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John Krige
Reviews in American History, Volume 42, Number 3, September 2014,
pp. 505-512 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/rah.2014.0066
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rah/summary/v042/42.3.krige.html
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THE SOCIAL, ENVIRONMENTAL, AND PERSONAL
COSTS OF COLD WAR COMPETITION
John Krige
Kate Brown. Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and
American Plutonium Disasters. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
2013. x + 406 pp. Illustrations, list of archives and abbreviations, notes, and
index. $27.95.
Scott Kaufman. Project Plowshare: The Peaceful Use of Nuclear Explosives in
Cold War America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013. xiv + 295 pp.
Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.
Yanek Mieczkowski. Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World
Prestige. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013. viii + 358 pp. Illustrations,
notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.
Audra J. Wolfe. Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State
in Cold War America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. viii
+ 166 pp. Illustrations, suggested further reading, and index. $45.00 (cloth);
$19.95 (paper).
Scientific and technological competition between the superpowers was a defining characteristic of the Cold War. That competition was spurred by the quest
for supremacy in the production and refinement of nuclear weapons and the
delivery systems that sent them racing to their targets. Both had a “peaceful”
face: nuclear power drew on many of the resources used for nuclear weapons;
rockets that lofted payloads into outer space shared a pedigree with ballistic
missiles. These four books are all situated within this terrain, and alert us to
sometimes disastrous personal, social, and environmental consequences of the
pursuit of scientific and technological competition at any cost.
Yanek Mieczkowski is a man with a mission. That mission is to correct the
negative image of Dwight D. Eisenhower as a president who failed to assert
himself, notably after the launch of two earth-orbiting satellites by the Soviet
Union in fall 1957. Through an analysis of political and media responses to
Sputnik, Mieczkowski argues that the Sputnik moment serves as a unique
Reviews in American History 42 (2014) 505–512 © 2014 by Johns Hopkins University Press
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window into several defining characteristics of Eisenhower’s presidential
legacy: his enduring principles, his deep suspicion of federal spending, and his
measured approach to leadership. In concentrating on this moment in history,
Mieczkowski also argues for a reinterpretation of the U.S.–Soviet space race
that restores credit to Eisenhower’s oft-forgotten achievements and contributions to American pre-eminence.
To resuscitate Ike’s image as Cold War commander-in-chief, Mieczkowski
explains that his book “addresses the perception and reality of Eisenhower’s
leadership within three critical frameworks.” First is Sputnik’s testing of Ike’s
leadership; second, the creation of critical Cold War institutions; and, third, the
space race (pp. 2–5). The distinction between the perception and the reality of
Eisenhower’s leadership is an important one for the author. As Mieczkowski
explains, “The Sputnik ‘panic’ was not a public panic but a press and political
one. The media, the military, politicians, industry, and scientists formed a mass
of interests that exaggerated Sputnik’s importance, with the ultimate effect
of generating support for space and defense programs” (p. 25). Mieczkowski
argues that while Eisenhower’s public image took a beating after the Sputnik
launch, he ultimately remained true to his fiscally conservative principles
by refusing to react hastily to the launch by throwing money at numerous
“crash-projects.” Despite being vilified by the press and the Democratic Party,
Eisenhower’s slow and steady leadership prevailed, according to Mieczkowski.
In fact, 1957 was a “banner year” for missile development (p. 56). “The truth
was that Eisenhower’s administration guided one of the most energetic, fastmoving scientific programs in history . . . when his presidency ended, the
United States had gone from having no large rockets or a measurable space
program to having IRBMs, ICBMs, and space satellites” (p. 285).
Mieczkoski follows Walter A. McDougall (The Heavens and the Earth: A
Political History of the Space Age, 1985) in emphasizing the importance Eisenhower attached to surveillance from space over the exploitation of the conquest of space for purposes of national prestige (p. 35). While Kennedy and
the Democratic Party in general proved much more successful at capturing
public enthusiasm for space and in capitalizing on the prestige value of space
exploits in the context of the Cold War competition, Eisenhower failed to see
beyond his narrowly conceived goal of national security. Mieczkowski argues:
“In the international arena, prestige translated to power; it was political and
diplomatic currency, yet Eisenhower dismissed one means at his disposal—the
space race—to enhance America’s cold war standing” (p. 6). The Kennedy and
Johnson Space Centers stand as monuments to Eisenhower’s failure to grasp
this crucial point, and his successors are credited with America’s success in
space. Mieczkowski insists that Eisenhower’s role deserves more credit than
it gets. He also reminds his readers that Kennedy’s success in his standoff
with Khrushchev in the Cuban missile crisis owed much to his predeces-
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507
sor’s foresight. The U-2 spy plane, the Polaris Missile, and U.S. superiority
in ICBMs were all technological advantages established before Kennedy’s
administration. Mieczkowski argues: “Although critics assailed Eisenhower
for retarding rocket development and lapsing in national security, a year and
a half after he left office, the United States scored a diplomatic victory that
relied on technologies he had fostered” (p. 207).
