ABSTRACT

Science was also a driver of prosperity, which was important both for domestic reasons and because the superpowers were competing for the support of countries in the "Third World." Many of these countries had just emerged from European colonial empires as independent but impoverished societies, and were eager to exploit the superpowers for economic benefit. Although the move towards more expensive and labor-intensive science took place in a variety of disciplines, the main driver of big science was physics, and particularly the physics of atoms and subatomic particles–"nuclear" physics, and within nuclear physics "high energy" physics. The connection between the military and big science established in the Second World War continued and deepened during the Cold War. Cold War science required permanence. After the war, both the United States and the Soviet Union sought to build permanent institutions devoted to research and development, but ones that served military as well as scientific interests.