Aaron Bateman

Aaron Bateman is an assistant professor of history and international affairs. Trained as a historian of science and technology, he studies how technology shaped U.S. foreign relations, defense strategy, Western alliance dynamics, and superpower competition during the Cold War. His scholarship explores these themes in the context of space security, missile defense, nuclear strategy and operations, arms control, intelligence, and global information networks. His work draws from archives in Australia, Europe, New Zealand, the former Soviet Union, and the United States. He has been awarded grants from the Stanton Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation to support his research.

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. Both the technological and political forces that shaped SDI’s research and development trajectory through the end of the Cold War and beyond are thoroughly explored. Moreover, the book details the participation of Western European allies in SDI, thereby shedding new light on the politics of technology cooperation within the transatlantic alliance in the 1980s. Finally, Aaron details SDI’s enduring consequences for space security and its connections with resurgent anxieties about an arms race in space. This book received the 2024 U.S. Air Force Historical Foundation’s Space History Prize.

Aaron’s second book project uses an infrastructural lens to explore how the nuclear age shaped 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 stresses the enduring importance of terrestrial communications infrastructure in the space age. To underline this point, he investigates the politics of basing U.S. information infrastructure, such as satellite ground stations, in foreign territories. An article drawn from this book project can be accessed here.

Aaron’s peer-reviewed work has been published, or is forthcoming, in the Journal of Strategic Studies, International History Review, 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. Prior to his doctoral studies, Aaron served as a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer. He serves on the board of the Society for Intelligence History.