The 1958 Lacy-Zarubin agreement on cultural, educational and scientific exchanges marked decades of people-to-people exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union. Despite the Cold War tensions and mutually propagated adversarial images, the exchanges had never been interrupted and
Science and Diplomacy around the Earth: From the Man and Biosphere Programme to the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme
In this article we discuss two phases in the evolution of global environmental programs, namely the Man and Biosphere Programme and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, with the aim of showing their hidden diplomatic ambitions from both US and Soviet perspectives.
The (Science Diplomacy) Origins of the Cold War
The US monopoly of information regarding nuclear weapons was one of the distinctive features of the early Cold War. It encouraged US officials to bolster their country’s hegemonic role in post-war affairs, something that scholars have previously referred to in
On the road to Stockholm: A case study of the failure of Cold War international environmental initiatives (Prague Symposium, 1971)
In May 1971, the Czechoslovak capital hosted an international conference on the environment that brought together high-ranking government officials and scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain. The idea to organize such an event reflected Czechoslovakia’s interest in environmental
A Matter of Courtesy: The Role of Soviet Diplomacy and Soviet “System Safeguards” in Maintaining Soviet Influence on Czechoslovak Science before and after 1968
In 1969, a few short months after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Sergei I. Prasolov, advisor to the Soviet Ambassador in Prague, informed František Šorm, President of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, at a formal meeting that he welcomed
The seismograph as a diplomatic object: The Soviet–American exchange of instruments, 1958–1964
Scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain met in Geneva in 1958 and 1959 to create the technical basis for monitoring a future nuclear test ban treaty. Despite their scientific veneer, these meetings were politically motivated and the scientists
Materialized internationalism: How the IAEA made the Vinča Dosimetry Experiment, and how the experiment made the IAEA
After a deadly 1958 nuclear reactor accident in Vinča, Yugoslavia, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) engaged in intensive nuclear diplomacy to assemble a major international scientific experiment on radiation dosimetry at the accident site. The 1960 Vinča Dosimetry Experiment
