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Boffins: Scientists, War, Politics and Culture in the Twentieth Century

Module description

This module explores the complex and changing roles of scientists in the twentieth century.  Focusing primarily on Britain, France, Germany, Soviet Union and the USA from the 1920s-60s, you will study the significant impacts of war, political and economic change, and other factors on the meanings and values of scientific expertise, and on the sciences more generally.  You will analyse the dramatic growth of scientists in government, industry, the military and in higher education, as well as their roles as popularisers, historians, philosophers and science fiction writers.  You’ll be studying the ways in which the sciences transformed and were transformed by the political, economic, military, bureaucratic and other objectives of the state, and how these transformations continued and challenged ideas of the scientist’s vocation and profession.

Module aims - intentions of the module

Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed 2023 film Oppenheimer dramatized many questions about the roles and functions of scientists that still preoccupy us today.  For example, how do governments, the military, and industry profit from scientists and vice-versa?  Are there fundamental differences between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ science?  Are scientists working for governments, the military, and industry compromising their vocational ideals and professional identities?  Should scientists speak out on politics and other issues ostensibly beyond their specialist areas of expertise?  How do scientists reconcile internationalist views of their work with the demands of national security?

In this module you’ll be exploring these and other questions in the context of the twentieth century, a period when the scale and impact of the sciences grew exponentially, when scientists – often called ‘boffins’ in Britain - gained unprecedented powers and responsibilities, and when the sciences came to be seen as the most powerful drivers of military, political, economic and cultural progress.  The module focuses primarily on the period from after the First World War to the height of the Cold War, and on those countries wielding the most scientific power during the period: Britain, Germany, France, the Soviet Union and the US.  You will be analysing the ways in which governments, the military, industry and higher education used scientists, and how scientists used them to serve intellectual, political, cultural and other ambitions.  The module will enable you to understand the transformative roles that different states have had on the content, approach, authority and scale of scientific activity.  Comparisons between science in capitalist, communist, liberal and fascist states will help you to assess these transformations in considerable detail.  You will also be analysing a host of other roles that scientists increasingly fulfilled in the twentieth century – as historians, philosophers and contributors to that fast-growing literary genre: science fiction.  The module will be examining the extent to which the writing of history, philosophy and fiction enabled scientists to support and challenge the roles that they occupied as instruments of the state.

You will be studying a wide range of primary source materials, including government documents, scientific and technical reports, newspapers, historical and philosophical works, science fiction stories, autobiographies, sound recordings and feature films.  These historical works comprise a small portion of the wider historiography of twentieth century sciences with which you will be critically engaging in seminars and assessments.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Describe and explain the changing roles of scientists in the twentieth century.
• 2. Demonstrate a critical understanding of the relationships between twentieth century sciences and the military, political, bureaucratic and cultural locations where they were located.
• 3. Evaluate critically and carefully different kinds of historical approaches to and interpretations of twentieth century sciences, including those of historical actors.

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 4. Analyse the key developments in complex and unfamiliar political, social, cultural or intellectual environments.
• 5. Evaluate different and complex types of historical source and historiography.
• 6. Identify and deploy correct terminology in a comprehensible and sophisticated manner.
• 7. Present work in a professional format, including footnoting and bibliographical references.

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 8. Mobilise research skills to pursue set objectives.
• 9. Communicate clearly and persuasively.
• 10. Work independently and to module deadlines.

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics:

• Doing history of recent science
• Science as a vocation, job or both?
• The First World War: the ‘chemists’ war’?
• European colonialism, medicine and ecology
• Industrialisation, militarization and bureaucratization of research
• Interwar expansion of US science
• Scientists and ideology in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany
• Racial hygiene and eugenics
• Boffins in Britain’s ‘warfare state’
• Scientists as politicians
• Scientists as humanists: George Sarton, J. D. Bernal, Ludwick Fleck, Michael Polanyi and others
• Pseudo-scientists?: the cases of parapsychology and Lysenkoism
• Sciences of life and death in the Second World War
• The Manhattan Project and ‘Big Science’
• Oppenheimer matters: Cold War scientists and secrecy
• CERN matters: Cold War scientists and internationalism
• Postwar sciences of the large and small (oceanography, ecology, space science and electronics)
• Governing machines, mechanising government: the computing ‘revolution’
• From H. G. Wells to Arthur C. Clarke: scientists as novelists and prophets
• Dr Strangelove and others: representations of scientists in novels and film

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

• Jon Agar, Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Cambridge: Polity, 2012)
• Brian Balmer, Secrecy and Science: A Historical Sociology of Biological and Chemical Warfare (London: Routledge, 2016)
• Robert Bud, Applied Science: Knowledge, Modernity and Britain’s Public Realm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024)
• David Edgerton, Science, Technology and the British Industrial ‘Decline’, 1870-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
• David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
• Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly (eds), Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992)
• Daniel S. Greenberg, The Politics of Pure Science (New York; New American Library, 1967)
• Philip Gummett, Scientists in Whitehall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980)
• Rosalind D. Haynes, From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994)
• Jeff Hughes, The Manhattan Project: Big Science and the Atom Bomb (Duxford: Icon Books, 2003)
• Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)
• John Krige and Dominique Pestre (eds), Science in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997)
• Patrick J. McGrath, Scientists, Business and the State, 1890-1960 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)
• Mary Jo Nye, Michael Polanyi and his Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011)
• Derek J. De Sola Price, Little Science, Big Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963)
• Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (London: Penguin Books, 1988)
• Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008)
• Mark Walker, Science and Ideology: A Comparative History (London: Routledge, 2002)
• Jessica Wang, Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anti-Communism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
• Gary Werksey, The Visible College: A Collective Biography of British Scientists and Socialists of the 1930s (London: Free Association Books, 1988)

Key words search

History of science; twentieth century; Britain; United States; Europe; Soviet Union; war; politics; careers; technology; industry; government; atomic bomb; radar; secrecy; morality; popular science; philosophy; science fiction