One of the important tensions involved in the military patronage of scientific research is that of confidentiality vs. publicity. While most military operations are based on controlling flows of information, it is commonly agreed that science needs open publishing and unrestrained communication among peers across national borders to flourish. Military planners in the USA and in Denmark and scientific institutions involved in Greenland research had to negotiate and define the boundary between what is made publicly available and what is kept secret. Moreover, the communication of scientific activities in Greenland to a broader public had to be managed and controlled.
After World War II, greatly increased military aims and interests in scientific activities clashed with strong claims of scientists and science administrators, who publically demanded open communication as a prerequisite of competitive science. In his report to the President, the influential science administrator Vannevar Bush argued that, in order to make the most of science in peacetime, “we have to remove the rigid controls which we had to impose, and recover freedom of inquiry and that healthy competitive scientific spirit so necessary for the expansion of the frontiers of scientific knowledge” (Bush 1945).
The early Cold War period was characterized by an increased number of initiatives aimed at strategic science communication and directed efforts seeking “to improve the attitude of members of the public toward science as a body of knowledge, science as a way of knowing about the world, scientists as individuals, and the particular requests for support and funding that came from scientific institutions” (Lewenstein 1992, 46; see also Moore 2008; Rudolph 2002; Wang 2002).
In effect, many different actors such as commercial publishers, scientific associations, science writers, military institutions, government agencies, and many more took an interest in science communication as a deliberate means of serving specific interests. But the public image of science as an open and democratic venture did no fit with the military’s need for confidentiality. The Bush report and similar policy statements “represented an inaccurate, idealistic view of science” and “proposed an impractical, improbable array of promises” (LaFollette 1990, 15-16).
The International Geophysical Year of 1957-58 (IGY) provides an example of the balance struck between confidentiality and publicity in the making of public understanding of science during the Cold War. Under the auspices of the U.S. National Committee for the IGY, a special task force was established to initiate an information and education campaign. However, the task force encountered many problems in meeting their target. For one thing, Cold War politics heightened the difficulty in selling an explicitly international science program such as the IGY to the general public. Many research projects remained classified, and scientists with international affiliations easily fell under suspicion of Left-Wing tendencies. Moreover, the task force experienced problems of multiple actors with unclear or overlapping roles, poorly articulated goals, ambitious expectations with little money to back them, and a lack of clear management authority (Korsmo 2004).
This subproject aims to explore the construction of public understanding of geophysical science in Greenland and the communication of scientific results during the Cold War in Denmark, the USA, and Greenland. It will draw on a broad variety of archival material as well as published sources such as selected newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and educational films. Specifically, the strategic aims of different actor groups as well as conflicts and cooperation between actor groups will be assessed. Also, the specific products produced with an aim of improving public understanding and public appreciation of science will be analyzed. Comparisons between the Danish and the US case will be made. Finally, the subproject will consider efforts of communicating US-Danish scientific activities in Greenland to the Greenlandic public.
Relevant research questions include: Which actors were interested in public understanding of science during the Cold War? What were their motives, and what specific actions did they take? How did they collaborate? To what extent did they have conflicting interests? And what were the results of their acitivities? What resources did the public have in order to construct their own understanding of science?
