Ocean Science and the British Cold War State

Samuel A. Robinson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319730967
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Wissenschaftsgeschichte

This book focuses on the activities of the scientific staff of the British National Institute of Oceanography during the Cold War. Revealing how issues such as intelligence gathering, environmental surveillance, the identification of 'enemy science', along with administrative practice informed and influenced the Institute's Cold War program. In turn, this program helped shape decisions taken by Government, military and the civil service towards science in post-war Britain. This was not simply a case of government ministers choosing to patronize particular scientists, but a relationship between politics and science that profoundly impacted on the future of ocean science in Britain.

© The Author(s) 2018

Samuel A. RobinsonOcean Science and the British Cold War StatePalgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73096-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Ocean Science and the British Cold War State

Samuel A. Robinson¹

(1)

Department of Sociology, University of York, York, UK

End Abstract

In March 1974, a one-day symposium was held at the Royal Society in London, to reflect on the effect of two world wars on the organisation and development of science in the United Kingdom.¹ Listed amongst the speakers were two leading British scientists who feature prominently in this book: Edward Bullard and George Deacon. Bullard believed that important lessons taught to young scientists by the war included:

how to use the Government machine, how to get one’s way with committees, how to persuade people with arguments suitable to their backgrounds and prejudices and how realistically to assess the means needed for a given end.²

Following Bullard’s paper, George Deacon (the recently retired director of the National Institute of Oceanography, NIO) noted that ‘Marine science was revolutionised by the two world wars, particularly the second’.³ In fact, their own post-war work took courses opposite to those that their statements at the symposium may indicate. Bullard had devoted more time to research than patronage, contributing to the establishment of the Cambridge-based Department of Geodesy and Geophysics, whereas Deacon fitted Bullard’s description of the scientist’s changed role, having mastered the art of “getting one’s way” and using the government machine to drive new marine science.

Bullard’s candid description of the interface between science and government, with its depiction of the scientist as the manipulator of the machine, is compelling. The extent to which his statement reflects the reality of post-war British oceanography is the central research objective of this book, which focuses on the relationship between ocean scientists, military officers, and government officials in Britain. These groups came to work together as a result of an increasing perception within the military that the ocean environment was dangerously unknown, affecting potential military readiness in a time of Cold War tensions.

Ocean Science and the British Cold War State seeks to address two vital questions: what kind of relationships existed (and developed over time) between ocean scientists, military officers, and government officials? And how does the study of these relationships contribute to our understanding of the development of Cold War science, especially in terms of patronage, policy, and resources? In order to address these questions, the book examines individuals involved in these relationships and their actions, in an effort to break down the monolithic treatment of scientific institutions, political departments, and the military.⁴ This is a study of Big Science⁵ as an instrument, with a focus on the individuals who played a key role in the political, military, and scientific networks in Britain that shaped the disciplinary trajectory of oceanography.⁶

The focus is primarily upon the actors within these large networks. I employ the notion of a “bio-network” to explain how certain individuals in a scientific community have the power to change the development of policy networks that affect the trajectory of their scientific discipline. Of course not all the historical actors in the book can be considered “network brokers”. All of them make various entrances and exits; some play fleeting roles whilst others are present throughout, and some are versatile players who act different parts at different stages. One, however, has a recurring role: George Deacon. Yet this is not a biography of a leading British oceanographer of the period. It is concerned with the network that he worked to forge, maintain, and adapt in the context of British military, political, and scientific circles.⁷

Biographies of Hybrids in the History of Science

If this is not a biography, why discuss biography at all? For a long time, the history of science was seen as the account of Great Men through time.⁸ As a result, biographical approaches within the field are often seen as tainted by a historiographical debt to hagiographical writing.⁹ This hagiographical-biographical method was challenged after the Second World War by Robert Merton, who used his sociological approach to science studies to respond to a perceived need for science in the 1950s to promote a bigger, more collaborative vision of itself in light of the contemporaneous development of Big Science.¹⁰ Merton’s approach was the foundation of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), which is concerned with understanding how ‘types of social arrangements…were conducive to the production of certified knowledge’.¹¹ Essentially, Merton argued that the scientific community was central to the reception of scientific facts and theories, pointing out that the Great Men of science were often challenged and in their own lifetimes their theories were rarely accepted because of any ingrained notion of their “genius”. Later scholars further refined these terms of reference to study, exclusively, the social construction of knowledge within science, in doing so discrediting biographical accounts.¹²

