In The Surveillance Imperative, from the Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology series, editors Simone Turchetti and Peder Roberts have assembled ten chapters touching on Cold War geoscience from a variety of national perspectives. Those differing perspectives make this volume worthwhile for historians of science and technology even though the historiography and research behind the chapters is not uniformly strong.

In their introduction, Turchetti and Roberts argue that state use of surveillance is nothing new, but, during the Cold War, the United States and the USSR both significantly expanded their capabilities to surveil not only the entire Earth, but the atmosphere and space as well. While their original interests were geopolitical, in the process both states gathered huge amounts of geoscientific data that were used to bolster state control and national security. Those same data contributed directly to the rise of the geosciences in the latter half of the twentieth century, a result of the ‘surveillance imperative’.

The book's five sections address different uses and outcomes of the surveillance imperative. Section 1, ‘Surveillance strategies to control natural resources’, addresses two very important Cold War energy resources critical for economic prosperity and military capabilities: uranium and oil. In Chapter 1, ‘From the ground up: uranium surveillance and atomic energy in Western Europe’, Matthew Adamson, Lino Cambrubí and Simone Turchetti argue that while the United States initially used surveillance to control the discovery and exploitation of uranium deposits, it also used it to monitor knowledge transfer critical to nuclear weapon development. Simultaneously, France, Italy and Spain all sought to find and develop their own sources of uranium despite American disapproval. In Chapter 2, ‘Underground and underwater: oil security in France and Britain during the Cold War’, Roberto Cantoni and Leucha Veneer argue that securing sufficient oil to meet both national security and domestic consumption needs was critically important to France and Britain, with the French securing control of oilfields in Algeria and the British doing so in the North Sea. Both efforts relied on advances in geophysical knowledge and the implementation of national policies encouraging exploration for and exploitation of hydrocarbons.

Section 2, ‘Monitoring the Earth: nuclear weapon programs’, addresses the search for radiation from nuclear tests via atmospheric and seismological surveillance. In Chapter 3, ‘“Unscare” and conceal: the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation and the origin of international radiation monitoring’, Néstor Herran discusses how concerns over atmospheric radiation's public-health consequences triggered the establishment of international monitoring networks, which were also used to gather data on nuclear weapon programs. But once the Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963) banned atmospheric testing, states needed another approach to keep tabs on these programmes. As Simone Turchetti points out in Chapter 4, ‘“In God we trust, all others we monitor”: seismology, surveillance, and the test ban negotiations’, the development of seismological techniques that exploited Earth as a ‘signals transmission device’ was not only critical for national security, but simultaneously advanced geoscientific research agendas (p. 13).

Section 3, ‘Seeing the sea: from above and below’, examines the surveillance of the oceans and of sea ice, and how it shaped associated research areas. In Chapter 5, ‘Stormy seas: Anglo-American negotiations on ocean surveillance’, Sam Robinson looks at how British and US naval leaders sparred over North Atlantic military strategies, and how oceanographic surveillance influenced them. In Chapter 6, ‘Scientists and sea ice under surveillance in the early Cold War’, Peder Roberts points out that as the Arctic became a potential theatre of war, the race was on to accurately chart the ice pack and determine how the military could work either with it or around it. That the Soviet Union was assumed to have significantly better knowledge of the ice in its own backyard spurred US development of ice measurement techniques.

Section 4, ‘Surveillance techniques’, takes on the new space-based remote-sensing technologies that boosted the capability of monitoring the entire Earth. In Chapter 7, ‘Space technology and the rise of the US surveillance state’, Roger Launius argues that all kinds of surveillance drove advancements in satellite technology, and in Chapter 8, ‘Serendipitous outcomes in space history: from space photography to environmental surveillance’, Sebastian Vincent Grevsmühl argues that once states got beyond using satellites for spying, it quickly became evident that they could be used to assess and monitor global environmental conditions.

Section 5, ‘From surveillance to environmental monitoring’, picks up the story of environmental surveillance and monitoring to analyse the rise of global systems. In Chapter 9, ‘Observing the environmental turn through the global environment monitoring system’, Soraya Boudia discusses how this transnational programme turned its attention to a wide variety of environmental concerns. And in Chapter 10, ‘What was whole about the Whole Earth Catalog? Cold War and scientific revolution’, Robert Poole examines how images of Earth from space influenced humans’ perceptions of their planet as a rather fragile global system.

While the subject matter is undoubtedly important and the chapters offer readers more than the standard US-centric view of Cold War science, the execution remains problematic. The sheer number of writing problems – missing and/or extra words, incorrect words, poor or non-existent sentence structure, misspellings, incorrect acronyms and agency titles – makes it frustrating to read. The authors and editors failed to consider that not all readers would be fully conversant with the characters marching through the text, leaving one to ask, ‘who are these people, and why should I care?’ Additionally, many paragraphs lack sufficient citations, making it impossible for the reader to follow up the research. However, for those who can read poorly written prose without grabbing a red pen, and who are willing to work a bit to figure out some of clunkier sentences, this book contains much useful information.