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impact on the physics community. During the First World War the physicist Abram Ioffe created, in Petrograd (soon to be renamed Leningrad), the State Physiotechnical X-Ray Institute. Ioffe’s institute would become the ‘forge’ of Soviet nuclear physics. The first chair of its nuclear department was Igor Kurchatov, a bearish and humorous scientist who in the early 1930s immersed himself in the growing scholarship on nuclear physics and thereafter built a proton accelerator at the institute—though he changed course when he read about the Italian Enrico Fermi’s revolutionary work with neutrons. By the middle of the decade, a British physicist pointed to four international centers for nuclear research: the Cavendish, Fermi’s lab in Rome, Paris (wherein worked Marie Curie’s daughter Irene and her husband, Frederic Joliot), and ‘Kurchatov and his people’, who were ‘not far behind us considering the time difference in receiving journals’. The institute physicists would eventually be awarded by the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry a cyclotron, a magnetic, circular accelerator of subatomic particles.30

How much faster Kurchatov and his colleagues might have gone had they not been restricted by their government’s rigidity and suspicion is difficult to say. Travel to the West was curtailed: Peter Kapitsa was prevented from returning to the Cavendish in 1934, and Kurchatov was not allowed to accept an invitation to Berkeley, where Ernest Lawrence was pioneering particle acceleration techniques, in the winter of 1934-5. Soviet travel restrictions worked in the other direction, too. David Holloway has noted that, at the annual Soviet nuclear conference in 1933, half the papers were presented by non-Soviet scientists. Four years later, just five of the twenty-eight papers were given by non-Soviets, and by 1938 no one from abroad participated in the meeting at all. The extraordinary sensitivity of nuclear physics saved the physics community from the utter devastation that would be suffered by the biologists under Lysenko. But these conditions were not enough to keep scores of the most talented physicists from being arrested, sent to the Gulag, or shot. Research nevertheless went on. In David Holloway’s judgment, ‘Soviet physics reached a high standard in the 1930s’—testament to the intelligence and determination of people working under a government both authoritarian and capricious.31

The United States during the interwar period represents, following Solingen’s typology, a pluralist state with a market-oriented economy—the opposite, in other words, of the Soviet Union. Daniel Kevles has traced the developing relationship between American physicists and the state, and in particular the association made between the scientists’ work and national security, beginning during the First World War. This affiliation was by no means inevitable. Like all scientists, American physicists cherish their independence and do not lack for ego. ‘The vehemence of conviction, the pride of authorship burn as fiercely among scientists as among any creative workers,’ noted the eminent chemist and scientific administrator James Conant. There existed a tension between the physicists’ view that, in a free society, they ought to be able to follow whatever scientific paths they chose, and the government’s view that resources must go first to those engaged in what it considered to be useful work for the state. In times of national emergency, when US security is threatened, these visions may coincide. In June 1916, prodded by President Woodrow Wilson and its own foreign secretary, the astronomer George Ellery Hale, the National Academy of Sciences formed the National Research Council (NRC), which promised to support scientific research aimed at ‘the national security and welfare’. Some scientists objected; one, a pacifist, branded the NRC ‘militaristic’. But, when the United States went to war with Germany in April 1917, most physicists resolved to help in the effort. American scientists devised new and more effective ways to detect German submarines, worked with