Cold War Communities: Militarization in Los Angeles and Novosibirsk, 1941--1953
详细信息
- 作者：Seth ; Anita Malini ; Ph.D.
- 学历：Ph.D.
- 年：2012
- 关键词：Cold War ; Comparative history ; Aerospace ; Labor ; L
- 导师：Pitti, Stephen J.
- 毕业院校：Yale University
- 专业：American history, Modern history, Russian history
- ISBN：9781267577351
- CBH：3525322
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：15445235
- Pages：307
文摘
This dissertation examines the growth of military industries in Los Angeles and Novosibirsk, Russia from the beginning of World War II through the end of the Korean War. Over this period, both cities became industrial and scientific centers of the Cold War aerospace industry. World War II accelerated their industrialization, dominated by defense production. The Cold War conflict consolidated the centrality of aircraft and aerospace to their local economies. This study focuses particularly on the three factories that produced the leading jet fighters of the Korean War: the Chkalov aircraft factory in Novosibirsk, the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in Burbank, and North American Aviation in Inglewood.
An arms race is inherently interactive. But almost all studies of defense production during the Cold War focus exclusively on one of the two sides in the conflict, even as they rely on implicit underlying comparisons. Looking at the two sides together exposes similarities in the organization of military industries in what were otherwise two very different contexts, and thereby suggest that there are social, economic and political structures inherent to the process of military production itself. From the beginning of the twentieth century, observers in the United States noted that military industries did not operate by market rules but tended toward consolidation and monopoly. In the Soviet Union, the uncharacteristic power of military consumers to hold producers accountable, combined with the priority accorded the defense industries, caused factories like Chkalov to operate differently than their counterparts in other sectors of the economy. Thus, the operation of Lockheed, North American and Chkalov had more in common with each other than with civilian factories located just miles away from each.
Using oral histories, archival documents, factory and union newspaper accounts, the dissertation traces the history of these two Cold War places, where weapons production became a pervasive presence upon which lives and communities were built. Defense-dependent cities were not the sole creation of a few military, political and industry leaders, although the growth of military production did redistribute power. Over time, whole groups of residents, workers, industrial leaders and city officials--in effect, whole urban areas--joined in to build the system that influenced political and social priorities for at least a half-century. The influence and power of military industrial interests grew over time, as the result of myriad individual choices, and of incentives and disincentives created by the intersection between fears of foreign attack and of domestic subversion.
The constituencies who embraced military production did so in a context where there were significant rewards for these choices and penalties for dissent. If prestige, economic growth and a higher standard of living were positive incentives for the growth of the military complex in these two cities, secrecy and repression discouraged alternatives. This dissertation follows workers, factory managers, local government officials and scientists who bound their fates to military production, in order to understand the benefits and the costs of their decisions, and the alternate paths that they failed to pursue.
An arms race is inherently interactive. But almost all studies of defense production during the Cold War focus exclusively on one of the two sides in the conflict, even as they rely on implicit underlying comparisons. Looking at the two sides together exposes similarities in the organization of military industries in what were otherwise two very different contexts, and thereby suggest that there are social, economic and political structures inherent to the process of military production itself. From the beginning of the twentieth century, observers in the United States noted that military industries did not operate by market rules but tended toward consolidation and monopoly. In the Soviet Union, the uncharacteristic power of military consumers to hold producers accountable, combined with the priority accorded the defense industries, caused factories like Chkalov to operate differently than their counterparts in other sectors of the economy. Thus, the operation of Lockheed, North American and Chkalov had more in common with each other than with civilian factories located just miles away from each.
Using oral histories, archival documents, factory and union newspaper accounts, the dissertation traces the history of these two Cold War places, where weapons production became a pervasive presence upon which lives and communities were built. Defense-dependent cities were not the sole creation of a few military, political and industry leaders, although the growth of military production did redistribute power. Over time, whole groups of residents, workers, industrial leaders and city officials--in effect, whole urban areas--joined in to build the system that influenced political and social priorities for at least a half-century. The influence and power of military industrial interests grew over time, as the result of myriad individual choices, and of incentives and disincentives created by the intersection between fears of foreign attack and of domestic subversion.
The constituencies who embraced military production did so in a context where there were significant rewards for these choices and penalties for dissent. If prestige, economic growth and a higher standard of living were positive incentives for the growth of the military complex in these two cities, secrecy and repression discouraged alternatives. This dissertation follows workers, factory managers, local government officials and scientists who bound their fates to military production, in order to understand the benefits and the costs of their decisions, and the alternate paths that they failed to pursue.