Aaron Bateman

Aaron Bateman is an assistant professor of history and international affairs. Trained as a historian of science and technology, his interests lie at the nexus of science, technology, and international security. Specifically, Aaron’s research investigates how science and technology have shaped foreign policy, nuclear strategy, alliance dynamics, and arms control. His scholarship has explored many of these themes through the lens of the space age during the Cold War.  

Aaron’s first book, Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative, is an international history of Ronald Reagan’s controversial Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), more popularly known as “Star Wars.” Using recently declassified documents, he situates SDI within intensifying U.S. - Soviet military space competition in the final two decades of the Cold War that emerged as détente collapsed. He also details SDI’s enduring consequences for arms control and its connections with resurgent anxieties about an arms race in space.

Aaron’s second book project uses an infrastructural lens to explore how the nuclear age shaped the U.S. global information networks that served as the ‘connective tissue’ of American power. He details both the technological and political challenges associated with developing and maintaining information networks stretching from under the ocean and into outer space. This project also investigates the politics of basing U.S. communications sites, such as satellite ground stations, in the Global South to reveal how decolonization shaped this infrastructure. This work is rooted in the historiographies of technology, diplomacy, and decolonization and engages with the security studies scholarship in political science. An article drawn from this book project can be accessed here.

Aaron’s peer-reviewed work has been published in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Diplomacy & Statecraft, Intelligence and National Security, the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, and Science & Diplomacy. His policy commentary has been published in Foreign Affairs, Engelsberg Ideas, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Physics Today, and War on the Rocks.

Aaron received his PhD in history of science from Johns Hopkins University. While in graduate school he held a Guggenheim predoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. He has completed multiple intensive Russian-language courses in the United States and the Russian Federation. Prior to his doctoral studies, Aaron served as a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer.