ABSTRACT
In the shadow of the Vietnam War, a new generation of scientists began to challenge the long-held scientific premise that objectivity and faith in democratic government would allow science to have a positive effect on humanity. Scientists' status as objective experts had been challenged—and damaged—largely from within. And while scientists' authority had declined a great deal because of New Left activism, the national security state had also restricted scientists' role as activists in Cold War America. While scientific political activism revived after 1975, scientists pursued new avenues of dissent against the Cold War. In fact, politically active scientists in the 1970s sought a very different way of achieving peace: Whereas an earlier generation of scientists pursued peace by pursuing arms control agreements, the pursuit of human rights during the 1970s aimed at achieving peace through the liberation of unjustly imprisoned scientists.
