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

One of the most-debated episodes in the history of the twentieth century is the development of the atomic bomb, its use against Japan, and the subsequent growth of the nuclear weapons laboratories at Livermore, California, and Los Alamos, New Mexico. Shrouded in secrecy, the work of these two institutions and the workers at them are often misunderstood by scholars.

People of the Bomb, the second book by anthropologist Hugh Gusterson centered primarily on Livermore, is a collection of essays published over a twelve-year span that detail his exploration of the place and its people. The book encompasses a variety of topics and theses, ranging from descriptions of Gusterson's research techniques to the Bourbakification (death of authorship) of science. More than anything else, these essays are a chronicle of how Gusterson has come to intellectually understand and describe a very difficult subject.

Studying something cloaked in secrecy is by definition more difficult than studying something out in the open. Although scholars cannot fully characterize the Livermore and Los Alamos environments, they try. Gusterson bases his attempt to do so on ethnographic research, a standard anthropological technique that uses the participant-observer method. One of the questions scholars often ask about nuclear scientists is whether or not they are really different than other people, and Gusterson follows in this tradition. He finds, to his surprise, diversity of thought, opinion, and lifestyle. Nuclear weapons scientists even go to church on Sundays. Historians, of course, have an analogous research method, oral history. Like oral history, ethnographic research is highly constrained. Researchers are, as Gusterson notes, "at the mercy of the human beings they study." This constraint is particularly acute when studying a topic protected by security laws; one can never be sure that the results are not skewed. When told, for example, that the colleagues of one of his interview subjects joked about feeding him disinformation, Gusterson had no way of proving whether or not it happened. Historians will find both this methodology and the manner in which conclusions are reached problematic.

Another of the major themes in this book is how newly hired scientists acquire knowledge of weapons design and operation. Since universities cannot teach this topic, the intimate details are held and taught by resident weaponeers. Gusterson believes that this ritualistic passing of knowledge serves the double purpose of teaching science and technology and indoctrinating new scientists in how to think about their work. Nuclear testing, for Gusterson, was just as important for its cultural impact on the thinking of its participants as it was in gaining new technical knowledge. While testing was, for many, a ritual of learning, its true importance was in the production of scientific and technological information. The laws of nature needed to be observed, recorded, and understood.

Unintentionally, Gusterson's discussion of how nuclear weapons knowledge is kept and disseminated issues a clarion call to policymakers and scientists to think about how such knowledge is codified and protected. He is correct in pointing out that knowledge which resides in the designers themselves is practical or hermeneutic, and therefore at risk. He also notes a similar issue with respect to stockpile stewardship. While the stated purpose of stockpile stewardship is to guarantee the safety and reliability of the nuclear arsenal, its unstated purpose is to maintain the reliability of scientific and technical judgment. Currently there is no way of validating the efficacy of this role.

People of the Bomb is a useful and productive book for students of nuclear history. It provides a good starting point for scholars interested in how scientists learn, think, and apply their knowledge. The problems highlighted by Gusterson—secrecy and its effects on scientific personnel, knowledge dissemination within a closed society, and stockpile stewardship—are all worthy of further investigation. Gusterson has lighted the path.