Cold War Science and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge, edited by Jeroen van Dongen, is a strong collection of essays on the relationship between national scientific projects and the geopolitical exigencies of the United States’ ‘Cold War’ with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, with a focus on the 1940s to 1960s. Twelve relatively compact essays are divided into thematic and geographical sections: ‘Secrecy and science’, ‘Dutch perspectives’, ‘“Cold War” science?’ and ‘Scientific hubris’. These sections are not mutually exclusive – for example, secrecy and classification are a main topic of an essay within ‘Dutch perspectives’ – readers with specific interests are advised to peruse the entire volume. These divisions indicate that this volume is an instantiation of recent developments in the historiography of Cold War science: attention to general themes such as secrecy, attention to smaller states such as the Netherlands, and attention to historiography and the framing of Cold War science itself. The reviewer's copy was a print-on-demand ‘Brill MyBook’ paperback with acceptable print quality, though ink annotations show through the paper.

The individual essays primarily address the military, political and administrative entanglements of scientific work, with only one essay (by Kristine Harper) providing substantive details of experiments or calculations. Similarly, Simone Turchetti provides details on the practice of access to classified information databases. In addition to the expected general political concerns (see Jeroen van Dongen and Friso Hoeneveld, Ronald Doel) and analyses of physics and nuclear science (John Krige, Abel Streefland), the following scientific fields are covered: atmospheric sciences (Matthias Heymann et al., Harper), chemistry and chemical weapons (Herman Roozenbeek), and social sciences (Jessica Wang, Paul Erickson). A complete table of contents is available online. This breadth is much appreciated. The range of coverage and sophistication of contributions will make this volume attractive to all historians of post-Second World War science who are concerned with the interplay of science and politics in the United States and Western Europe.

The key question in the historiography of Cold War science is to what degree scientific work was shaped by specifically Cold War politics, in contrast to science that merely happened to be undertaken between 1945 and 1991. Despite this volume's title, this is the question that brings these essays together (as Van Dongen writes on p. 1). Generally, the essays in this volume seek nuance, rather than yes-or-no answers. This is epitomized in Harper's essay: ‘Was meteorology, then, a “Cold War science”? Or was it a science that happened to benefit from the Cold War …? In this article [she argues] that both statements are correct’ (p. 219).

Historians have argued over the correct terms of debate about Cold War science: was it an Atlantic phenomenon or a truly global one? And are traditional nation states the correct objects of study? Answers to these questions were provided by the title of Krige's American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (2006). Cold War-motivated American interests were hegemonic, at least in the NATO countries. Since then, both history of science and diplomatic history have moved towards more global and transnational approaches. Krige's essay in this volume makes concessions to the necessity of understanding European science as a global or ‘transnational’ phenomenon, after the work of historians such as Kapil Raj, and he gives more agency to states beyond the USA–USSR dyad – in this case metropolitan France. In her essay, Wang pushes Krige's framework to include earlier colonial eras and an ‘international system’ which includes states as well as non-governmental actors. But these concerns are not necessarily integrated into other papers. For example, a slightly deeper temporal frame would improve Turchetti's account of the classification of scientific research. Withholding nuclear physics research from publication was instigated before the Second World War by physicists such as Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi. Similarly, in US–UK nuclear negotiations, the commercial potential of nuclear science was central from their first agreement (at Quebec City in 1943). Classification was undoubtedly a Cold War phenomenon, but has deeper roots. Overall, this volume makes strong contributions to increasing the sophistication of this state-centred approach, though the various contributions have yet to be synthesized.

An alternative frame for understanding Cold War science is more closely aligned with postcolonial science and technology studies, as exemplified by Gabrielle Hecht's edited collection Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (2011). Rather than accepting the existence of nation states as a given, this approach takes state power – and the definitions of states – as an effect of the interrelation of science, technology and politics. In the reviewer's opinion, the volume under discussion shows opportunities for further fruitful modification of the state-centred picture. For example, European colonies peek through the narrative of Cold War science presented in this volume. Roozenbeek's essay mentions that the Netherlands’ military in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia and New Guinea) purchased a mustard gas facility. Later, France negotiated access to a Saharan chemical-weapons-testing facility in the Evian Accords, which ended the Algerian War of independence in 1962. In northern Europe, Heymann et al. document Denmark's concern that the US had de facto control over their colony, Greenland. As American and Danish soldiers and scientists manoeuvred in Greenland, in 1953 Denmark remade itself as a state with an entirely new Constitution, which made Greenland part of the state, gave residents Danish citizenship, and initiated a wave of cultural imperialism that sought to diminish indigenous Greenlandic culture. Was this political reconstitution independent of the military–scientific work that Heymann et al. describe? Acknowledging the geographically distributed and temporally dynamic reality of modern states may allow an answer to this question, and further the historiographic aims of Van Dongen's Cold War Science and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge.