[Sci-tech-public] Schedule of events: week of October 20th

[Debbie Meinbresse]

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