Competing with the SovietsScience, Technology, and the State in Cold War America\nAuthor(s): Audra J. Wolfe\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, United States\nImprint: Johns Hopkins University Press\nISBN-13: 9781421407692, 978-1421407692\nSynopsis\nFor most of the second half of the twentieth century, the United States and its allies competed with a hostile Soviet Union in almost every way imaginable except open military engagement. The Cold War placed two opposite conceptions of the good society before the uncommitted world and history itself, and science figured prominently in the picture. Competing with the Soviets offers a short, accessible introduction to the special role that science and technology played in maintaining state power during the Cold War, from the atomic bomb to the Human Genome Project. The high-tech machinery of nuclear physics and the space race are at the center of this story, but Audra J. Wolfe also examines the surrogate battlefie.