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

In The Final Frontier, Dominick Jenkins considers the relationship between science, technology, and warfare. He focuses on the development of chemical weapons and the rise of air power during World War I, especially in the United States, and implicitly and explicitly extends his analysis to the present. This is timely, given the Bush administration's employment of a fearsome arsenal of killing technologies abroad.

While the American homeland remained insulated from the technological horrors of World War I, military and industrial leaders joined with scientists to create an arsenal far more lethal than anything actually unleashed in Europe. By 1918, one in four U.S. artillery shells contained poison gas. Thirty universities were involved in research on such weapons, and Jenkins suggests that this close relationship laid the groundwork for the development of nuclear weapons during World War II.

The United States of course remains the only nation to have used nuclear weapons, more recently subsumed under the rubric of "weapons of mass destruction," which includes chemical and biological weapons. Jenkins makes a persuasive case that the U.S. has pursued WMDs for most of a century, and pursued them more avidly than any other nation. He discusses the formation of new institutions to ensure America's technological leadership in every realm, such as the National Research Council during World War I. Even though he overstates the power and influence of the NRC, it was an important forerunner of institutions that arose during World War II and the cold war. And his point is clear that, just as the partisans of chemical weapons ignored their potential ramifications, so, too, the supporters of new nuclear weapons ignored warnings of the consequences of actually using them—an arms race, fear of surprise attack, waste of human resources, global instability.

Jenkins also describes the evolution of the belief that the United States has a special mission to defend civilization against infidels and evildoers, a belief based on the nation's supposed close relationship to God. This belief first became prominent at the end of the nineteenth century, and scientists eventually argued that support of their research contributed to successful pursuit of this special mission. This was a world of "we" and "they," with "we" being civilized nations and "they" being evil. At the end of the cold war, there emerged new categories of "rogue nations" and "outlaw" states that seek or have actually acquired chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. These threats to American hegemony have been responsible to the massive infusion of funds into research.

In part 2 of The Final Frontier Jenkins turns to doctrines aimed at keeping dissidents in their place—specifically dissident workers, socialists, and African Americans—and related technologies, such as tear gas. This part of the book is not fully integrated with the first part, and yet Jenkins does advance his aim of placing American pursuit of WMDs under critical scrutiny. The tone is polemical, but, given the dire international situation in 2004, warranted. The Bush administration has ignored, withdrawn from, or abrogated treaties regulating chemical and biological weapons, as well as ballistic missiles. Jenkins's book serves as a call to resist the unilateralism of U.S. foreign policy and the closed-minded and costly pursuit of technological advantage as some kind of manifest destiny.