Trained as a historian of science and technology, I study how technology shaped U.S. foreign relations, defense strategy, Western alliance dynamics, and superpower competition during the Cold War. My work draws from archives in Australia, Europe, New Zealand, the former Soviet Union, and the United States.

My 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), more popularly known as “Star Wars.” 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 details 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.

My second book project uses an infrastructural lens to explore how the nuclear age shaped the U.S. global information networks that served as the “connective tissue” of American power. I detail both the technological and political challenges associated with developing and maintaining information networks stretching from under the ocean and into outer space. This project also investigates the politics of basing U.S. communications sites, such as satellite ground stations, in the Global South to reveal how decolonization shaped this infrastructure.  An article drawn from this research can be accessed here.