TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Book Reviews 631 Leslie focuses and many others as well. In general, the more one highlights the development of high technology devices, the more obvious it appears that military R&D produced weapons-related rather than civilian goods. On another level, where basic science is concerned, it is hard to believe that important physical laws went undiscovered because of military distortion of scientific disciplines. Leslie admits that “no one can assert with any confidence exactly where a science and engineering driven by other assumptions and priorities would have taken us” (p. 256). This is a weak conclusion for a study which is the most detailed exposition to date of the distortionist critique. Leslie’s cases lend themselves to a more plausible interpretation. Postwar scientific support from the military distorted academic research chiefly by making it much larger than it otherwise would have been. Some of Leslie’s examples illustrate this point well. The Stanford aeronautical engineering program was on the verge of being shuttered until it developed a close working relationship with Lockheed Aircraft and rose to the top of its field. Had that research been in nonacademic settings—a distinct possibility—there might have been no aeronautical research at Stanford. More generally, when military support for aca demic research was scaled back after the 1970 Mansfield Amendment, it was not replaced by “science and engineering driven by other assump tions”; it was not replaced at all. What Leslie’s book in fact shows is how the military’s desire to develop critical technologies and utilize them in advanced weapons systems forced the development of challenging and fruitful scientific fields. Military necessitywas the mother ofinvention—and ofexciting science. One need not be an apologist for the military to appreciate this. One can also recognize how having a vested interest in the arms race warped the political and sometimes the scientific judgments of academic scientists. Coming to grips with the Cold War impact on American science thus remains a compelling topic. For anyone interested in this subject, Leslie’s eight case histories will long stand as indispensable contributions. But they by no means typified American science or American universities. Rather, the relationships he describes epitomized the workings of the military-industrial-academic complex at its greatest effectiveness. Roger L. Geiger Dr. Geiger is professor of higher education at Pennsylvania State University and editor of History ofHigherEducation Annul. His most recent book is Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II (New York, 1993). On the Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Nuclear Site. By Michele S. Gerber. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Pp. x+312; illustrations, glossary, notes, index. $35.00. On theHomeFront is Michele Gerber’s examination ofthe health hazards and environmental degradation that arose from the industrial-scale 632 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE production of plutonium for nuclear weapons at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), later Department of Energy (DOE), facility at Hanford, Washington. Covering the period from World War II to 1966, Gerber catalogues radiation releases to the atmosphere and the Colum bia River and the radionuclides and other toxic substances that con taminated Hanford soils. She bases her work on recently declassified records and is one of the few historians to study a nuclear weapons production facility. In an introduction, eight chapters, and epilogue, Gerber discusses wartime construction of this government-owned, contractor-operated facility; its postwar expansion; health and environmental problems springing from plutonium production; and growing knowledge about the health effects of radiation. Her chapters on airborne, river-borne, and groundwater contaminants form the heart of her work and add to our appreciation of the costs of waging the Cold War. In them, consistent with her purpose, she only delves sufficiently deeply into the technologies of production reactors and of reactor fuel reprocessing to enable readers to grasp their health hazards and environmental impact. Gerber opens her conclusions by noting “that the Hanford experi ence underscores a need to examine issues of secrecy and openness” (p. 214). Hanford should form a fruitful case study of problems that controlling nuclear technology poses to our democratic society. At Hanford, the government and its contractors had to protect...