Sputnik and ‘skill thinking’ revisited: technological determinism in American responses to the Soviet missile threat

Abstract

Revisiting popular, political and academic reactions 50 years after the launch of Sputnik, this article seeks to highlight the substantial fear of technological development evident in these reactions. The nature of responses to Sputnik is especially notable, it is argued, in light of the tendency to assume an American love affair with technology across all areas of social and political life. The article examines the manner in which both contemporaneous and subsequent accounts of the launch of Sputnik incorporate a strand of technological determinism that inverts the primary features of the seemingly utopian, ‘skill thinking’ approach to technology assumed to be characteristic of the American outlook during the Cold War and beyond.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the help and comments provided by Richard Wyn Jones, Michael C. Williams, Mike Sheehan, Stuart Croft, Peter Jackson and Julie MacLeavy on earlier drafts of this article. Special thanks are also due to the two anonymous referees for providing invaluable feedback on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

 [1] LaFeber, The American Age, 8.

 [2] LaFeber, The American Age, 8

 [3] Wheeler and Booth, “Beyond the Security Dilemma,” 314.

 [4] Wheeler and Booth, “Beyond the Security Dilemma,” 314

 [5] Hoffman, Gulliver's Troubles, 144. Emphasis original.

 [6] Hoffman, Gulliver's Troubles, 144. Emphasis original, 147.

 [7] Hoffman, Gulliver's Troubles, 144. Emphasis original, 150.

 [8] Hoffman, Gulliver's Troubles, 144. Emphasis original, 148.

 [9] Hoffman, Gulliver's Troubles, 144. Emphasis original, 148–9.

[10] Gray, Nuclear Strategy and National Style.

[11] Wheeler and Booth, “Beyond the Security Dilemma,” 314.

[12] McNamara's use of skill thinking, Hoffman argues, gave the ‘nightmarish realities of deterrence in the nuclear age the cool, aseptic air of science, removed from the impurities of politics’. Hoffman, Gulliver's Troubles, 149.

[13] Armacost, The Politics of Weapons Innovation, 267. Emphasis added.

[14] Murray and Knox, The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 178–9.

[15] Murray and Knox, The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 178. Cf. O'Hanlon, “Rumsfeld's Defence Vision.”

[16] Coker, Waging War without Warriors?; Shaw, The New Western Way of War.

[17] Cohen, “The Mystique of U.S. Air Power”; Cf. Shaw, The New Western Way of War, 12–42.

[18] Wolfowitz, “Testimony on Defence Transformation.”

[19] Evangelista, Innovation and the Arms Race, 222.

[20] Cf. Franklin, War Stars.

[21] Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, interview for PBS Frontline “Missile Wars” [13 May 2002].

[22] Booth, “American Strategy,” 22.

[23] Booth, “American Strategy,”, 22. Emphasis original.

[24] Cf, Wiegley, The American Way of War.

[25] Quoted in Freedman, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 29.

[26] Linenthal, Symbolic Defence, 2.

[27] Linenthal, Symbolic Defence, 2, 4; Eberhart, “How American People Feel about the Atomic Bomb”. See also Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light, 2.

[28] Freedman, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 131.

[29] Sputnik was quickly recognized as the standout event in the “International Geophysical Year” period of July 1957–December 1958.

[30] Freedman, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 131.

[31] Freedman, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 131

[32] President Dwight D. Eisenhower, as quoted in Stares, Space Weapons and US Strategy, 38.

[33] Divine, The Sputnik Challenge; Dockrill, Eisenhower's New-Look National Security Policy.

[34] As quoted in Dockrill, Eisenhower's New-Look National Security Policy, 210.

[35] As quoted in Dockrill, Eisenhower's New-Look National Security Policy, 212–13.

[36] Divine, The Sputnik Challenge, 11–12.

[37] Divine, The Sputnik Challenge, 8, 205; see also McDougall, “President Fails As National Shrink,” 700–701.

[38] Stares, Space Weapons and U.S. Strategy, 19.

[39] Killian, Sputnik, Scientists and Eisenhower, 7. Emphasis added.

[40] Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture; Chant, Technology and Everyday Life; Disch, The New Improved Sun.

