Aaron Bateman

Aaron Bateman is an assistant professor of history and international affairs. His research explores how science and technology shaped superpower competition, warfare, espionage, alliance dynamics, and arms control during the Cold War. Much of his research agenda has focused on using recently declassified documents to uncover the military dimensions of the space age. 

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 missile defense effort: the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). 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. Moreover, he shows how the international political conditions in the 1980s shaped U.S. decisions about strategic defense technologies. Finally, he 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 investigates the U.S. strategy for developing resilient global information networks during the Cold War. The destructiveness of nuclear weapons, combined with the speed of long-range missiles, necessitated information networks that were fast and survivable. But these information networks were also attractive targets for the Kremlin and therefore vulnerable. Through this project Aaron uncovers the formerly secret history of the information networks –submarine cables, radio, and satellites – that formed the “connective tissue” of global American power during the Cold War and beyond. An article drawn from this research can be accessed here.

Aaron’s work has been published in Foreign Affairs, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Diplomacy & Statecraft, Intelligence and National Security, the Oxford Handbook of Space Security, the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Science & Diplomacy, the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 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. Prior to his doctoral studies, Aaron served as a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer with assignments at the National Security Agency and the Pentagon. He has completed multiple intensive Russian- language courses in the United States and the Russian Federation.