Stephanie Cooke . In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age . New York : Bloomsbury . 2009 . Pp. 488. $27.00.

Abstract

As Stephanie Cooke notes early in her invigorating book, “The civilian nuclear enterprise is more politicized than any other industry, even oil, because of its close link to nuclear weapons” (p. 5). This is an observation worth thinking about. Immediately after World War II, the hope for civilian nuclear power—energy “too cheap to meter,” in the words of Lewis Strauss, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)—promised both bounty and redemption for American scientists and politicians. Yet this vision of a utopian future was but the outer surface, masking the vast archipelago of sites involved in nuclear weapons production. The AEC mostly made bombs, but it did not talk about that part much. Historians have sniffed out the military side of the story, and the historiography of nuclear weapons has (pardon the pun) mushroomed in recent years. Yet nuclear power, the civilian face of the military juggernaut, has not received comparable attention. Cooke's great merit is to take a journalist's trained eye (she has covered the industry for almost thirty years) to the history of nuclear matters with power generation front and center. Instead of nuclear energy being tacked onto a history of weapons, the weaponry is subordinated here to a history of power generation. All of the usual stops of the American weapons narrative are here: the Manhattan Project, testing in the South Pacific, the Cuban Missile Crisis. But we also get Atoms for Peace, Three Mile Island, Yucca Mountain, and a worldwide tour of nuclear power: Soviet (with Chernobyl); British (with Windscale); Israeli, Indian, and Pakistani (with bombs); and Iran's ventures into the dark nucleus of uranium and plutonium atoms.