[41] Bulkeley and Spinardi, Space Weapons, 12, 16. See also Neufeld, ‘“Space Superiority’.”

[42] Stares, Space Weapons and US Strategy; Roman, Eisenhower and the Missile Gap, 31.

[43] Freedman, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 131.

[44] Wenger, Living with Peril, 154.

[45] Stares, Space Weapons and US Strategy, 39. See also Dockrill, Eisenhower's New-Look National Security Policy, 212–13.

[46] Stares, Space Weapons and US Strategy, 48.

[47] Quoted in Bulkeley and Spinardi, Space Weapons, 33.

[48] On the importance of the Killian and Gaither reports in shaping the American strategic debate of the 1950's see Freedman, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 150–55.

[49] As quoted in Wenger, Living With Peril, 8.

[50] Quoted in Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, 135.

[51] Stern, The USAF Scientific Advisory Board, 82–3.

[52] The Gaither report, quoted in Freedman, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 152.

[53] Freedman, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 146–62.

[54] For further expansion on this see Johnson, Improbable Dangers, 42.

[55] Quoted in Wenger, Living With Peril, 148.

[56] Quoted in Freedman, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 150.

[57] Hoffman, Gulliver's Troubles.

[58] Cf. Leiss, Under Technology's Thumb.

[59] From McNamara's speech to the Editors of United Press International in San Francisco, 18 September 1967, reprinted in Humphrey and Douglas Anti-Ballistic Missile.

[60] McNamara, Essence of Security.

[61] McNamara, Essence of Security, 31. Adorno: ‘No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb’ – Negative Dialectics, 320.

[62] McNamara, Essence of Security, 114.

[63] McNamara, Essence of Security, 114

[64] McNamara, Essence of Security, 114, 115.

[65] McNamara, Essence of Security, 114, 117.

[66] McNamara, Essence of Security, 114, 116.

[67] McNamara, Essence of Security, 114, 116.

[68] McNamara, Essence of Security, 114, 117.

[69] Bulkeley and Spinardi, Space Weapons, 57. Emphasis added.

[70] Freedman, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 241.

[71] Pursell Jr., Readings in Technology and American Life, 3.

[72] Quoted in Winkler, Life Under a Cloud, 177.

[73] Quoted in Winkler, Life Under a Cloud, 177–8.

[74] Galbraith, The New Industrial State; Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 247.

[75] Kennan, Russia, the Atom and the West, 54; quoted in Freedman, Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 153.

[76] York, Race to Oblivion, 180.

[77] Yanarella, The Missile Defence Controversy, 165.

[78] Lapp, Arms Beyond Doubt, 3.

[79] Quoted in Lapp, Arms Beyond Doubt, 8.

[80] Lapp, Arms Beyond Doubt, 191.

[81] Lapp, Arms Beyond Doubt, p.31. Emphasis original.

[82] Ruina, “Aborted Military Systems,” 320.

[83] Wohlstetter, “Strategy and the Natural Scientists,” 178

[84] Yanarella, The Missile Defence Controversy, 16; Goldfischer, The Best Defence, 116–46.

[85] McNamara, quoted in Yanarella, The Missile Defence Controversy, 101.

[86] Yanarella, The Missile Defence Controversy, 100.

[87] Stein, From H-Bomb to Star Wars, 3.

[88] Erickson, The Military Technical Revolution, 18.

[89] Johnson, “Periods of Peril,” 969.

[90] Quoted in Pratt, Selling Strategic Defence, 3.

[91] Johnson, “Periods of Peril,” 969.

[92] Johnson, “Periods of Peril,” 969

[93] Johnson, “Periods of Peril,” 969

[94] Johnson, “Periods of Peril,” 969, 955. Emphasis added.

[95] Johnson, “Periods of Peril,” 969, 950–51. Emphasis added.

[96] Johnson, “Periods of Peril”; Bulkeley and Spinardi, Space Weapons, 20.

[97] Johnson, “Periods of Peril,” 967.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Columba Peoples

Columba Peoples is a lecturer in American Defence Policy at Swansea University. He has recently completed a monograph on representations of technology used in the promotion of US missile defence initiatives past and present.