Rosamund Johnston

Czechoslovakia and Austria were two of the main weapons producers of the Cold War, but they are rarely thought of among the conflict’s major players. At the IWM, Rosamund Johnston will work on two chapters of a collective monograph—Linking Arms: Central Europe’s Weapons Sector, 1954-1994. It retrospectively analyzes the perspectives of munitions workers, business and governing elites, and the general public to make three main claims. Firstly, that legacies predating the Cold War are crucial for understanding this conflict’s dynamics: historical continuities dating from the Austro-Hungarian period and World War II endured, with important effects on states’ industrial production and their abilities to navigate international arms markets. Secondly, that “smallness” gave actors representing Czechoslovakia and Austria in the arms trade room to maneuver and allowed them a relative lack of scrutiny not available to larger players. Thirdly, the work enriches transnational historiography with an argument for the transnational communities consolidated by conflict rather than peace.