Table Of ContentNuclear Rites
Nuclear Rites
A Weapons Laboratory
at the End of the Cold War
Hugh Gusterson
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press
London, England
First Paperback Printing 1998
Copyright© 1996 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gusterson, Hugh.
Nuclear rites : a weapons laboratory at the end of the Cold War I
Hugh Gusterson.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN o-520-2 1373-4 (pbk: alk. paper)
1. Nuclear weapons-Research-Social aspects-California
Livermore. 2. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory-Employees.
3· Antinuclear movement-Social aspects. I. Title.
U264+C2G87 1996
306.2'7-dc2o
Printed in the United States of America
as
10 09 o8 07 o6 04
12 II IO 9 8 7 6 5 4
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z3948-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence ofP aper). @J
To Lynn and Joan, my family in Livermore
CONTENTS
PREFACE I ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I Xttt
A NOTE ON NAMES I XVtt
I. Introduction I I
2. Beginnings I I 5
3· Becoming a Weapons Scientist I 38
4· Secrecy I 68
5· Bodies and Machines I IOI
6. Testing, Testing, Testing I IJI
7· Crisis I r65
8. A Different Reality I rgi
9· Conclusion: The End of an Era? I 219
Postscript I 232
Comments on the Text I 236
NOTES I 25f
BIBLIOGRAPHY I 291
INDEX I 345
PREFACE
I am often asked why an anthropologist would study a nuclear weapons
laboratory. The risk of being labeled deviant by colleagues in anthropology
and irrelevant by arms control specialists is high, and the difficulties in
carrying out fieldwork are substantial: nuclear weapons scientists are very
busy people who do not suffer fools gladly; because their work is top secret,
most of their daily life is inaccessible to participant observation, tradi
tionally the cultural anthropologist's principal research technique; and
their work is not only virtually impossible to observe but also, for the
person lacking several years training in physics, virtually impossible to
understand.
Despite these obstacles, I chose to do an ethnographic study of a nuclear
weapons laboratory for three reasons. First, I believe the American public
debate on defense policy in general-and on nuclear weapons policy in
particular-has been sorely in need of a cultural perspective. Discussions
have hitherto been dominated by scientists, political scientists, and poli
ticians, who construe defense policy questions as problems that; like those
in mathematics, have one correct answer. I believe that policy problems
are rarely like math problems, and my own interest is less in finding the
one true answer to the conundrums of nuclear policy than in understand
ing how people become so profoundly convinced that their answer is the
only one. It is my belief that if more people looked at defense policy in this
light, our public discussions might be more generous and imaginative.
Second, I believe that it is important to invigorate and extend anthro
pology as a discipline by conducting ethnographic studies of institutions
ix
x PREFACE
of power in the West and, in particular, by developing a cultural analysis
of Western science. If the first wave of anthropologists in the early twen
tieth century documented the lifeways of "traditional" peoples whose
cultures were rapidly disappearing and the second wave documented the
effects of colonialism and the struggle for decolonization after World War
II, the third wave must investigate the functioning of power and the flux
of identities within an integrated global system at the end of the second
millennium. We now live in a world where money, people, and ideas flow
liberally across local and national boundaries and where our lives are
profoundly affected by the practices of multinational corporations, sci
entific laboratories, and television studios. This does not mean that an
thropologists should abandon their traditional objects of study; rather, it
means they should extend them, by adding such people as bond traders,
bureaucrats, biologists, migrant factory workers, tourists, airline atten
dants, and soap opera fans to the anthropological archive of shamans,
traders, nomads, and peasants.
