Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War by Hugh Gusterson

Abstract

technology and culture Book Reviews 133 Attention very much centers on his policy concerns and their expres­ sion. This may reflect the book’s origin. In 1983 Francis X. Gannon began the project as a set ofessays on the retired congressman’s nuclear energy views. It evolved into a socalled authorized biography supported by a group ofclose associates and friends organized as the Holifield Book Associates. When Gan­ non suffered a fatal heart attack in late 1988, the associates sought a successor and found Richard W. Dyke. In 1989 Dyke published his dissertation as Mr. AtomicEnergy: Congressman Chet Holifield andAtomic Energy Affairs, 1945-1974 (Greenwood Press) and early the following year accepted the new commission. Finally published in 1996, Chet Holifield retains marks of its original purpose, part testimonial and still mostly a series of essays on various topics related to Holifield’s congressional views and positions. Considering the book an essay collection rather than a biography shifts the basis forjudgment without much changing the final grade. Some of its shortcomings are relatively minor, but others are more serious. Such lapses as “profuse time” (p. xiv), “credible and au­ thoritarian sources” (p. xvii), or “Cold War Warrior” (p. 74), for instance, may be merely amusing or annoying, but infelicity of lan­ guage verges on downright error in a sentence like: “Human beings receiving high levels of exposure could and did experience serious biological mutations” (p. 159) Interviews form the book’s backbone, fleshed out with research in manuscript collections; reference to published literature later than the 1980s appears very limited. Anec­ dote, mostly bland if not pointless, largely seems to displace analysis, with scarcely a hint that Holifield might ever have displayed flaws ofjudgment or character. Although uncritical and relentlessly com­ mitted to Holifield’s viewpoint, the discussion of individual topics, most of them on matters nuclear, may nonetheless reward the care­ ful reader with some useful details. Barton C. Hacker Dr. Hacker is the author of Elements of Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing, 1947-1974 (University of California Press, 1994) and other prizewinning history and fiction. Since 1992 he has been associated with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as historian and editor. NuclearRites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End ofthe Cold War. By Hugh Gusterson. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. xviii+351; illustrations, notes, bibliography, in­ dex. $39.95 (cloth). Hugh Gusterson’s Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War represents an important attempt by an anthropologist to understand the worldview of nuclear weapons scientists and anti­ 134 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE nuclear activists. Drawn to nuclear weapons production systems first as an antinuclear activist, Gusterson became fascinated with the question of how nuclear weapons designers maintain an image of themselves as good scientists and conscientious citizens while work­ ing on weapons of mass destruction. For historians of technology, Gusterson adds to our understand­ ing of the people who design technologies of mass destruction. In­ stead ofopening the black box ofthe weapons themselves, as Donald MacKenzie skillfully has done in his Inventing Accuracy, Gusterson examines the political and ethicaljustifications of the scientists, nu­ clear testing as a cultural ritual, and policy implications of this cul­ ture. This means that the book is short on the technical details that have filled many other official and technological accounts ofnuclear weapons design. However, it brings the people and institutions of the nuclear weapons complex into the foreground, something that few histories or sociological accounts of nuclear weapons have done successfully. The bulk of the book focuses on weapons scientists. As a preface to his analysis of the scientists, Gusterson presents a political history of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and of the eco­ nomic significance of the nuclear weapons industry for the city of Livermore, California. He then goes on to describe richly the texture of work life at the laboratory, from the secrecy that characterizes working at a site such as Livermore, to the socialization of newly hired scientists, to the ritual of nuclear testing, which celebrates and defines the elite community of weapons designers. In writing aboutweapons scientists, Gusterson strives to avoid...