Technology in post-war Britain

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Technology had been an area of sporadic governmental concern for several centuries, but after the Second World War it moved nearer the centre-stage of thinking in both public and private domains. This growth of interest in, and concern about, technology was driven by a number of factors, none of which was new but all of which were accentuated. First was the growing complexity of technology, associated in part with extending links with the science base and in part with the advent of new technological fields. Second was the impact of ‘globalisation’, which helped to place technology at the forefront of the ‘competitiveness agenda’ in the economic domain. And third were the intensifying public anxieties about unchecked technological proliferation and potentially adverse environmental impacts, which led to demands for tighter control and regulation. In various ways, each of these brought about a widening consciousness of technology among the people of Britain. Though concerns and anxieties were to grow in the second half of the twentieth century, technology had emerged from the war with a high reputation: in the military, in government and in the public at large. Initial excitement over how atomic bombs had brought a speedy end to the war in the Pacific led not only to enlarged testing programmes for nuclear weapons, by the UK as well as other leading military powers, but also to General Eisenhower’s call for ‘Atoms for Peace’, and nuclear power that would prospectively generate electricity that was to be ‘too cheap to meter’. Computers that had been first developed to analyse the ballistics of rockets could be harnessed for a wider range of scientific calculations, and perhaps other purposes.

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