technology and culture Book Reviews 973 and concludes the section with a notable essay on aeronautical technology and aerospace culture. “Part 4: Civilian and Military Remote Sensing and Reconnaissance” is introduced by Fries with a primer on “sky spies” for hot peaces and cold wars. The first focal paper is by Pamela Mack, based on what became her Viewing the Earth: The Social Construction of the Landsat Satellite System (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). The second is by William E. Burrows, based on two of his works: Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security (New York, 1987) and Exploring Space: Voyages in the Solar System and Beyond (New York, 1990). Commentary by Jeffrey T. Richelson, author of four recent books on espionage and intelligence from space surveillance systems, concludes this section and the book with reminders of military versus civilian rivalries, purposes, uses, secrets, and proliferations. Thus, this anthology ends, without index or any back matter, with a whimper rather than a bang. Its small type, frequent typos, and lack of any illustrations make one wonder why it took four years to publish. So much has happened in the meantime, both in publications and in world events, that perhaps a videotape of those proceedings at the NASM back in 1987 might have been a better means of informa tion storage and retrieval. Loyd S. Swenson Dr. Swenson professes history of science and technology at the University of Houston and was a contract historian at NASA’sJohnson Space Center from 1963 to 1973, where he led the production of program histories for projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. He has published several books on Einsteiniana and most recently has undertaken studies in microhistory and macrohistory. The Origins of SDI, 1944—1983. By Donald R. Baucom. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992. Pp. xix + 276; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95. The relationship of high technology to warfare is a perennial interest of policy planners, military strategists, and the defense industry, but it has attracted comparatively little interest among historians of technology. Radar has yet to find its historian, and the history of nuclear weapons has only begun to be written. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was founded on a presump tion that the United States could make an end run around the Soviet Union by relying on high technology to overcome the strategic advantage supposedly conferred on that nation by its possession of greater numbers of land-based nuclear weapons. President Ronald Reagan invoked the Manhattan Project as a model of the kind of effort he envisioned to restore the balance. The official history of the origins of that call to arms has appeared only a few years after the official history of the Manhattan Engineer District and will perhaps 974 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE give comfort to those who find that the response to Reagan’s challenge has been adequate. Donald Baucom, the historian of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, believes that Reagan’s de cision to pursue strategic defense technologies was a wise one, and he seeks to explain its political, military, and technological roots. In so doing, he apparently relies heavily on interviews with those individu als who helped influence Reagan to make the decision, for example, Edward Teller, Admiral James D. Watkins, and Marshall Hunter, the Lockheed engineer who inspired official Washington with hopes of high-energy laser weapons in space. Because he has listened primarily to the advocates of strategic defense, however, Baucom tends to slight the arguments of the opponents. This tendency extends to his history of the technologies which contributed to the Strategic Defense Initiative. The antiballisticmissile system developed in the United States in the 1960s, SAFE GUARD, was defeated primarily because it symbolized the Vietnam war, Baucom maintains, not because of its strategic or technological shortcomings. Similarly, Baucom takes an optimistic view of the power of high-energy laser weapons, particle-beam weapons, and other technologies tbat were cobbled together in SDI. One example can be seen in Baucom’s treatment of “Excalibur,” the X-ray laser weapon proposed by Edward Teller and Lowell Wood of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Baucom holds that it “was demonstrated in principle through experiments con ducted by...