A Global History of Cybernetics 45
one of the weapons Khrushchev had in mind when he threatened to ‘bury’
the West.”^104
The Central Committee began publicly promoting cybernetics along
similar lines in 1961 at the Twenty-second Party Congress as “one of the
major tools of the creation of a communist society.”^105 First Secretary Nikita
Khrushchev himself promoted a far-reaching application of cybernetics:
“it is imperative,” he declared to the Congress, “to organize wider appli-
cation of cybernetics, electronic computing, and control installations in
production, research work, drafting and designing, planning, accounting,
statistics, and management.”^106 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sources
noted similar enthusiasm at an All-Union Conference on the Philosophi-
cal Problems of Cybernetics held in June 1962 in Moscow, which included
“approximately 1000 specialists, mathematicians, philosophers, physicists,
economists, psychologists, biologists, engineers, linguistics, physicians.”^107
The conference adopted an official, if vague, definition of cybernetics as “the
science which deals with the purposeful control of complex dynamic sys-
tems.”^108 The most ambitious of these complex dynamic systems, the Party
leadership’s support seemed to imply, would be the Soviet Union itself.
The looming menace of a well-organized, cybernetic self-governing
socialist enemy worried some American observers as well. During the John
F. Kennedy administration, members of the intelligence community agi-
tated against the perceived looming peril of Soviet cybernetics. John J. Ford,
then a Russian specialist in the CIA and a future president of the Ameri-
can Society for Cybernetics, was responsible for several alarm-generating
reports on Soviet cybernetics, which had already grabbed Attorney General
Robert F. Kennedy’s attention. One fateful evening in the fall of 1962, Ford
gathered with President John F. Kennedy’s top men to discuss the impend-
ing peril of Soviet cybernetics, only to have his meeting interrupted by
the announcement that surveillance satellites had just uncovered photos
of Soviet missiles in Cuba.^109 By the time the dust settled after the Cuban
missile crisis, Soviet cybernetics no longer agitated the administration,
which had reviewed the science and did not deem it an urgent threat. It is
a strange twist of history, then, that the international crisis that is consid-
ered the zenith of cold war hostility (the Cuban missile crisis) also defused
and derailed mounting American anxieties about the “Soviet cybernetic
menace.”^110
Although U.S. and Soviet intelligence officers alternately fretted about or
enthused over the possibilities of a cybernetically coordinated Soviet power,
the facts about the practical debates among Soviet scientists point in a very
different direction. Soviet cybernetics, for all its talk about self-governance,