A schedule of events for the week of October 20th is posted on the STS website http://web.mit.edu/sts/calendar/index-css.html.
Please note that the next STS colloquium will be held a week from Monday on October 27. Michael Gordin's talk, "Red Cloud at Dawn: Worrying About, Detecting, and Announcing the First Soviet Nuclear Test," will be held at 4:00 pm in E51-095. Abstract: At the end of the Second World War, the United States found itself the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in a world that was fast hardening into a bipolar Cold War. Possession of an atomic monopoly was instantly beset by fears of when the Americans would "lose" it -- i.e., when the Soviet Union would acquire a nuclear capacity of its own and detonate a test device. This talk follows the debates during the monopoly (1945-1949) over how long it would take the Soviets to proliferate; over whether, when, and how to erect a long-distance monitoring network to detect the first blast; and finally the internal debates within President Harry Truman's administration about whether to release the first positive results in September 1949. Bio: Michael D. Gordin is an associate professor in the History Department at Princeton University, where he teaches the history of science and Russian history. He is the author of A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (2004), Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War (2007), and several articles on the history of Russian and Soviet science. This lecture is part of the STS Fall 2008 Colloquia on Cold War Knowledges: A New Look. Debbie Meinbresse STS Program, MIT 617-452-2390 _______________________________________________ Sci-tech-public mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/sci-tech-public
