People of the Bomb: Portraits of America's Nuclear Complex (review)

People of the Bomb is a collection of previously published journal articles and book chapters that date back to 1991. The eleven chapters plus a postscript cover a wide range of topics but are loosely held together by a few unifying themes. The main subject of the book is U.S. militarism during and after the Cold War; specifically, how the U.S. national security state attempts to control the consciousness or collective imagination of the American public to shape its view of the outside world. Through the power of language, a convenient reality is created that defines the country's challenges and threats and provides the rationale for its policies. A further purpose of this "manufactured consensus" is to keep the population pliant and unquestioning. Nuclear weapons and the language that surrounds them are essential parts of this process.

Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist and ethnographer by training, brought a fresh perspective to the field in his first book, Nuclear Rites: A Nuclear Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press,1996), an account of living among the nuclear weapon scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. That book incisively described the scientists' rites, rituals, beliefs, and values. In his new book, Gusterson draws on other scholarly disciplines and a few academically fashionable Parisian gurus, with a sprinkling of Marxist and feminist theory thrown in. The title of the book is slightly misleading, abetted by the unusual cover photograph. I was expecting portraits of people who work or worked at the main sites of "America's Nuclear Complex"—Hanford, Oak Ridge, Savannah River, Pantex, Rocky Flats—but that is not what I found.

The themes from Nuclear Rites are rehashed in several of the chapters here. Gusterson recounts his meeting with Sylvia, a Japanese-American weapon designer, whose aunt was at Hiroshima. She, like many of the scientists he encounters, does not fit his preconceived stereotype. Through her he learns how weapon scientists are formed. To be able to work on nuclear weapons requires resocialization and a new way of thinking. The central ideological axiom that must be instilled is that the weapons are necessary for deterrence and, if the United States remains strong, will never be used. In this subculture, nuclear tests become a rite of passage demonstrating expertise and control over weapons of such unimaginable power that they could, if used on a large scale, end most life on earth.

The quality of the chapters is a bit uneven. Some of the essays were written a decade or so ago, and the issues and topics discussed often seem dated. On the weaker side is one that recounts how Gusterson and a weapon designer watched a film on television about cyborgs. The essay includes such obtuse sentences as: "Thus, if I have a quarrel with Janice Radway's approach to the ethnography of reading, it is that articulating a fundamentally post-structuralist insight about the multipleness of the world with a structuralist sensibility, she assigns too much stability to her reader's responses, discerning in them a clearly consistent set of beliefs about the world that ultimately correlates with the social position of the readers" (pp. 59–60). Unfortunately, the book contains far too much of this kind of mumbo-jumbo.

Some of the stronger chapters examine the role of language in the rise of the United States to its status as the preeminent power in the post-1945 world. Gusterson aligns himself with a "critical security studies" perspective rather than the traditional realist perspective, which he says dominates international relations theory. The former school of thought examines how the national interest is socially constructed through the use of a dominant discourse. Gusterson cites as an example of "manufacturing consent" Dean Acheson's radio broadcast on 18 March 1949 that initially informed his American audience about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Gusterson critiques some of the experts on nuclear strategy and the...