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Throughout the Cold War, many publicly influential and socially committed scientists participated in a wide array of efforts to push U.S. foreign policy toward nuclear disarmament. Some of these scientists, such as Linus Pauling and Carl Sagan, relied on their credibility as respected public authorities to sway public opinion against nuclear weapons. Other scientists, such as Eugene Rabinowitch, quietly pursued informal, quasi-diplomatic methods. Still others, such as Hans Bethe, George Kistiakowsky, and Jerome Wiesner, worked within the government to restrain the arms race. Though rarely working in concert, all these scientists operated under the notion that their scientific expertise enabled them to articulate convincing and objective reasons for nuclear disarmament. But the U.S. government went to great lengths to neutralize these scientific arguments against nuclear weapons with a wide array of tactics all aimed at undermining their scientific credibility. Some scientists who offered moral reasons to end the arms race found their loyalty questioned by the state. When prodisarmament scientists offered strictly technical reasons to oppose to nuclear weapons, the government responded by promoting the equally technical objections to disarmament held by pronuclear scientists. At still other times, the government attempted to co-opt the arguments of its scientific challengers. In addition, scientists’ professional identity as objective and apolitical experts hampered scientific antinuclear activism. From the beginning of the Cold War to the 1980s, scientists continuously challenged nuclear weapons in a variety of ways; the government likewise continuously reshaped its responses to meet this challenge, and in so doing crafted a method of scientific containment. Thus the result of this incessant struggle was the consistent defeat of scientists’ dissent. By the time the Cold War ended, it did so on terms unrelated to scientists and nuclear weapons. / text

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My dissertation explores the intense crisis of sensibility experienced by liberal intellectuals in cold war America, with special emphasis on the desire to renew liberal democratic culture by moving, in mind and spirit, from innocence to responsibility. The latter term, however, expresses sentiments of civic virtue or republicanism very much at odds with liberalism; hence the ultimate failure of liberals to consummate their own sense of what is most needful or necessary. Although liberals clearly desire the sensational execution of innocence, their inability to be "altogether evil" (Machiavelli) consigns them to the equivocating limbo of what R. W. B. Lewis called the "new stoicism." The liberal desire for renewal does find its consummation, however, in Leo Strauss's Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), which instructs liberals in the salutary benefits of a philosophical republicanism. As embodied in Machiavelli himself, this mode of republicanism promises to emancipate liberals (if only they would listen) from the tyranny of innocence, thereby effecting the desired regenerative movement to civic responsibility.