Abstract
This is the book’s conclusion. The primary objective of this book has been to provide a history of how, during the Cold War, oceanographic science in Britain interacted with its state patrons. Three themes have emerged which have driven its analytical framing. First, this work sets out to study the management of ocean science. Secondly, the connections between ocean science and surveillance are explored. Thirdly, this book strives to break down monolithic understandings of government research funding. This conclusion brings together these themes and places them in a historiographical context.
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Notes
- 1.
Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
- 2.
Charles Thorpe, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
- 3.
David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- 4.
Whilst this began with the anti-nuclear movement, it came to encompass all science that was linked to nuclear weapons; oceanographers’ support of ASW and the development of surveillance techniques implicated the military aspects of the NIO just as much as nuclear scientists elsewhere. Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations: A History of Physics in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999): 394–404.
- 5.
Helen Rozwadowski, “Introduction,” Isis, 105:2 (2014): 335–337.
- 6.
See for example, Simone Turchetti and Peder Roberts, The Surveillance Imperative: The Geosciences and the Cold War (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014).
- 7.
For outputs from the wider project, see, ibid.
- 8.
Here I want to invoke Latour’s remarks ‘Technoscience is part of a war machine and should be studied as such’. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987): 172; Dominique Pestre, “Challenges for the Democratic Management of Technoscience: Governance, Participation and the Political Today,” Science as Culture, 17:2 (2008): 101–119; Dominique Pestre, (ed.), Le Gouvernement des technosciences: Gouverner le progrès et ses dégâts depuis 1945 (Paris: La Découverte, 2014); Chris Sneddon, “The ‘Sinew of Development’: Cold War Geopolitics, Technical Expertise, and Water Resource Development in Southeast Asia, 1954–1975,” Social Studies of Science, 42:4 (2012): 564–590.
- 9.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1977 [1991]): 24–31; also see Roger Jervis, “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics, 30:2 (1978): 167–214.
- 10.
Here I am paraphrasing the closing remarks of Latour, Science in Action, 254–257.
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Robinson, S.A. (2018). Conclusion: Situating Britain and the Sea in the Cold War. In: Ocean Science and the British Cold War State. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73096-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73096-7_9
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