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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 450-452



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Building the Trident Network: A Study of the Enrollment of People, Knowledge, and Machines. By Maggie Mort. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. Pp. x+217. $32.95.

Maggie Mort's Building the Trident Network examines the adoption of the American Trident ballistic missile submarine system by Margaret Thatcher's Britain in the midst of the Conservative Party's effort to privatize the [End Page 450] nation's shipbuilding industry. Mort approaches the issue from the viewpoint of skilled shipyard labor interested in both defense and their own jobs. Through documents, the media, and oral histories, she very carefully followed the activities of the Barrow Alternative Employment Committee to illuminate the ways in which Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Ltd. [VSEL] and the Conservative government sought to "enroll" the workers in particular and the nation in general in the effort to build Trident as a necessary and seemingly inevitable next step in the defense of the United Kingdom.

As VSEL became the British analog of General Dynamics' Electric Boat Division, the shipyard labor force found itself caught up in the calculated development of the company's "core" business, Trident, during which management eliminated a number of promising commercial technologies in favor of a complete focus on the new submarine and its missile system. Mort's study eventually follows the workers into the large-scale layoffs that resulted when the cold war ended, and she brings the labor view to the fore—a perspective sadly lacking in other works on similar subjects. In addition, her use of the concept of enrollment provides a useful methodological tool for a close examination of the processes described above.

Nonetheless, Mort's heavy dependence on interviews and labor sources creates an imbalance in her study. The attempt to enroll the workers emerges clearly from the narrative, but the few oral histories do not give one the sense that she ever captured the view of Trident that prevailed within the huge labor force involved. In addition, Mort needed to do more interviews with the company leadership on the Trident vision, the core business issue, and the enrollment process. While harder to find, those in a position to know the uncensored view inside VSEL needed to answer some key questions, especially about the extent of the company's appreciation of commercially viable technologies and the limited Trident production run that was projected. Did management truly understand the potential of technologies like the Constant Speed Generator Drive? The reader sees VSEL's vision only through the company's propaganda of enrollment.

Mort also fails to pose an even more essential question. Did VSEL expect to build a future on a four-boat Vanguard production run? Did the government give VSEL reason to believe that, after the four SSBNs went to sea, more business would emerge, beyond refits and overhauls? Pursuing these interviews and textual sources, even with mixed success, would have permitted a much more complete picture. Two decades of experience suggests to this reviewer that unclassified sources adequate to this task have finally emerged in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

Another, and perhaps more profound, flaw in Mort's study lies in her poor understanding of the ballistic missile submarine, its mission, and its performance at sea. This problem recalls the errors in Mary Kaldor's 1981 study, Baroque Arsenal. Mort regularly drew on Kaldor's model of anachronistic [End Page 451] weapons systems that succeed politically because they seem the obvious, "high-tech" way to the future. In reality, she argues, they offered yesterday's deterrent and promised only economic dislocation and wasted resources.

With some systems this is true, but not with Trident. A careful reading of Kaldor's study reveals all of her basic operational assumptions about Trident to be erroneous, save for the reported physical dimensions of the boat. At the very least, this places the analyses of both Kaldor and Mort in question. One must know the acoustics, prescribed tactics, conventional offensive capability, and the fundamental...

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