Every president inherits the state of the nation bequeathed him by his
predecessor, warts and all. His skill lies in mobilizing existing capabilities
and developing new ones to meet new needs. Mieczkowski’s special pleading for Eisenhower is irritating and insulting to his subject, a trap he falls
into because he takes public hysteria and political opportunism as his target.
This is obviously a shaky foundation on which to build anything but counterpropaganda. A serious historical evaluation of Eisenhower’s presidency must
recognize the contradictions that bedeviled a man who could both watch over
a massive buildup of the country’s nuclear arsenal and criticize the emergence
of a military-industrial complex, who was assailed for failing to protect national security when in fact he had gone to extreme lengths to build a massive
retaliatory force, and who struggled to balance a billowing federal budget
that funded schools and hospitals as well as battleships. The fascination of
Eisenhower lies in his struggle to meld his traditional Republican values with
a totally new challenge: the need to invent means to secure the nation against
communism at the dawn of the nuclear and space ages.
Scott Kaufman’s analysis of Project Plowshare is a comprehensive history of
the use of underground nuclear explosions to excavate harbors, build canals,
release trapped oil and gas (rather like fracking today), create caverns to store
gas, and so on. It was one of the more extravagant applications of the peaceful
atom, actively promoted by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and
above all by scientists Edward Teller and AEC Chairman Glenn Seaborg. Teller’s
presence is not coincidental: as father of the hydrogen bomb, he was convinced
that by detonating such weapons under carefully controlled conditions one
could contain the radiation released by a peaceful nuclear explosion (PNE)
to acceptable levels—and could maintain superiority in this technical domain
over the Soviets. Kaufman’s history covers the entire trajectory of Plowshare,
project by project, from its inception in the late 1950s to its demise in the late
1970s. It never met the hopes of its advocates for a variety of reasons: funding
was always tight, local opposition was often intense, commercial applications
in mining were usually risky and unprofitable, and international agreements
hampered progress. Let the reader be warned though: Kaufman writes as
though PNEs were the centerpiece of Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program.
They were not: those were nuclear reactors for research and power—though
you would not know that from this book.
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Kaufman’s analysis confirms that, rather than seeking ceaseless confrontation with the Soviets, senior American officials went out of their way in the
1960s to secure Soviet consent on international treaties containing nuclear
proliferation. Indeed, one of the single biggest obstacles to the Plowshare
program was the fear that it might provoke the Soviets to walk away from
the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) of 1963 and the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty (NPT) of 1968. The former allowed for underground tests and accepted
that sometimes a certain amount of radiation would be released in the air. Its
key requirement was that such radiation should not leave the territory of the
state where the explosion took place (p. 110). Ploughshare’s excavations were
expected to respect these constraints, even if it was known that the Soviets
frequently conducted underground explosions that did not. The two sides never
managed to come to an agreement on how to interpret the LTBT, and Moscow
never seems to have been severely criticized for its infractions. Instead the
AEC and the proponents of Plowshare found themselves frustrated time and
again by a narrow interpretation of the LTBT in Washington that was used to
put a halt to their plans. The same thing happened with the NPT: a scheme
to use a PNE to excavate a harbor in Australia ran into difficulty because
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was reluctant to conduct a PNE (as
allowed for in Article V of the NPT) in a country like Australia until it had
signed and ratified the Treaty—a strict interpretation of the NPT’s provisions
(p. 187). Containing proliferation and so securing the nuclear weapons status
quo repeatedly trumped the case made for a PNE.
The arrogance (or “hubris,” as Kaufman calls it) of the AEC and its scientific
proponents seems to have known no bounds. Underground explosions conducted inside the confines of the Nevada Test Site area were free from public
scrutiny and created a mindset that was totally unprepared for the hostility to
AEC plans in more public areas. The dream of excavating a harbor in Alaska
or in Australia, or of cutting a sea-level isthmian canal in Panama to connect
the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, foundered on local opposition. This opposition was often led and articulated by scientists in non-nuclear fields. They
did not simply distrust the AEC’s reassurances about the low risk of radiation
released by the PNE; they also produced what would later be called environmental impact statements detailing the potential damage to fauna, flora, and
human populations who stood to be harmed. The AEC liked to say that they
planned their activities for areas that were sparsely populated; in fact, they
were often home to disempowered native communities that relied entirely
on the environment for their survival, be it in the Arctic or in Australia. The
AEC’s ham-fisted efforts to cope with these criticisms and its almost-blind
faith in all things nuclear as being the bearers of progress and modernity did
little to help the cause of Plowshare’s defenders before an increasingly fearful
public and a skeptical non-nuclear scientific community.
