How Did The Cold War Influence American Science

When it comes to thinking about war, people often may wonder whether or not it brings positive or negative impacts to the countries that participated. For the purpose of this paper, the question at hand is whether or not the second world war and the cold war had a positive or negative influence on American and Soviet science. Too simply answer this question, the American science program benefited from world war 2 and the Cold War while the soviet union did not. This will be discussed in greater detail later on in the paper. With this said, the paper will start with examples of how American science benefited from the war. Examples such as MIT and Stanford will be discussed. After that, the paper will shift gears and explain why science in the …show more content…
This is because of the way the science program in the Soviet Union was managed. There was too much control over the Science program. In-fact, according to a class lecture, Stalin gave himself the right to determine what science is right and what science is wrong (Lecture 3/02). The war has left a devastating amount of destruction, death, and human exhaustion for the Soviets, which in turn have drained the Russian people of any energy they may have had. People were drained from working in labor camps against their wills for countless hours everyday for very long durations (Keenen 10). This was all done out of the Soviet Union’s hatred of capitalistic systems (Keenen 8). Ideological teachings in the Soviet Union stressed that the outside world was hostile and that it was everyones duty to overthrow and eliminate the political forces beyond the borders of the Soviet Union (Keenen 8). So with all of this said, the Soviet Union’s aspirations of wanting to take over the capital systems and forcing tough working conditions for their people and the massive control of the science programs is the reasons the influence of war was a negative factor for the Soviet Union science program. Without war, the science program would still be under strict control, but with the addition of war only had made things worse for …show more content…
Despite having technological advancements in the Soviet Union, the lack of freedom they had was the reason for the influences of the wars being negative. Scientists were thrown in prisons and sometimes killed for disagreeing with Stalin and other figures. That is not how a science program gets to the top and stays at the top. The United States on the other hand endured great benefits as science programs in the country gained many dollars for research. Programs like Stanford and MIT benefited as well, bringing in more money for their schools and better recruits. Yes, they had to work on the needs of the military, but they still had money to work on other stuff as