Scientific Spoils of War Ann Finkbeiner Examines Two Books on the Cold War’S Ethical and Material Legacies

A decommissioned missile in a silo at the Titan Missile Museum in Green Valley, Arizona. MILITARY SCIENCE Scientific spoils of war Ann Finkbeiner examines two books on the cold war’s ethical and material legacies. ar is good for science. Countries Science and Technology in the Global used underwater sound recordings to trace require their defence industries Cold War the movements of submarines was recycled to invent military technologies, EDITED BY NAOMI ORESKES AND JOHN KRIGE around the year 2000 by scientists at the The MIT Press: 2014. Wwhich are often based on science, sending Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San money to researchers. So how does this Unmaking the Bomb: A Fissile Material Diego, California, to map ocean temperatures intersection affect the course of research? Approach to Nuclear Disarmament and and global warming. If national priorities Two books discuss the extent to which Nonproliferation bend science towards application, scientists MARSHALL/CORBIS JAMES HAROLD A. FEIVESON, ALEXANDER GLASER, ZIA MIAN scientists change — or must change — what AND FRANK N. VON HIPPEL bend it back towards pure research. they do in response to national emergencies. The MIT Press: 2014. Written mostly by historians of science, The cold war is an excellent case study. It Science and Technology in the Global Cold saw the continuation of the extraordinary science”. But the balance never stayed put. War is an academic conversation with no development of nuclear weapons, ballistic Chinese researchers and students looked grand conclusions. But one commonality that missiles and radar begun during the Second towards international science: between emerges, writes Krige, is that “he who paid World War. Science and Technology in the around 1980 and 2000, at least 10,000 went the piper didn’t so much call the tune as pro- Global Cold War, an essay collection edited by abroad to work and study. Soviet nuclear vide the instruments, the hardware, and the science historians Naomi Oreskes and John scientists outmanoeuvred the state and, by logistical support”. Changing the metaphor, Krige, addresses the question: were scientists relabelling pure science as applied, succeeded national attempts to direct science look like guided by curiosity, or did national funding in creating a reactor design based more on a magnetic field aligning iron filings — until redirect them towards military technological technical feasibility than on cheapness. the filings go off on their own in all directions. applications? Its answer: although redirection The West experienced a similar shifting Unmaking the Bomb presents a more com- is inevitable and powerful, so is curiosity. balance. The US response to Sputnik led plex relationship between scientists and war, The balance differed from field to field and to NASA’s Apollo human-spaceflight pro- arguing that researchers tasked with creat- place to place. China and the Soviet Union gramme, but as that project slowly ground ing extraordinarily lethal applications have erased the distinction between pure and down, NASA adopted its technologies for the a responsibility to control them. Specifically, applied science and directed their research- Mission to Planet Earth observation system, the authors — physicists and nuclear-policy ers towards national priorities — an isolated which gathered data for climate scientists. experts Harold Feiveson, Alexander Glaser, self-reliance in China, and big industry in the Radar, developed by Britain and the United Zia Mian and Frank von Hippel — present Soviet Union. In China, horse breeding was States to track aircraft and missiles, was used the case for controlling the materials that given the status of scientific experimenta- in the 1960s by US physicist Irwin Shapiro make a nuclear bomb nuclear. tion; in the Soviet Union the Sputnik satel- to test Einstein’s general theory of relativ- National mandates drove the nuclear lite, launched in 1957, was deemed “Soviet ity. A cold war US surveillance system that bomb’s development during the 1940s. By 27 NOVEMBER 2014 | VOL 515 | NATURE | 489 © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS the peak of the cold war, 10 countries — including the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and China — had built 65,000 nuclear warheads. But before the first bomb had been built, nuclear scientists had been lobbying politicians to change the mandate from building nuclear weapons to controlling them. The lobbying, partly through avenues such as the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, was fairly successful: the number of nuclear weapons in those 10 countries has fallen to around 17,000. But the fuel — fissionable plutonium or uranium enriched in a rare isotope of uranium — is still with us. Neither occurs naturally, so bomb-builders manufactured them. At the end of the Second World War, 100 kilograms of weapons-grade material had been made; now, it