Citizens against the MX: Public Languages in the Nuclear Age by Matthew Glass

Abstract

technologyand culture Book Reviews 633 the factors they weighed in decision making. Bereft of context, their decisions often seem the product of conspiracy. Related to these problems is the narrow focus of Gerber’s research in primary sources. She exploited recently declassified Hanford docu­ ments but did not carry her research into some important collections located elsewhere. She did not consult the records of the Manhattan Engineer District, the AEC, or the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which are in the custody of the National Archives. Surprisingly, she did not examine the papers of Washington senators Henry M. Jackson and Warren Magnuson and of Hanford health physicist Herbert M. Parker, which are available at the University of Washington. Although Gerber does not have to go into production reactor or fuel reprocessing technology in depth, she needs to display a firm grasp of one scientific topic—the health hazards of radiation. Unfortunately, she does not adequately treat uncertainties about the health effects of low radiation doses or relate them to Hanford radiation release decisions. Too often she fails to examine limitations of experimental results and relate them to activities at Hanford. For example, her discussions of research on the effect of reactor effluent on fish (p. 117) leave the impression that radioactivity was the sole cause of fish mortality when other causes were surely operating. Distressingly, she does not cite standard secondary works on radiation and its health effects, such as J. Newell Stannard, Radioactivity and Health: A History (National Techni­ cal Information Service, 1988). Gerber should, however, get credit for tackling a difficult and controversial topic, one which will challenge scholars for some time. Roger M. Anders Dr. Anders is a historian with the Department of Energy. He is the author of Forging the Atomic Shield: Excerptsfrom the Office Diary ofGordon E. Dean and is working on a study of the problems of commercial nuclear power. Citizens against the MX: Public Languages in the Nuclear Age. By Matthew Glass. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Pp. xxii+188; notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $29.95. Arguably one of the most remarkable things about the end of the Cold War has been the rapidity with which the outstanding issues and concerns of those days have receded into dim memory. The QuemoyMatsu crisis, over which the United States almost went to war in 1958, seems as remote and irrelevant today as the Punic Wars; even the SDI debate is beginning to have a dreamlike quality about it. Another seemingly life-and-death issue at the time, which will soon provoke only blank stares or nostalgic recollections, is the controversy that dogged the Carter administration over the MX missile; the tenwarhead behemoth that the air force hoped to deploy in the western 634 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE United States, thereby closing the “window of vulnerability” that supposedly left this country wide open to a Soviet surprise attack. Those old enough to remember a Russia before Gorbachev and perestroika will recall that the military proposed a number of diverse and increasingly bizarre “basing modes” to render the MX itself invulnerable to sneak attack—including firing the missile from airplanes, moving it around inside a hollowed-out mountain, and even making it part ofan elaborate bait-and-switch ruse played over virtually the entire western desert, officially dubbed Multiple Aim Points but inevitably known as the “shell game.” The fact thatJimmy Carter, who entered office talking about the abolition of nuclear weapons, ultimately chose the most expensive and disruptive basing option for the MX—the shell game—made the missile a kind of tangible symbol of the fecklessness of his presidency. Merci­ fully, Ronald Reagan—after unsuccessfully proposing yet another Rube Goldberg-like solution to the problem—put an end to the MX dilemma by agreeing to base the missile in existing intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos. In the first part of this book, Matthew Glass, a sociologist of the American West, tells the story of the unlikely alliance of ranchers, environmentalists, Native Americans, and church leaders who banded together to—in the words of one westerner—“drag the MX down by hand” and stop the air force from playing the shell game in their backyard...