Chapter Four explores proposals for the creation of a postwar United Nations air force in Britain and the United States during the Second World War. Aviation, the chapter shows, emerged as a central component of internationalist campaigns for the creation of a postwar international security organization. Allied aerial ascendancy appeared to offer the opportunity, and the aeroplane the perfect tool, for the creation of a new system of collective security and international governance. By examining discussions and proposals within internationalist organizations and state planning committees, the chapter examines the coalition of interests which formed in support of the force. In the United States, it was supported by proponents of international law and of a strong United Nations Organization, and by a lobby keen to see the expanded wartime aviation industry used for postwar peacekeeping. In Britain meanwhile support was built on visions of joint Anglo-American policing of the world, and hopes of British influence over an integrated postwar Europe. An international air force was incorporated into the blueprint for a United Nations Organization at the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks Conference, and although the force was never formed it remains a part of the United Nations Charter to this day.

In February 1963, not long after the Cuban Missile Crisis, David Lilienthal gave a series of lectures on nuclear weapons at Princeton University. As a leading US policymaker on atomic matters in the late 1940s (including as the first Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission), Lilienthal had been instrumental in shaping early policy on the atomic bomb. Now, in the aftermath of the deepest nuclear crisis to envelop the United States, he conceded that his, and society’s, earlier thinking on the bomb had turned out to be incorrect. ‘We have been following a myth’, he exclaimed, ‘an illusion about the Atom’.

Chapter Six highlights the complex and contested nature of atomic internationalism in the United States between 1945 and 1950. It conceptualizes the introduction of atomic energy into the public sphere as the opening of a new discursive space which was fought over by contending activists and their associated organizations (prominently the Atomic Scientists’ Movement, the World Federalists, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the United Nations Association). Each struggled to have its vision of international atomic energy governance and world order accepted by the public and the state as official policy. In this chapter, the well-known Baruch and Acheson-Lilienthal Plans emerge as just two of a number of contending schemes for international control. These proposals, the chapter demonstrates, were as much shaped by their authors’ visions of international relations, notions of expertise, and in response to each other, as they were by the desire to tackle an existential threat.

The age of peace through technology never arrived. The facets of international relations that so horrified internationalists in the first half of the twentieth century remain with us today. International politics is as anarchic today as it was in the 1930s and 1940s: although there are socially constructed international norms and complex interdependence, strongly competing national interests continue to dominate.1 Wars continue to bring suffering to millions; international organizations which once promised freedom from sovereign state interests remain largely beholden to these very same interests; and the ordered worlds of internationally planned resources or free trade remain ideals distant from the current jumble of bilateral and multilateral trade and economic treaties. The weak multilateral response to crises such as climate change and the recent Covid-19 pandemic point to little cooperation even in matters related to science.

Chapter Seven focuses on postwar Britain and highlights the liberal nature of postwar atomic internationalism by examining responses to the bomb from across the political spectrum. The chapter explores media coverage as well as positions taken by prominent intellectuals; particularly liberals Arthur Salter and Bertrand Russell, realists such as Lord Hankey, and the leftist perspective developed by physicist Patrick Blackett. The chapter also argues that long-established liberal internationalist organizations such as the New Commonwealth Society and the United Nations Association were more crucial to the propagation of proposals for international control than the scientists’ associations emphasized in existing histories of the period.

Chapter Three argues that British thinking on aviation and internationalization became radicalized in the early thirties, and remained so until the onset of the Second World War. By the start of the decade, scientific disarmament was no longer enough for internationalists. They now pushed for a more comprehensive aerial transformation of international relations. The 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference, and internationalist organizations such as the League of Nations Union and the New Commonwealth Society, emerged as sites for the discussion and propagation of these aerial visions. Arguments about the convertibility of civilian to military aviation were used to make the case for comprehensive international control of both military and civilian aviation. In the most radical proposals existing airlines and air forces were to be transferred to the League of Nations, which was to run them and use them to ensure international peace and security. By the mid-thirties, as the fascist threat loomed large, there emerged a more muscular internationalism willing to use bombing to bolster the fledgling League order. A central argument in this chapter is that these proposals were not simply a response to the rise of German aviation or fear of bombing but instead reflected a national enthusiasm for aviation, as well as British aerial and scientific might.

Chapter Two explores British discourses on disarmament and international organization in the 1920s. Its central argument is that conceptualizations of disarmament and collective security were transformed by internationalists searching for broader solutions to the problems of international affairs. Internationalists such as Philip Noel Baker and David Davies came to envisage armaments as products of modern science, and so to see disarmament itself as an increasingly technical and scientific project requiring the guidance of experts schooled in international relations or with a specialized understanding of armaments. Disarmament and collective security came to be seen also in broader political and institutional terms – intimately connected to and dependent on a powerful international organization to organize, operationalize and police them. Aviation was central to this transformation. Apparently successful in policing and controlling vast imperial territories cheaply and effectively, to most observers aviation promised not only connectivity and internationality, but military domination too. Thus for internationalists it came to represent the only weapon capable of giving international organization the teeth required to build legitimacy, enforce international law, and police arms control.

This chapter explores the role science and technology played in ideas and writings on international relations between 1920 and 1950. The chapter highlights the pervasiveness of notions such as the technically driven global integration, the 'machine age', 'scientific warfare', and 'cultural lag' in the interwar years, and argues that internationalist engagement with science and technology was broader and deeper than historians have hitherto appreciated. It contextualizes these motifs within the international politics of their time, and shows how they traversed the Second World War, changed but still intact, into the postwar years, where they were incorporated into new of theories of international relations (dealing with, for example, atomic weapons).

Chapter Five explores planning, debates, and rhetoric about postwar civil aviation during the Second World War in Britain and the United States. As well as public rhetoric, it focuses on discussions at the 1944 Chicago conference on international aviation, and in state committees and internationalist organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations (in the USA) and Chatham House (in Britain). The internationalism surrounding aviation was powerful enough, it argues, to manifest in a wide variety of visions for postwar aviation. This internationalism was not monolithic: the chapter emphasizes its fractured and contested nature by exploring the intermingling of political, commercial, and national interests within differing internationalist proposals. Although in both countries internationalists continued to see the aeroplane as a globalizing machine of prosperity, their proposals were also designed to safeguard national commercial interests. In Britain, a postwar aerial regime managed by a powerful international organization (the Labour Party’s policy pamphlet on the subject was titled 'Wings for Peace') was to safeguard British aviation and forestall the spread of US aviation around the world. In the United States, on the other hand, most internationalists joined state officials and the aviation industry in a consensus that global nature of aviation necessitated minimal regulation, a freedom of the air.