Quote:Margaret Mead is well-known for her studies about sexual attitudes in the South Pacific. So RAND might have seemed like an odd fit for this cultural anthropologist.

But during World War II, Mead successfully lobbied the government to include anthropologists in the war effort to help understand enemies and allies. She began using anthropological techniques to characterize entire civilizations from afar. After the war, she and her husband had already written “national character” studies of Americans and Britons. At RAND from 1948 to 1950, she turned to the USSR.

To accomplish what she called “culture cracking,” Mead looked to Russian emigres, books, journals, archives, and films for answers since the Soviet Union was inaccessible. The result, Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Problems of Soviet Character, examines the discrepancy between Bolshevik ideals and Soviet reality. It ends with Mead predicting the USSR's future strengths as well as weaknesses that the United States might exploit.

The study met with mixed reviews. “The study is blood chilling and strips bare our chiefest enemy,” the Omaha World-Herald breathlessly reported. Another reviewer wrote: “Europeans have their views about the American habit of putting one's legs on tables, about American admiration for Coca-Cola and chewing gum … But nobody would consider these features part of a serious study of the ‘traditional American character.’”

Mead soon moved on from conducting national character studies to becoming a national character herself, advocating for women's rights, more sexual freedom, better race relations, and solutions to pollution and world hunger.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world,” Mead is famously quoted as saying. “Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

— Melissa Bauman

Sources: “Mead and the Trajectory of Anthropology in the United States” by Ian Jarvie; The New York Times; The Russian Review; Encyclopedia Britannica; and RAND archives.

Quote:The U.S. Is Paying Billions to Russia’s Nuclear Agency. Here’s Why.

Nuclear power companies rely on cheap enriched uranium made in Russia. That geopolitical dilemma is intensifying as climate change underscores the need for emissions-free energy.

In a cavernous, Pentagon-sized facility nestled in an Appalachian valley, thousands upon thousands of empty holes line the bare concrete floor.
A mere 16 of them house the spindly, 30-foot-tall centrifuges that enrich uranium, converting it into the key ingredient that fuels nuclear power plants. And for now, they are dormant.

But if each hole housed a working centrifuge, the facility could get the United States out of a predicament that has implications for both the war in Ukraine and for America’s transition away from burning fossil fuels. Today, American companies are paying around $1 billion a year to Russia’s state-owned nuclear agency to buy the fuel that generates more than half of the United States’ emissions-free energy.

It is one of the most significant remaining flows of money from the United States to Russia, and it continues despite strenuous efforts among U.S. allies to sever economic ties with Moscow. The enriched uranium payments are made to subsidiaries of Rosatom, which in turn is closely intertwined with Russia’s military apparatus.

...

One American company, TerraPower, which was founded by Bill Gates, has had to delay the opening of what could be the United States’ first new-age nuclear plant by at least two years in part because it has pledged to not use Russian enriched uranium.

TerraPower’s facility will be built on the site of a coal-burning plant in remote Kemmerer, Wyo., to be decommissioned in 2025. TerraPower has promised jobs and retraining for all the coal plant’s workers. But the delays have left some in Kemmerer with doubts.