# Merchants of Doubt [[Naomi Oreskes]] and Erik Conway's documentation of how a small group of politically connected Cold War physicists — Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, William Nierenberg, Robert Jastrow — ran serial doubt-manufacturing campaigns across four decades: tobacco, SDI, acid rain, the ozone hole, secondhand smoke, climate change. Same men, same think tanks, same playbook, different product. ## The Argument The strategy, lifted from the tobacco industry's internal memo ("Doubt is our product"), is to keep a settled question *appearing* open: fund contrarian science, demand impossible certainty, exploit journalistic balance norms, and frame regulation as the road to socialism. The scientists involved were not fringe cranks but elite insiders whose anticommunist market fundamentalism made defending industry indistinguishable, to them, from defending freedom. The book established **manufactured doubt** as the canonical model of corporate science denial. ## RWKB Relevance Foundational text for the vault's [[Disinformation]] cluster — the supply-side mechanics that the outrage-media demand side ([[The Outrage Industry]]) distributes. Direct lineage into climate-denial infrastructure and the broader think-tank doubt economy.