The Arms Race and Command Economies since 1945 369
cultivated wherever it could be found, and if it were encouraged by
the removal of long-standing fiscal limitations on education, research,
and development.
The ensuing academic boom, led by natural science, was matched
only by the boom in aerospace and electronics. In effect the manage
rial elites that had come so powerfully to the fore during World War II
now found a new, more technocratic outlet for their ambitions and
skills. For their cold war had to be fought on a wide front. Social
engineering to achieve a better society mattered as much as the im
provement of military hardware.
The prevailing confidence in the nation’s ability to solve all prob
lems and overcome all obstacles took dramatic form in 1961 when
President John F. Kennedy announced that the United States would
put a man on the moon within the decade. The task was entrusted to a
civilian agency, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Adminis
tration). But new technologies allowing men and machines to move
about in space always had military implications and applications. This
made the separation of military from civilian research and develop
ment of space technology almost meaningless.^7
The Soviet Union strained to keep up, announcing a new party
program in 1961 that promised to overtake the United States level of
per capita production within the decade so as to be able to inaugurate
communism (from each according to his ability, to each according to
his need) in the 1980s. Premier Khrushchev’s technocratic faith was,
indeed, very similar to that which inspired President Kennedy’s circle
of policy makers. Both drew upon their memories of what had been
done during and immediately after World War II to achieve im
possible production goals by resort to deliberate social and technical
engineering.
Most other countries despaired of the race. France, however, re
belling against what General Charles de Gaulle felt to be undue
American partiality for Britain and Germany, withdrew from NATO
and embarked on a national program of research and development à
l'Américaine. Only so, de Gaulle felt, could France escape from becom
ing a quasi-colonial dependency of American (or, alternatively, of
Russian) technocracy.^8 In the Far East, China and Japan both made
- John M. Logsdon, The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National
Interest (Cambridge, Mass., 1970); Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell, The Origins and
International Economics oj Space Exploration (Edinburgh, 1973).
- Robert Gilpin, France in the Age of the Scientific State (Princeton, 1968) offers a
sympathetic analysis of French reaction to American example in the 1960s. I also owe
much to two unpublished papers by Walter A. McDougall, “Technology and Hubris in
