The Final Frontier: America, Science, and Terror (review)

The Final Frontier mixes interesting ideas and insights with digressions which blur its focus. It raises important questions regarding the dilemmas posed by the conflicting imperatives of power and morality without resolving them in a balanced manner.

The final frontier is the geographical barrier which once protected the United States from destruction by its enemies. The rise of airpower, and the development of weapons of mass destruction have swept away that frontier. Jenkins's study is organized into three parts. Part 1 explores how America's increasing sense of vulnerability was exploited by advocates of high technology warfare to advance the special interests of scientists and military organizations (especially the chemical weapons promoters and the airmen). In part 2, the author argues that American imperialism, disguised as freedom abroad, was used by established elites to restrict freedom at home for blacks and other groups. In part 3, the author calls for a democratic alliance which will promote a "deep science movement" to direct technology and invention in more peaceful directions than in the past.

Jenkins constructs a master history which relies on selective memory, using selected events to make his case. He presents insights on the way in which chemical weapons advocates used the threat from the German dye industry as an argument for developing U.S. chemical warfare capability, on the effort to wed gas warfare to bomber strategy, on the relationship between research scientists and big business. His analysis touches on a major problem: the conflict between ethical and military imperatives, especially as exemplified by the momentum towards overkill in modern warfare and the danger posed when a democratic nation imitates its opponent's conduct.

Unfortunately, the book is seriously flawed by poor, often obscurantist writing, combined with an unwieldy organization, moving back and forth in time, using extraneous material and repetition.

The basic problem, however, is the author's use of case histories, which is weakened by his failure to give a balanced presentation. I cite two major cases as examples: the use of atomic weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki (pp. 5, 13, 270-73), and the Cold War as a manipulative game. The author argues that there was no military reason to use nuclear weapons over these Japanese cities: the government was seeking peace and the U.S. knew it. The only reason, therefore, was to intimidate the Russians and implicitly to threaten all governments who did not behave themselves in the future. To assert this theory is to ignore the uncertainty that surrounded the decision to use the bomb: the possibility that the war would drag on indefinitely even after the conquest of Japan, the fear that an invasion of the Home Islands would lead to horrendous casualties. The U.S. government had no assurance that the tentative Japanese moves towards surrender would succeed in overriding the Japanese military's fanatical resolution to resist to the end.

On the Cold War, the author makes a surprising assertion: "It is questionable that there was ever such a threat. To maintain their dominance over allies and to deny aspirations for greater liberty and democracy among their own populations, it served both superpowers to pretend they really were locked in global confrontation" (p. 79).

These cases highlight the underlying themes of the book: how the United States, seeking security against terror, became a terroristic and imperialist nation and how the U.S. government, business, industry, the military, and the technologists combined in a common endeavor which threatens democratic institutions.

The Final Frontier attempts to deal with an important problem: the conflict between morality and power in the waging of war. Unfortunately, the weaknesses of Jenkins's book vitiate the force of its argument. It remains one of those innumerable books in which the simplicities of theory triumph over the complexities of evidence.