Aaron Bateman

Headshot of Aaron Bateman

Aaron Bateman

Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs

Full-time Faculty


Contact:

1957 E St. NW, Office #403G Washington, D.C. 20052

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. He has published in the fields of international relations, diplomatic history, intelligence studies, and history of technology. 

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 that formed the “connective tissue” of global American power during the Cold War and beyond. The article-length version of this project can be accessed here.

Aaron’s work has been published in Foreign Affairs, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Diplomacy & StatecraftIntelligence and National Security, the Oxford Handbook of Space Security, the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterintelligenceScience & Diplomacy, the Journal of Slavic Military StudiesEngelsberg 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. 


  • ​​​​​Cold War 
  • History of Science and Technology

  • Diplomatic History

  • Strategic Studies

PhD, Johns Hopkins University 

MA, Saint Mary’s University

BA, Saint Joseph’s University

Certificate in Russian Language, Kazan Federal University (Russian Federation)

HIST 2001/IAFF 3190 Science, Technology, & Espionage

HIST 2001/IAFF 3190 Outer Space and International Security 

HIST 6001/IAFF 6158 Science, Technology, and Global Statecraft (graduate students only)

Books

Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative (MIT Press, 2024)

 

Peer Reviewed Articles (selected)

“The Weakest Link: The Vulnerability of U.S. and Allied Global Information Networks during the Cold War,” Journal of Strategic Studies (2024), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2024.2360724

“Information security in the space age: Britain’s Skynet satellite communications program and the evolution of modern command and control networks,” Journal of Strategic Studies (2024), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2023.2265072

“Secret Partners: The National Reconnaissance Office and the Intelligence-Industrial-Academic Complex,” Intelligence and National Security (2023), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02684527.2023.2219013

“Trust but Verify: Satellite Reconnaissance, Secrecy, and Arms Control during the Cold War,” Journal of Strategic Studies (2023), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01402390.2022.2161522?journalCode=fjss20

“Keeping the Technological Edge: The Space Arms Race and Anglo-American Relations in the 1980s,” Diplomacy & Statecraft (2022), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09592296.2022.2062130?journalCode=fdps20

 “Mutually Assured Surveillance at Risk: Anti-Satellite Weapons and Cold War Arms Control,” Journal of Strategic Studies (2022), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01402390.2021.2019022?journalCode=fjss20

“Intelligence and Alliance Politics: America, Britain, and the Strategic Defense Initiative,” Intelligence and National Security (2021), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02684527.2021.1946958?journalCode=fint20

 

Commentary (selected)

“Undersea Cables and the Vulnerability of American Power,” Engelsberg Ideas, 7 May 2024, https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/undersea-cables-and-the-vulnerability-of-american-power/

“Why Russia Might Put a Nuclear Weapon in Space, Foreign Affairs, 7 March, 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/why-russia-might-put-nuclear-weapon-space