During the Cold War, historians of science argued that scientists had either been substantially captured by the military patrons’ values – Paul Forman's ‘mutual-alignment’ theory – or were able to accept the considerable funding available without sacrificing the openness essential to free enquiry – a position represented by Daniel Kevles's arguments that physics continued to be ‘what physicists do’. In the 1990s, as archives began to be opened, and, perhaps more importantly, subtler constraints on historians lifted, a different historiography emerged. Post-Cold War history of Cold War science has shown that scientists and military patrons were far more interdependent, and that the story was more complex and more interesting, than had previously been thought.

There is now a healthy burgeoning field of history of Cold War science and technology to which this edited collection is a very welcome addition. John Krige, co-editor with Naomi Oreskes, is too modest when he writes in his concluding remarks that ‘there is much that is familiar’ among the thirteen case studies on offer (p. 431). But it is still the right question for a reviewer to ask: what is new that a reader will learn? While, as Krige candidly admits, there is not enough here on Africa and India, for example, to really justify the ‘global’ tag, two of the contributions significantly and confidently draw China into the picture. By following Chinese students as they travelled abroad, to the United States on Boxer indemnity funds in the early twentieth century, to the Soviet Union in the brief period of sovietization between 1949 and 1960, and back again to the United States after the Nixon visit, Zuoyue Wang demonstrates that Chinese science and technology were far more hybridized and transnational in character than we might expect. Yet Sigrid Schmalzer, in her account of policies and practices within China in the Cold War, shows that this transnational flow existed, without contradiction if not without tensions, alongside an emphasis on ‘self-reliance’ in science and technology. I would have no hesitation setting this pair of papers for students taking a course on science in the twentieth century.

Another good point made by several contributors is that the dynamics of the Cold War shifted significantly across time. The early phase dominated by East–West rivalries is perhaps the best understood, and clearly framed the space race, for example, as well as the largesse of patrons such as the Office for Naval Research. Even then, important stories are told here. Angela Creager traces radioisotopes as the tools and symbols of research in medicine and ecology, Matthew Shindell tells how investment in geochemistry might not only assist uranium prospecting but also lead to Clair Patterson's determination of the age of the Earth, and Benjamin Wilson and David Kaiser show how an immensely expensive radar facility was deployed to test Einstein's theory of general relativity. Asif Siddiqi and Sonja Schmid offer intriguing studies that illustrate how competition existed between Soviet projects, in their studies of rocket and reactor designs respectively.

But the middle and end phases of détente and then heightened competition were clearly different from the earlier period: old strategies for raising funds faltered and, as Krige notes, ‘new rationales were required’ (p. 435). Erik M. Conway's paper neatly captures this change: NASA found that its early Cold War justifications were losing purchase and reinvented its relevance, not least with an attempted turn to the earth sciences. As the Cold War ended, so this strategy too had problems: NASA's Mission to Planet Earth started with a gargantuan $53 billion price tag in 1989, but this was cut to a mere $6.5 billion by the 1990s. Likewise, in a wonderful case study, Oreskes discusses how what at first seemed a straightforward swords-to-ploughshares application of using military acoustic surveillance techniques to measure the warming of the oceans became a debacle as Cold War oceanographers struggled to find a language that would appease activists, so unused were they to justifying projects under post-Cold War conditions of public scrutiny.

A third theme, one that seems if not entirely novel then certainly developed in fascinating ways in Science and Technology in the Global Cold War, is the history of science studies. George Reisch argues that Thomas Kuhn rejected James Conant's portrayal of science as a liberal and open process, but then retracted an emphasis on ‘dogma’ when it seemed to be a step too close to Western caricatures of the communist system. Elena Aronova reveals the power of comparative studies by showing that both the West and the East had not entirely parallel debates on ‘big science’ and the ‘scientific–technological revolution’ (STR), neither of which can be reduced simply to concerns about planning versus freedom. Again a surprising, if thin, transnational flow can be found: ‘Kuhn's work was received in the Soviet Union with sympathetic interest but without any particular enthusiasm’, not least because STR already offered a ‘competing discourse of scientific revolutions’ (p. 418).

Aronova therefore shows that the Cold War context mattered for the meaning of some our discipline's key terms. Indeed, as Oreskes reminds us, the very term ‘cold war’ was introduced by George Orwell in an essay that addressed a technology, the atomic bomb, in 1945. Very soon it would label a state of world affairs – the ‘Cold War’ – one which, as these essays show, had long and deep implications for science, technology and their histories and courses.