Paul Maddrell's Spying on Science will be welcomed by specialists, who will appreciate its careful attention to the previously hidden details of espionage in the realm of weapons-related technology. In particular, it shows the use that Western espionage agencies made of defections, particularly among those displaced by the upheaval of World War II. Readers should, however, bear three caveats in mind before delving into this volume.

First, the title promises somewhat more than the volume delivers (a problem that is hardly unique to this study). Although the book claims to have researched what Western agencies knew about Soviet weaponry, its bibliography lists no Russian or French language sources and minimal U.S. documentation. This is a book written primarily from British and East German documentation (which is perfectly acceptable, but it would have been better to make that clearer in the title). As a result, while the study does discuss the Western allies and the Soviet Union, its claim to originality rests mainly in its assessment of the actions of the British and the reaction by the East Germans.

Second, Maddrell argues in his introduction that just as readers do not “doubt the accuracy of British and American government records concerning the operations of their own secret services” (p. 5), neither should they dismiss East German secret police, or Stasi, sources. While Stasi files are indeed a useful resource for scholarship, it is nonetheless clear that a basic measure of Quellenkritik is necessary when using any sources on intelligence, East German or otherwise. This point is not just historical: excessive CIA claims about the extent of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs provide a very immediate reason for looking critically at British and American government records concerning the operation of their own secret services.

The third and final problem concerns a question of epistemology. Maddrell's conclusion reads as follows: “By its very nature, scientific knowledge could not be contained as completely as Communism. It grows and grows” (p. 289). Such a description of the nature of scientific investigation simply takes one side of, without discussing the key concepts in, the long-running debate about the manner in which technical knowledge actually advances (i.e., incrementalism vs. long periods of stasis punctuated by paradigm shifts). Put another way, this book tacitly assumes that one of the main hindrances to the spread and use of scientific knowledge was hostile intervention by outside forces. As a result, Maddrell's study bypasses much interesting discussion among historians of science about the many reasons why scientific and technical discoveries, once made, do not necessarily propagate—regardless of whether enemy agents are active. The scholars working at the ancient library of Alexandria knew perfectly well that the world was round; propagation of that knowledge was much less perfect, as the subsequent centuries of history show.

For the specific goals of the author, however, these caveats are not critical. For the time period under discussion here, it is indeed interesting what knowledge the British and their allies could glean from divided Germany, and the sources that Maddrell has found are useful ones. Moreover, it was arguably clear (at least since the 1930s) what the next discoveries in atomic weapons science needed to be, and all governments involved had sufficient motivation for providing the funding and resources needed to propagate and weaponize that knowledge. The question that arose was whether there were ways to prevent your enemy from making progress on those obvious questions, and that is where Maddrell's study comes in.

Maddrell argues that Western containment of the Soviet Union included previously unrecognized, aggressive attempts to contain the growth of technology and weapons-related knowledge. He shows convincingly how the mass movement of peoples both during and after World War II provided the West, and particularly the British, with unprecedented opportunities. The British occupied both the most populous zone of Germany and most populous sector of Berlin, and so had a larger pool from which to draw. After World War II, Americans took the lead in forms of high-technology data collection. The U.K., knowing that “information from human sources is cheap” (p. 302), however, took full advantage of it. In particular, it recruited agents who could then send it back into not only East Germany but also the Soviet Union. Maddrell concludes that this was a successful form of containment, one that undermined East Germany and maddened Soviet leaders. This study provides a useful new angle on a critical period of the Cold War.