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509
The environmental damage caused by PNEs haunted Plowshare from the
outset and generated coalitions of opponents against them. Indeed Kaufman
agrees with Barry Commoner and Edward Teller (p. 70) that the roots of the
environmental movement lie in the sensitivity to radioactive fallout caused
by activities like PNEs that amplified the impact of Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring. There is doubtless some truth in this, although it does seem that,
by the late 1960s, the AEC had succeeded in reducing radioactive materials
released during underground PNEs to extremely low and safe levels. Fear
of fallout might have helped catalyze environmental concerns, but it did not
sustain the movement.
The controversies surrounding the Plowshare program provide an entry
point to Audra Wolfe’s survey of the relationship between science, technology,
and the state in the Cold War. Her book, intended as an introductory synthesis
rather than a comprehensive account of that relationship, uses key episodes,
anecdotes, and individuals to illustrate the “fundamental characteristic” of Cold
War science in America—namely, “the central role that the scientific enterprise
came to play in the maintenance of the nation state” (p. 6), typically the AEC.
This role was consolidated along with the largest expansion of government
in U.S. history between the New Deal and the 1970s, and it was subject to the
same social forces that inspired anticommunist witch-hunts in the 1950s and
anti-Vietnam protests in the 1960s. Similarly, the broad social consensus that
welded Americans together in the name of national security in the ‘50s and
early ‘60s infused the scientific enterprise and secured its credibility. When
that consensus began to unravel, so too did trust in the institutions of science.
Wolfe describes how the authority of science began to wane in the 1960s as
the prevailing structures of power and the dominance of the military-industrial
complex came under public scrutiny. Faith in social science to build the Great
Society foundered on race riots in several American cities (chapter five). Attempts to “modernize” developing countries using theories of economic growth
and demographic transition, along with robust interventions in agriculture
and family planning, lost credibility by failing to take account of local and
national aspirations (chapter four). The role that some major universities played
in developing sophisticated weapons for use in Vietnam challenged science’s
claim to be objective and value-neutral, precipitated increased oversight of
defense research-and-development contracts, and forced research activities
tightly linked to military objectives off campuses.
The national security state began to withdraw as a patron of science in the
1970s; corporations (including defense contractors) took up the slack. At the
same time, the promise of commercializing cutting-edge research in biotechnology and biomedicine, made possible in part by the success of the human
genome project, breathed life into scientific fields that had been overshadowed
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by state patronage for nuclear and space activities in the early Cold War. The
Bayh-Dole Act and other similar measures accelerated the trend to the commercialization of science in the 1980s. They were supplemented by a major
new influx of federal funds during the Reagan administration in the name of
developing a space-based missile defense system to ward off threats from the
“evil empire” (the Strategic Defense Initiative).
Wolfe’s book provides a valuable overview of some of the main trends in
the state/science relationship in the United States since 1945. It is unusual in
dealing with the effects of Cold War priorities on both the natural and the
social sciences. Its brief illustrative case studies are always interesting, though
sometimes they sacrifice precision in the name of brevity. Wolfe’s concept
of what constitutes space (starting on p. 90) is remarkably elastic, and she
is wrong to imply that Kennedy and Johnson were the first to pay as much
attention to the image of American science and technology as to its products.
Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program blazed the trail in that regard.
And today? The collapse of Soviet communism, Wolfe tells us in her brief
epilogue, “stripped the American scientific community of much of the justification for its existence” (p. 135). Scientific agendas are being set by the quest for
patentable research and by contractors who plug into “congressional enthusiasm for pork barrel projects and high-tech weaponry,” while the academic
community drifts in limbo without clear domestic or foreign-policy goals
(p. 138). These claims reveal Wolfe’s allegiance to an ideal vision of science,
notwithstanding her claims to the contrary—a vision that holds that socially
useful research is incompatible with market demand or military patronage.
The fact of the matter is that support for American science and technology
after World War II has always been driven by the quest for American economic
and military superiority, themselves part of the quest for global leadership.
Today the structure of patronage may have changed, along with the external
threats, but the overall goals are steadfastly the same. Scientists and engineers
are just as able to rise to the new challenges posed by the war on terror and
by the economic power of the People’s Republic of China as they were to the
old dangers.
