- entists, not above them” and that a “republic of science” existed to mediate disputes. Indeed, Polanyi, Karl Popper, and other philosophers of science wrote about this dynamic orthodoxy in part as an attack on pseudoscience, Lysenkoism, and so on (Merton 1973; Polanyi 1962; Popper 1945). This view of science is hard to reconcile with the fact that, in a number of totalitarian systems, the science enterprise is dynamic. In the most prominent case, the Soviet Union, not only was society as a whole sub- jected to arbitrary one-party rule, but scientific institutions came to be dominated by scientific administrators whose administration might be characterized as “stagnant orthodoxy.” Yet the USSR orbited the first artifi- cial satellite (Sputnik), developed the Tokamak fusion reactor, and, in a number of other fields, supported scientists who were recognized as world leaders. In the last days of the Soviet regime, in comments before scientists who had gathered to consider the admission of new members and the transformation of the Academy of Sciences into a less elite institution, the academy’s last president, Gurii Marchuk, attacked the notion that science is anything like a democracy, since “truth” is not decided by majority vote (Marchuk 1991). This book aims at a balanced view of science in totalitarian regimes, going beyond mere attacks on their “pseudoscience.” All governments have an impact on science and science policy. Since the rise of Western science in the years 1500 to 1800 CE, the state has played an increasingly impor- tant role in the conduct of science (Dobbs and Jacob 1995). In the seven- teenth century, rising nation-states underwrote honorific and research-ori- ented scientific societies and universities in England, France, Denmark, Germany, and Russia. By the late eighteenth century, they funded arma- TOTALITARIAN SCIENCE 11 ments, mining, and metallurgy endeavors. By 1900, governments recog- nized the importance of science for health, medicine, agriculture, and national defense. They set up land-grant colleges, geological surveys, mete- orological services, and national standards facilities. In World War II, the relationship between scientists and the state changed forever. Vastly increased government subsidies enabled scientists to develop radar and atomic weapons in national laboratories that after the war became a fixture throughout the world (Josephson 1991; Taubes 1986; Macrakris 1994). In regimes like the United States, which may be characterized as liberal plu- ralist regimes, the impact of the state on science is none too subtle. When the US federal government spent billions of dollars on the space race in the 1960s through NASA, or on Star Wars (the Strategic Defense Ini- tiative) in the 1980s, it created demand for tens of thousands of scientists to be trained in such areas as aeronautical engineering, solid-state physics, and computer science and technology; many of them lost their jobs when the projects were cut back. Renewed support for Star Wars under the administration of George W. Bush—against the advice of dozens of leading retired Pentagon admirals and generals and the conclusions of the Amer- ican Physical Society that the technology is excessively costly and
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