American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe

How the United States used its position as the world's leading scientific and technological power to rebuild European scientific practices and institutions and align them with American interests during the first two decades of the Cold War.

Rabi of Columbia University and Vannevar Bush of MIT--tried to Americanize scientific practices in such fields as physics, molecular biology, and operations research. He details U.S. support for institutions including CERN, the Niels Bohr Institute, the French CNRS and its laboratories at Gif near Paris, and the never-established "European MIT." Krige's study shows how consensual hegemony in science not only served the interests of postwar European reconstruction but became another way of maintaining American leadership and "making the world safe for democracy."