4 - Securitization and Secrecy in the Cold War: The View from Space

Summary

Thomas O. Paine, the scientist, General Electric (GE) executive, and former NASA administrator in the Nixon administration, traveled to Moscow in October 1987 to attend the “International Space Future Forum.” He was shocked by the attitudes he encountered. US officials were “evasive about space goals, and suspicious of dealing with foreigners,” while the Soviets pursued projects of “cooperation with European and Japanese space capabilities.” He was struck by the “openness of Soviet scientists compared to the uncertainty, aimlessness, and […] xenophobia of Washington space officials.” Paine's observations highlight a surprising turn of events: While the US space program was hostile to international collaboration, the Soviet Union was opening its space programs on numerous fronts—with France in 1966, with the United States through the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) in the first half of the 1970s, and with other communist and noncommunist nations. This chapter evaluates Cold War regimes of information management and secrecy through the prism of ASTP and its aftermath. Its goal is to explain the surprising end point of the Cold War in which the Soviet Union, and not the United States, had stepped into the role of defending more open information exchanges against the global forces of militarization and classification, led by the United States. The move toward greater openness in the Soviet Union originated in the late 1960s, suggesting that the Soviet system of the Brezhnev era was anything but stagnant as it developed orbital stations and extensive programs of scientific and technological collaboration with friendly and formerly hostile foreign powers in the 1970s and 1980s. Those programs, and science and technology exchanges more generally, gave the Soviets a seemingly neutral and technocratic sphere that transcended the binary ideological oppositions of the Cold War, ultimately making détente and Soviet outreach to the noncommunist world possible. As a result, the Soviets began to dismantle the elaborate system of secrecy for which it was notorious, anticipating, at least in part, Gorbachev's policies of new political thinking (novoe politicheskoe myshlenie) and glasnost’ in the late 1980s.

Regimes of Secrecy across the Ideological Divide

During and after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union viewed science and technology as instruments of national power. Both countries, for example, devoted more funding to big science and technology projects, creating a closed model of scientific and technological research tied to national security.