“Before Chernobyl and Fukushima came Hanford and Maiak” writes Kate
Brown (p. 9) in her beautifully written, richly documented history of two of the
most polluted regions on the globe: the major plutonium production plants on
the Columbia River in Washington State and in the southern Urals in Russia.
Her narrative follows four successive moments from a comparative perspective. Parts one and two describe the construction of the plants themselves
and the surrounding towns (the “village” of Richland and the “socialist city”
of Ozersk) that first housed the managers, workers, and their families in the
1940s. In part three, we learn of their emergence into what she calls “zones of
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511
immunity” during which plant managers, spurred by the need to fuel their
nations’ weapons complexes, produced tons of plutonium while running up
budgets, embezzling funds, papering over accidents, and irreversibly and
massively polluting the environment with little or no opposition from the
local citizenry. As she describes in part four, the Chernobyl accident in 1986
“blew the lid off the plants’ security regimes [whereupon] downwind and
downstream neighbors began to attribute the occurrence of chronic illnesses
and high rates of birth defects, infertility, and cancers in their communities
to the plutonium plants” (p. 7).
Brown’s concept of plutopia is intended to capture the singular contradiction between the perception held by Hanford and Maiak workers of their
towns as islands of security, enhanced social infrastructure, and consumer
comforts—while they were, simultaneously, living in a sea of radioactive pollution and waste that not only made their jobs risky, but also impacted the air
they breathed, the water they drank, and the food they ate. By building cities
that benefited from massive state subsidies and controlling access to them, the
national security states on both sides of the iron curtain basically purchased
the cooperation of those who lived in them. Convinced that they were living
the American dream or the Communist utopia, the citizens of Richland and
Ozerk repressed the dangers that surrounded them, denying the nightmarish
images of deformed births and disfigured bodies.
The symmetry in the two cases is indicative of what was at stake for both
of the superpowers. It is not simply that both wanted nuclear weapons. Because they were in an arms race, they felt limited to persisting—in spite of
the dangers—with production techniques that were known to work, for fear
of falling dangerously behind their rivals. Other less destructive enrichment
technologies were conceivable even if not yet feasible (such as the gas centrifuge). National security interests prevented devoting scarce resources to novel
technologies, persisting rather with plutonium extraction and turning a blind
eye to its environmental and health hazards.
While it seems stunning, with hindsight, that people in both Richland and
Ozerk were willing to put their health and that of their children at risk to secure
not only their jobs but their relatively comfortable lifestyles, one must realize
that it took quite some time to provide robust scientific evidence correlating
cancer and a variety of other debilitating human ailments with radiation
exposure. The systematic collection of longitudinal data on targeted human
populations in and around the plutonium cities was just not done. Even today,
as Brown puts it, “despite decades of practice, researchers still do not have
tools sensitive enough to determine any but the most obvious health effects”
of radiation (p. 333). It is not that scientists provided the wrong answers;
rather they asked the wrong questions. Coupled to this, there was always a
plant manager willing to ignore accidents and to forge records, as well as a
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hired gun or two who would provide the AEC and its contractors with the
scientific evidence that they wanted to buttress their case. The ambiguity and
contested nature of the scientific results contrasted with the palpably obvious
illnesses of the residents and those downwind. It took a long time before the
personal testimony of uneducated laborers could compete with the epistemic
authority of putatively objective research. There is no better illustration of the
power relations built into the rhetoric of the scientific method. Nor is there
any stronger warning that objectivity does not reside therein but is forged
in the crucible of the clash between the viewpoints of diverse stakeholders,
including those with local, personal knowledge.
Plutopia was built on fear, fear of being annihilated by an enemy, fear of
falling ill from exposure to dangerous radiation, fear of losing one’s job, fear
of having to face an “outside world” that was subject to the ruthless logic
of American capitalism or, far worse, state socialism. That fear bred conformity, a willingness to keep one’s mouth shut, an ability to defy evidence and
to explain away (yet another) miscarriage or crippling cancer as bad luck.
“Richland and Ozersk are easily recognizable because in these citadels of
plutonium, at ground zero of nuclear Armageddon, people who had choices
made the same kind of trade-offs of consumer and financial security for civil
rights and political freedoms as did their fellow citizens nationally” (p. 336).
The Cold War may be over, but the strategies that were evolved to manage
nuclear fear and to secure civic discipline persist, creating spaces for both new
and expanding abuses of power. The increasing audacity of these is matched
only by the widespread resignation with which they are tolerated.
John Krige is the Kranzberg Professor in the School of History, Technology
and Society at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. His most recent
monograph was American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in
Europe (2006). His current project is entitled Sharing Knowledge, Shaping Europe:
Strategies of Nonproliferation.