Aaron Bateman

Aaron Bateman is a historian of contemporary science and technology. He studies how technology shaped U.S. foreign policy, defense strategy, alliance dynamics, and superpower competition in the Cold War. His research is supported by the Smith Richardson Foundation and the Stanton Foundation.

His first book, Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative (MIT Press, 2024) is an award-winning international history of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The book reveals SDI’s linkages with shifts in U.S. thinking about the role of space technologies in national security beginning in the 1970s. It then follows SDI’s trajectory through the end of the Cold War and beyond. Along the way, the book unpacks SDI’s effects on U.S. - Soviet relations, arms control, and transatlantic alliance dynamics. In each of these contexts, the book details how technology both shaped and constrained political choices.

His second book project explores the development of information networks that formed the “connective tissue” of U.S. global power in the Cold War. The book shifts attention away from the ships, missiles, planes, and bases that are traditionally associated with U.S. power and towards the information networks that connected them. As such, it uncovers the technical and political factors that determined the placement of submarine cables, satellite ground stations, and radio antennas as well as the geographic entanglements created by this infrastructure. Moreover, the book shows how information networks shaped U.S. alliance relationships. This project draws from archival collections in Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States.

His peer-reviewed work has been published, or is forthcoming, in International Security, Journal of Strategic Studies, International History Review, Diplomacy & Statecraft, Intelligence and National Security, and Science & Diplomacy (among others). His policy commentary has been published in Foreign Affairs, Engelsberg Ideas, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Physics Today.

He received his PhD in history of science from Johns Hopkins University. Prior to his doctoral studies, he served as a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer. He has also held positions with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the RAND Corporation, and the Aerospace Corporation.