is 1,900 tonnes, ORNITHOLOGY enough for 100,000 bombs. As the authors show, material from dismantled bombs can be downblended to a less fissionable form and stored or used in power plants, Fowl domination but it cannot be destroyed, and it remains available for nuclear weapons or for low- Ewen Callaway relishes a study tracing the chicken’s tech radiological weapons. In 1945, only eventful march from Asian jungles to global ubiquity. the United States could build a nuclear warhead; now, 35–40 countries can, and the margin of security is “too slim for com- he chicken is the Swiss army knife trappers to collect eggs fort”, says a former director-general of the of livestock. Since its domestication — the more remote International Atomic Energy Agency. in Southeast Asia as early as 18,000 the better, because he Feiveson, Glaser, Mian and von Hip- Tyears ago, the bird has been religious sacri- wanted purebred birds pel convincingly argue that this problem fice, pet, research subject, fighting machine — and deliver them demands a real and immediate solu- and, of course, dinner. The Victorians paid to US hatcheries. The tion. Along with the history of nuclear enormous sums for exotic breeds, and in the birds never thrived, weapons, they cover attempts to con- 1960s, NASA imagined the birds feeding and the US govern- ERMAKOVA/GETTY DZHAMILIYA trol the weapons’ spread, including the Martian colonies. Around 20 billion are alive ment pulled the plug 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of at any one time, bred to meet global demand. Why Did the on the programme in Nuclear Weapons; the physics and tech- Science journalist Adrian Lawler explores the Chicken Cross 1970. Descendants of nology of producing, downblending and chicken’s multipronged place in human civili- the World?: The Bump’s birds survive in storing fuel; and the complexities of con- zation in his rip-roaring, erudite Why did the Epic Saga of the a handful of flocks. An Bird That Powers vincing nations to agree to be supervised Chicken Cross the World? Civilization evolutionary geneti- and controlled by an international agency. Genome data and resemblance have ANDREW LAWLER cist has sampled their The authors’ suggested long-term pol- pinpointed the red jungle fowl Gallus gallus Atria: 2014. blood, in the hope of icy is to reduce the amount of fissionable — a furtive bird that roams the subtropical discovering what truly material in military and civilian stock- forests of southern Asia — as the wild ances- sets chickens apart from their wild forebears. piles, and to regulate it “as if the world is tor of Gallus gallus domesticus. The birds From their initial domestication, Lawler preparing for complete nuclear disarma- are considered one species, because unions traces the chickens’ journey to Mesopotamia ment”. Countries should stop hiding the between them still produce fertile offspring. and ancient Egypt, where the earliest known sizes of their stockpiles, the authors write, A few thousand years of separation is an evo- depiction of the bird was made, and then on and stop manufacturing weapons-grade lutionary blink of the eye, too brief to create to Polynesia and South America, where DNA uranium and plutonium; they should also reproductive barriers. from ancient chicken bones offers conten- downgrade or bury all fissionable mat Scientific efforts to unpick the origins of the tious evidence for a pre-Columbian trans- erial, even if they must give up nuclear domestic chicken are muddied by the fact that Pacific chicken trade. The author does not energy. Finally, they should agree to few, if any, living red jungle fowl are free of the dwell on such controversy for long. For much international verification of declarations genetic vestiges of their ancestors’ romps with of the book, science has a supporting role to about weapons production — even if that domestic chickens. The last purebred jungle history, ethnography and even advocacy. means relying on nuclear scientists rather fowl on Earth may reside, as Lawler shows, Lawler’s discussion of cockfighting is than politicians to tell the truth. ■ on a farm in the northeast of the US state of among the book’s most compelling material. Georgia, rather than in a forest in Malaysia. In ancient Greece, Babylon and China, pit- Ann Finkbeiner is a freelance science That is down to ornithologist Gardiner ting roosters against each other was embed- writer in Baltimore, Maryland, who often Bump. In the 1950s and 1960s, faced with ded in religious practice. Now mostly illegal, covers scientists advising governments. a shortage of game birds in the US south- it still thrives in parts of South America and She blogs at The Last Word on Nothing, east, Bump set out to populate forests with Asia, especially the Philippines, as Lawler www.lastwordonnothing.com. imported wild red jungle fowl. He paid demonstrates with a harrowing dispatch 490 | NATURE | VOL 515 | 27 NOVEMBER 2014 © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.

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