Authors

Discussion

The different agendas that the Soviet satellites pursued in the mid-1960s have long been the subject of scholarly studies. Various state and individual actors used both Warsaw Pact structures as well as interbloc institutions to advance their own agendas. Scientists and intellectuals participated in different international forums to accomplish this. This article describes the history behind what the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), an organization formed in 1960 to allow individual-based interdisciplinary cooperation in space science, called “the CETI Project” in the mid-1960s. Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence or CETI is an underexplored topic in the history of the Cold War and science diplomacy, and is completely overlooked in the Prague Spring literature. CETI involved communication between Western and Soviet bloc states over the electromagnetic signals that could be used to communicate with extraterrestrials, employing new technologies from missiles and space exploration, at a time when nuclear proliferation augmented the threat of a conflagration. Eastern European countries possessed missiles that could carry nuclear warheads that the Soviet Union would provide. Missile guidance relied on knowledge and equipment from radio astronomy and astronautics. This article underscores the historiographical importance of CETI, given its implications for nuclear and space diplomacy.

Czechoslovakians led efforts in the mid-1960s “CETI Project” to gather scientists across the Iron Curtain to discuss interdisciplinary communication and contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. In June 1965, Rudolf Pešek proposed bringing East and West together at a symposium on “Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligences”—later changed into “Intelligence”—in Prague. He was an engineer and a leading member of the IAA. Even though the international symposium never occurred because of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the actions to enable it over the preceding three years show how CETI was intertwined with one of the most important events of the Cold War. The CETI symposium initiative offers a window into a series of liberal actions and liberalization policies known as the Prague Spring, which ended with the Soviet Union's invasion of the country. Addressing the understudied diplomacy in the IAA, the article illuminates how CETI’s history is grounded in the political specificities of Czechoslovakia between 1965 and 1968 in its international context.