The Neutron's Children: Nuclear Engineers and the Shaping of Identity by Sean F. Johnston (review)

The Neutron's Children: Nuclear Engineering and the Shaping of Identity takes on far more than the title would suggest. Sean Johnston's book describes the development of nuclear engineering in three different countries from World War II to the present. The book aims to uncover entire groups of nuclear engineers, researchers, and workers, starting with World War II. While social history has revolutionized almost every field of the human past, the history of the Manhattan Project is one of the great exceptions, with books churned out about top scientists (for example, J. Robert Oppenheimer) each year, and far less attention to the hundreds of thousands of engineers, technicians, and workers who made the effort's success possible. In the tradition of Thomas Hughes, Johnston examines nuclear efforts as a massive, complex human system, and not a series of disconnected scientific discoveries.

The Neutron's Children tells the parallel stories of nuclear engineering in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States to show the differences in approaches to nuclear design. Digging into archives, oral-history collections, and declassified documents, Johnston reconstructs the story of how DuPont's industrial and engineering muscle helped move the atomic bomb (particularly at Hanford, Washington) toward completion. He is an accomplished researcher, expertly piecing together a story based on limited documentation and oral-history evidence. In all three countries, World War II fostered the development of nuclear engineers, whose perspective focused on practical production issues, working in the shadows of their more abstract physicist colleagues.

The trajectory of the postwar history of nuclear engineering is well told by Johnston. In 1945, it was not clear how information on atomic energy would be released nor who would develop new nuclear technology. In the United States, industrial engineers and academic scientists struggled for control, with physicists gaining and holding the public limelight. In Great Britain, training was conducted on the job, and many important figures in postwar reactor design lacked the formal advanced education held by those in the United States and Canada (p. 180). In all three countries, nuclear engineers' knowledge remained behind the walls of national laboratories for over a decade, until the 1955 Atoms for Peace conference brought the field into the global spotlight.

The book describes how emerging nuclear information became part of the training and educational process in each country. Reactor technology in particular was held closely by government laboratories in postwar America, with a few universities (namely, North Carolina State College [later University] and MIT) able to make inroads during the 1950s. Johnston examines the consequences of this state control as well, including the case of a nuclear scientist afraid to take a position in Canada for fear of accusations of atomic spying (p. 101).

Johnston also treats nuclear work as a subject of labor history, examining the efforts of unions in all three countries to build labor organizations devoted to specific atomic issues. He does a thorough job tracing the complex labor politics of the union issue, and is able to locate material to tell his story in even the most secretive contexts. Johnston adds material on nuclear safety as well, describing shortcomings in both worker and environmental protection.

The book's structure does not always help it tell its story. Johnston argues that his work will bring to light a previously submerged history, but in the early chapters (beginning in the nineteenth century), the stories of atomic scientists, particularly physicists, continue to crowd out those of the nuclear engineers and others he seeks to champion. But once the story reaches the 1940s, nuclear engineers take center stage, where they remain in the chapters covering the next three decades. A chapter on nuclear representations and a conclusion connecting past issues to the accident at Fukushima round out the volume, thus bringing it up to the present.

The author's style is clear, the chapters themselves are well-organized, and the social and...