This approach typified ground-breaking works such as Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s study of the debate between Hobbes and Boyle over the latter’s air pump experiments, and it can also be traced in Andrew Pickering’s work on twentieth-century particle physics.¹³ As scientific debate naturally involved more than one actor, SSK scholars championed the study of science as a community discipline and knowledge as something that could never be defined by the single individual alone, thus challenging the paradigm of the lone genius. In broadening the scope of study to scientific communities, Shapin and Schaffer demonstrated that natural knowledge in seventeenth-century Britain was shaped by contemporary political philosophies. The more obvious conclusions of the SSK movement, namely that scientists do not work in isolation and that they are situated within cultural milieus that extend beyond science, are very important to this study, which shares with previous SSK works the aim of focusing on milieus and networks. Whilst SSK highlighted the falsehoods of the “Great Man of history” approach, it simultaneously demonstrated to biographers of science that a scientific actor, when placed in social, cultural, political, and economic contexts, could be a legitimate object of study and a part of the historiography of science.

Historiographical debate about biography and individuals returned during the 1980s following the defence of biographical approaches put forward by Thomas L. Hankins.¹⁴ Hankins elaborated the primary dilemma, as he saw it, with biographical writing, noting that ‘many scientists are not suitable subjects for biography’ and that writing biographies of what he deemed “suitable” persons ‘distorted the dimension of history by focusing on the head table and ignoring the other banqueters’. He supported the notion that there will always be a place for biographies of celebrated scientists such as Darwin, Einstein, and Faraday. However, beyond this Hankins argued that biography was unsuitable for studying the social and institutional organisation of science, nor was it ‘the proper mode for describing the development of a field of science through time’. He concluded that ‘a fully integrated biography of a scientist which includes not only his personality, but also his scientific work and the intellectual and social context of his times, is still the best way to get at many of the problems that beset the writing of history of science’. This was an early argument within the historiography of science for what is now termed “sociological biography”.¹⁵

According to Charles Thorpe, an advocate of sociological biography, this approach allows us to see individuals as “exemplars” of their age, providing a key sociological understanding of scientific relations in a given time through the history of individuals. This approach exemplifies social habits through individual characters. Although there is a growing acceptance of sociological biography amongst historians of science, it remains a contested field of enquiry within the discipline. In their sweeping biographical study of Lord Kelvin, Crosbie Smith and Norton Wise leaned heavily on new cultural history approaches then entering the field, rather than attempting to combine sociological studies of science with biographical methodologies.¹⁶ Placing William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) at the centre of their narrative, they used his career as the foundation upon which they carefully constructed a social and cultural history of late nineteenth-century science and technology in Britain. They also broke with biographical tradition in that they did not use the birth and death dates of Kelvin for periodisation, instead only beginning with his education at Cambridge and talking about his early life through the narrative of his father’s life. In much the same way, this book concerns itself only with the later career of George Deacon, from his entry into the Royal Navy scientific divisions in 1939 through to his retirement in 1971, and it uses this career to analyse a much broader historical canvas. In any case, this study should not be construed as a social biography, since the goal is not to examine Deacon as an “exemplar” of his time, but rather as someone who established the relevant connections that allowed British oceanography to thrive.

In recent decades, there have been further attempts to provide a theoretical backbone, ‘a framework to conceptualis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Ocean Science and the British Cold War State
• 2. Oceanographers at War
• 3. De-mobbing Military Oceanography: Post-War Needs of British Science
• 4. Collaboration on Defence, Intelligence, and Internationalism During the 1950s
• 5. Oceanographers, Surveillance, and Defence Research
• 6. Militant Oceanographers: Behind Britain’s “Technocratic” Moment, 1958–64
• 7. New Frontiers of Oceanology and “Environmentalism”
• 8. Epilogue: The Retirement of George Deacon
• 9. Conclusion: Situating Britain and the Sea in the Cold War
• Back Matter