This study is part of an emergent genre in the anthropological literature
of investigations of powerful institutions and of fundamental political
conflicts in the West.1 Traditionally, ethnographic studies in Western
settings have been quite peripheral in anthropology: they have often been
excluded from anthropology's list of its own classics; they have tended to
focus on marginal, relatively powerless populations, such as ghetto dwell
ers, ethnic minorities, or hippies; and they have often been carried out
somewhat casually in later life by anthropologists whose primary training
and fieldwork were in entirely different culture areas. This is changing as
traditional foreign fieldwork sites dry up, as the population of practicing
anthropologists becomes more demographically diverse, and as anthro
pologists reflect critically on their historical fascination with the exotically
primitive and the socially marginal. More anthropologists now accept the
importance of subjecting Western institutions, particularly powerful ones
that deeply affect the lives of millions of people, to sustained and rigorous
anthropological scrutiny.
One powerful Western institution that is particularly understudied by
anthropologists is science.2 This is because scientists are a relatively in
accessible population in our society and because in Western thought
science has tended to be construed as somehow outside culture, so that
shamans, for example, seemed to embody cultural knowledge while sci-
PREFACE xt
entists did not. But it is vitally important that ethnographic studies of
science be undertaken, because of the material and political power that
scientists now wield within Western society and because of the ideological
power of scientific and scientistic discourses in Western society. Tech
nology is omnipresent in our lives, literally from birth to death, and our
understanding of ourselves and our world in the West is profoundly shaped
by the tropes of science. It is important that we understand this under
standing.
Finally, I undertook this study for quite personal reasons. I began
following nuclear weapons issues closely in the early 19 8os when, as a
young man who had for some years feared that he would one day die in
a nuclear war, I joined the antinuclear movement in the San Francisco Bay
Area. It was at this time that I first met a weapons scientist from Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory, the nuclear weapons laboratory that is
the subject of this book. I was invited to represent the San Francisco
Nuclear Freeze Campaign in a debate with the scientist at a San Francisco
high school. I soon became much less interested in winning the debate than
in understanding what was obvious but, in my frame of mind at the time,
starding to me: the man I was debating believed passiqnately that his work,
far from being dangerous, was important and honorable. He was sick with
a cold and the liberal San Francisco teenagers in the class were being
unremittingly unkind, heckling him and even, at one point, accusing him
of a perverse sexual attraction to weaponry. Still he earnestly attempted to
explain why he believed it was important to develop new kinds of nuclear
weapons. Although the teenagers were on "my side," I found myself
wishing they would be quiet so I could hear what he had to say.3 It was
when I realized that I was more interested in understanding the scientist
than in arguing with him that I knew my career as an activist was ending,
and I began to feel the inexorable pull of the fieldwork I would eventually
do. Three years later, in 1987, I moved to Livermore to commence field
research among the weapons scientists.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The practice of anthropology would be impossible but for the openness
and generosity of the people we anthropologists study. Most of the nu
clear weapons scientists and antinuclear activists I interviewed had as
much to lose as to gain by talking to me, and I am enormously grateful to
them for their willingness to take the risk. I hope that they will find in this
book an unexpected but illuminating perspective on their lives. If it is, as
it should be, an unfamiliar perspective, I trust it will be thought-provok
ing rather than thoughdessly provocative. The appropriate style for cul
tural analysis lies somewhere between the bland and the offensive-a
zone that is not always wide. Space does not permit me to thank all the
people who helped me in the field individually, but some do deserve
special mention. In particular, I would like to thankJackie Cabasso, David
Dearborn, Hugh DeWitt, Alex Forman, Art Hudgins, Sun-Wouk Kang,
Marylia Kelley, Cynthia Nitta, Sue Olesen, Leslie Peeters, Tom Ramos,
Dennis Raunig, Elizabeth Selle Jones, Lynn and Joan Seppala, Septem
ber, Bob Several, Starhawk, David Solnit, Johana Thomson, and Bill
Zagotta.
Several people have been kind enough to comment on various drafts of
this book. Thanks go to my dissertation committee-Bart Bernstein,
Mary Pratt, Renata Rosaldo, and Sylvia Yanagisako-for supervising the
dissertation from which this book grew and for their skilled and compas
sionate guidance throughout my graduate student career. I also want to
extend special thanks to Lynn Eden: in addition to providing voluminous
written comments, she was kind enough to organize a special meeting in
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