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Article ID: CBB000954242

Was the Nuclear Arms Race Deterministic? (2010)

Roland, Alex (Author)

Technology and Culture
Volume: 51
Pages: 444--461
Publication date: 2010
Language: English

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Technology Nuclear weapons; atomic weapons Cold War Technological determinism Arms race 20th century, late

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union amassed remarkably similar nuclear arsenals. They built roughly the same number of warheads and parallel delivery systems. Can this mean that nuclear weapons were deterministic, forcing the superpowers to pursue the same technological trajectories? Was the evolution of these weapons systems inevitable? Did technology force the two superpowers to embrace a single technological paradigm for their military confrontation? This essay challenges the concept of technological determinism, either in the Cold War or anywhere else in human experience. "Technological determinism" is a rhetorical trope, invoked most often to denigrate either a historical phenomenon or an historical interpretation. Technology may be thought of as having social force that influences its adoption and directional force that shapes its trajectory, but nothing about it is inevitable. Technology shapes history but does not determine it.

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