Aaron Bateman

Aaron Bateman is an assistant professor of history and international affairs. He studies how technology shaped U.S. foreign relations, alliance dynamics, defense strategy, and superpower competition in the Cold War. He explores these themes in the context of two distinct research agendas. The first focuses on the history of national security activities in outer space. The second investigates the political and security dimensions of 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.

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). 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 investigates 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 explores how the nuclear age shaped the global information networks that constituted the “connective tissue” of American power in the Cold War. He details how the United States grappled with the challenge of moving data on a global scale, rapidly and securely, to realize its national security ambitions. The project emphasizes the political and security dimensions of the physical infrastructure – submarine cables, satellites, and long-range radio – for transmitting data. Moreover, since this infrastructure both depended on allied territories and served as a vital informational link with allies in Europe and Asia, the book analyzes the nexus between information networks and alliance dynamics. 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. He has presented his research to academic, government, and policy-focused audiences in Asia, Europe, Australia, the United States, and New Zealand. 

Aaron received his PhD in history of science from Johns Hopkins University. Prior to academia, he served as a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer.