Hugh Gusterson

Nuclear futures: anticipatory knowledge, expert judgment, and the lack that cannot be filled

After the cold war the USA and other nuclear weapons states were forced by treaty to stop testing nuclear weapons. The end of testing has produced an irremediable lack, a fundamental instability, in nuclear weapons science. Some scientists have proposed to resolve this instability by deploying an untested but assumedly super-reliable nuclear weapon (the Reliable Replacement Warhead), while others have argued that this weapon would be less reliable than what it replaced. For the new warhead to be built, its backers will have to align geopolitical, environmental and technoscientific discourses about nuclear weapons. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Tall Tales and Deceptive Discourses

W EAPONS SYSTEMS, TREATIES, and strategies come to seem right (or wrong) in the context of the stories we tell ourselves about them. Social scientists and historians call these stories discourses. Sometimes new discourses (like our discourse on civil rights) originate from below and eventually gain enough credibility that they are coopted by the government. Other discourses (like the discourse on deterrence during the Cold War) originate within the government, and within the tight circle of think tanks that speaks to the government, and are then propagated outward through society by waves of speech-making and media dissemination. From time to time there are sharp historical breaks as new stories and propositions become accepted with startling suddenness. Senior officials in the Bush administration are now trying to create this kind of radical shift in our discourse about nuclear weapons. The Cold War saw the rise of an official discourse on nuclear weapons that is now looking more than a little tattered. Its chief assumptions were: that the genie having escaped the bottle in a dangerous world, nuclear weapons could not be abolished, and anyone who thought otherwise was naive or worse; that even though the two superpowers were inevitable rivals racing to improve their arsenals, they were rational enough to manage their competition in ways that would not cause a nuclear war; that the arms race could be channeled and disciplined, though not prevented, by arms control treaties; and that certain avenues of competition were destabilizing and should therefore be foreclosed by mutual agreement. These included a race to build defensive anti-missile systems and a race to put nuclear, anti-satellite, or anti-ballistic weapons in space. After the Cold War, this way of looking at the world began to look increasingly outmoded. The Clinton administration attempted to strike up some new discursive themes, but its attempts were undercut by their own half-heartedness. For example, the administration made some vague remarks about moving toward a world without nuclear weapons, but it failed to negotiate any new arms reductions and it proclaimed through its Nuclear Posture Review that the United States would rely on nuclear weapons for its security for the indefinite future. Similarly, Clinton administration officials said that they supported the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty only to sponsor research and development programs that pointed in the direction of its

Paranoid, Potbellied Stalinist Gets Nuclear Weapons

Mainstream American print media coverage of North Koreas nuclear weapons program has been deeply flawed, a reality that skews policy debates and confuses public perceptions. Even simple factual descriptions of the parties’ obligations under the 1994 Agreed Framework have often been inconsistent and partial, informing readers about North Koreas obligations more than U.S. obligations, and rarely acknowledging U.S. failures. The media repeated allegations about an illicit North Korean uranium enrichment program based largely on anonymous sources, who made what seem now to have been misleading statements. Journalists rely for comment on administration officials or members of Washington think tanks, while making little effort to gather opinions from academics, those on the left (as opposed to centrist liberals), or experts in Southeast Asia. Journalists also frequently present Kim Jong Il in ways that erase the Korean perspective on U.S.-Korean relations. Accurate, nuanced coverage of events on the Korean Peninsula is vital in producing an informed public and a policy-making process that is judicious, supple, and intelligent. This article concludes with various ways in which the media could better report on North Korea.

NIF-ty exercise machine

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is proposed to be build at Livermore as a project for large science which will support laboratory staff, provide tests for inertial fusion and energy research, and allow weapons effects testing. The author emphasizes the latter point, in that Department of Energy proposals for the project have consistently emphasized the weapons aspects of the project. He summarizes the history of the proposed program, and argues that the program can probably be argued against from many perspectives other than that it is a military expenditure. The author points out the possible conflict of this program with the non-proliferation treaty.

The assault on Los Alamos National Laboratory: A drama in three acts

Since the late 1990s, nuclear weapons scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory have faced an unanticipated threat to their work, from politicians and administrators whose reforms and management policies—enacted in the name of national security and efficiency—have substantially undermined the lab’s ability to function as an institution and to superintend the nuclear stockpile. Morale and productivity have suffered at Los Alamos—and at the nation’s other weapons lab, Lawrence Livermore. The institutional decline of Los Alamos has occurred in three distinct phases: beginning with an overreaction to the Chinese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee’s downloading of secret computer codes, exacerbated by the heavy-handed leadership of Admiral Pete Nanos, and continuing under new management by a for-profit company that focuses more on personal bonuses than on scientific achievement. The author writes that security lapses at Los Alamos are not, as media and government officials have portrayed them, the result of a culture of arrogance and carelessness. More likely, they are symptoms of structural flaws in the workplace, but it is easier to stereotype and scapegoat scientists than to address these structural problems.

LAB CULTURE: Taking RRW personally

The RRW Program will not close the growing generation gap among weapons designers.

Elites, Anthropology of

Elites have been little studied by anthropologists because of practical and temperamental barriers to fieldwork. Early work on elites (in Africa, Oceania, South Asia, and Latin America) situated them in the context of broader social wholes and emphasized the importance of kinship in defining and maintaining elites. Subsequent work highlighted the roles of colonialism and capitalism in creating new elites – based on access to capital, education, and bureaucratic perquisites – that challenged and hybridized with traditional elites. While bureaucratic industrial societies present themselves as meritocracies, elites devise strategies of heredity dependent on their privileged access to the educational system and cultural capital. Anthropologists have only recently become interested in ‘studying up’ in the US, having earlier ignored the public debate of the 1950s and 1960s on the alleged ‘power elite’ in the US. Some of the most striking new work on elites has been of scientists, bankers, journalists, evangelists, psychiatrists, and development bureaucrats. Such work often requires innovative approaches to fieldwork.

Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War

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