Keeping the peace in the Cold War was a matter of MAD, or mutually assured destruction, with both the U.S. and Soviet Union racing to develop and amass ever more deadly weapons to keep the other at bay and maintain an uneasy status quo.

The problem, according to Benjamin Wilson, was the chief proponents of that early brand of arms control, an elite group of science advisers, “wore a progressive face” but ended up “protecting existing structures and domestic arrangements, foreclosing the possibility of more radical transformations.”

That’s the argument Wilson, an associate professor of the history of science, makes in his new book, “Strange Stability: How Cold War Scientists Set Out to Control the Arms Race and Ended Up Serving the Military-Industrial Complex.”

In this edited interview, Wilson discusses the doctrine of “strategic stability” and the downside of the American cultural myth of the independent scientist who saves society from itself.

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The book takes a look at the narrative that grew up around the arms control movement. Can you describe it?

In the 1950s, the U.S. and the Soviet Union started building these big arsenals of intercontinental bombers and ballistic missiles that could carry out devastating attacks very quickly.

But strategists realized that there could be a political or military crisis where tensions are extremely high, and one side gets convinced the other side might attack, so it seems prudent to attack first. Or there could be a mishap, like a blip on a radar screen that looks like an attack. 

Strategic stability is a condition where neither side would ever strike first, even if it might ordinarily be tempting to attack. Stability theory says you should put your missiles in hardened silos and submarines where the enemy can’t find them, so even if there is a crisis or an accident, both sides will know that they can retaliate even if they’re attacked first. 

The standard narrative from the Cold War says that strategic stability was a natural and inevitable idea and was dictated by the logic of strategy. 

The second part of the narrative is about the people who discovered and promoted this idea of strategic stability. These were social and natural scientists who advised and consulted for the government. They created a new field organized around stability that they called arms control.

The narrative says that these arms controllers were independent thinkers whose advice to policymakers was geared toward promoting stability and peace.

In effect, they were a restraint on what President [Dwight] Eisenhower famously called the military-industrial complex, and they were able to serve as a restraint precisely because they were independent scientists and intellectuals. 

But you found that’s not the case. What’s missing from that standard story? 

What I found in researching my book was that both parts of that Cold War narrative are wrong, or at least incomplete.

The first part, the origins of stability, is incomplete.

American strategists were talking about protecting retaliatory weapons before they talked about strategic stability, so it wasn’t the case that they discovered the theory of stability and then used it to formulate concrete strategic policy.

It turns out that throughout the Cold War, strategists applied stability concepts in flexible and sometimes inconsistent ways, often as a justification for policies they preferred for other reasons. 

So then, you can ask, what other reasons?

Well, it turns out those scientists were not the independent thinkers we thought they were. They were very much attached. They represented powerful institutions of the national security state, including extremely successful weapons contractors, and the interests of those institutions had a way of sculpting the kinds of stability arguments that the thinkers I studied put forward.

What they always argued for was more research and development to make better weapons. In the book I refer to such figures as R&D elites.

What was the alternative vision if not arms control and strategic stability? 

The alternative was disarmament — getting rid of weapons, getting rid of the means of developing and making weapons.

Cold War scientists and arms controllers spent a huge amount of energy arguing that disarmament was unrealistic and utopian because it would be impossible to verify, and it would be destabilizing.

They argued you could never erase the knowledge of the nuclear age, and that under a hypothetical condition of disarmament, the first side that decided to rearm would have a big advantage, and that was destabilizing.

I would simply point out that that argument is also very convenient for the military research and development organizations they represented. 

In the book you discuss the popular American trope of the independent scientist restraining the establishment for its own good. Why do you think that image has had such staying power culturally? 

I think the myth is a consoling one. It responds to an anxiety that people feel about the state and other big institutions that shape our lives. 

During World War II and the Cold War, the U.S. created an enormous national security state that reached deeply into other institutions, including private corporations and universities.

The myth became solidified with the surge of anti-militarism around the Vietnam War. That war profoundly damaged the faith that many Americans had in the institutions that purported to guarantee their security, and I think many wanted to believe that there was someone on the inside who was trying to keep things under control, who was working to check the government’s worst impulses. 

Into that space arrived the image of the scientist, someone who seemed to have a kind of innate independence, who could transcend institutions and restrain them from the inside.

And here were these powerful and prestigious scientists claiming to be doing exactly that, and so the myth was endorsed both by these scientists and by many people on the outside who looked to them with a kind of sincere hope. 

In what ways has this dynamic evolved from the Cold War, and in what ways has it remained the same? 

Many of the arrangements that I uncovered and analyzed in my book were hidden from the public, so it could take a future historian to build an accurate understanding of whatever is going on right now.

 I do have a hunch that the traditional military complex still has an important influence on policy debates today. But I suspect that in addition to missile companies, it’s Silicon Valley that’s furnishing some of the most influential R&D elites. 

What lesson can today’s scientists take about their role in guiding national policy and in speaking to the public? 

I have not written an advice book, and I don’t pretend to tell scientists how they should behave today.

But I do think my book presents a kind of cautionary tale. Here were some of the greatest and most prestigious scientists of the 20th century, and in my view, they ended up serving forces they claimed to control and even to oppose, sometimes without realizing they were doing it. 

Any advice I have applies as much to myself as anyone else: Be clear about what you value. Try to comprehend the forces that you serve and understand that they’re much larger than you.

And beware the temptation to believe that you are not responsible, ultimately, for the role that you play.