Catalysts of Change:

Abstract

In 1986, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a U.S. nongovernmental organization, began an unprecedented collaboration with the Soviet Academy of Sciences to establish three U.S. nuclear monitoring stations in the vicinity of the Soviet nuclear test site in Semipalatinsk. This transnational collaboration of scientists accomplished what U.S. administrations from Eisenhower to Carter had tried and failed to do, namely, to place U.S. scientists and their seismic monitoring equipment on Soviet soil. This chapter analyzes how, why, and to what extent this coalition of U.S. and Soviet scientists succeeded in shaping Soviet foreign policy and at the same time altering the nuclear test ban debate in the United States. The chapter places this project in a framework of transnational relations and highlights the importance of trust between the involved scientists, in particular between the project leaders, NRDC physicist Thomas Cochran and Soviet Academy physicist and vice‐president Yevgeny Velikhov.

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