Martin V. Melosi. Atomic Age America. Boston: Pearson, 2012. xvii + 366 pp. $62.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-205-74254-7.
Reviewed by Thomas Wellock (US Nuclear Regulatory Commission)
Published on H-Environment (April, 2014)
Commissioned by David T. Benac (Western Michigan University)
Hope, Promise, and Risk in the Nuclear Era
Martin Melosi, a professor of history at the University of Houston and former American Society for Environmental History president, has produced a new textbook on the United States in the era of nuclear energy. Atomic Age America comprehensively spans the early development of atomic theory to the recent Fukushima disaster. Melosi makes excellent use of his classroom experience on this subject and considerable expertise in U.S. foreign relations, waste, and energy issues. This will likely become the standard textbook for courses on nuclear issues for many years.
Atomic Age America joins an already crowded field of textbooks on the United States in the Cold War, particularly ones with a foreign relations bent. Much of the material covered in Melosi’s textbook is common to others: Hiroshima, containment, McCarthyism, Cold War confrontations, arms limitation initiatives, and the second Cold War during the Reagan administration.
Melosi’s book differs by taking seriously the word “atomic” in his title. Atoms for peace and war, he argues, have been “treated as anomalies [by historians] more than integral features of the central thrust of history” (p. 3). His goal is to blend the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants into a single narrative that binds their histories to the postwar period. Both technologies, he argues, exhibited the “hope, promise, and risk” that dominated the postwar world (p. 4). Americans have had to grapple with nuclear technology’s capacity to destroy life, the transformation of military capacity toward waging total war, a changed discourse over risk, and an increasing awareness that today’s actions might endanger future generations.
Most of the book focuses on nuclear weapons history, with nuclear power playing a supporting role. The first five chapters cover the development of atomic theory in the nineteenth century up to the controversy over fallout from weapons testing in the 1950s. Chapter 6 examines early efforts to develop peaceful applications of nuclear energy. Chapter 7 covers Cold War controversies from the Kennedy administration to the Nixon administration. Chapters 8 and 9 trace the ups and downs of nuclear power in the 1960s through the 1980s. The last two chapters examine nuclear issues from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present.
A key strength of the book is Melosi’s ability to contextualize scientific and technical trends. Taking students beyond a simple narrative of scientific discovery, he emphasizes the destructive influence of ideology on scientific advancement in Germany’s movement for “Aryan science” and Russia’s “proletarian science.” The United States won the race to the bomb because its social system and government system were more conducive to the free exchange of ideas necessary for scientific advancement.
The U.S. system, however, proved a double-edged sword. The pernicious influence of government on scholarly inquiry forms an important theme. Big Science, Melosi contends, was a Faustian bargain. While acknowledging the obvious resource benefits of government support, he laments that agencies like the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) “increasingly set the scientific agenda.... Before [World War II] scientists strenuously debated [atomic] theory in a relatively open arena of ideas. Atomic science, however, now became subservient to applied approaches conducted behind walls of secrecy and security” (p. 29). He returns to this theme often, particularly in highlighting Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address on the military-industrial complex and its threat to academic freedom (pp. 49, 104, 183-84).
Given current concerns about the federal government’s expansive security state, Melosi’s analysis should resonate with students. Nevertheless, a little more complexity might be useful. The federal walls of secrecy and security were porous. More than once officials at the Atomic Energy Commission rued the day they funded a study after it produced unwelcome and public results. The use of thermonuclear detonations for peaceful applications under Project Plowshare withered as AEC impact studies made headlines. And when antinuclear activists attacked the safety of nuclear power, they did so by citing the results of studies done by Brookhaven National Laboratory and tests conducted by the National Reactor Test Station in Idaho. As Brain Balogh showed, the iron triangle that controlled nuclear power had a very short life and was often undone by its own experts.[1]
Nor has the federal government been good at controlling the scientific agenda, as Melosi claims. The work it sponsored often fed scientific trends beyond its control. The radioecology studies performed for the AEC by Eugene and Howard Odum are only the most obvious examples where government research fed the “subversive science” of ecology.
The chapters on the development of the atomic bomb are excellent and very readable. Melosi deftly explains some of the complex technical discoveries and innovations developed during the Manhattan Project. He offers a very balanced assessment of Truman’s decision to drop the bomb and a judicious discussion of the medical effects of the bomb on their victims.
Melosi ranges beyond the well-trodden ground of Hiroshima into territory less familiar to most students, such as how nuclear weapons altered the balance of power among U.S. military branches. The Air Force came out the big budget winner and the Army the main loser. This shift had far-reaching implications. The Air Force came to dominate Cold War strategy. Curtis LeMay’s advocacy of overwhelming force and first strike capability became the dominant thinking of many presidential administrations: “Use too much [force] and deliberately use too much; you’ll save lives, not only your own, but the enemy’s too” (p. 92).
Atomic Age America is at its best when it takes an international perspective on Cold War topics, such as the development of and reaction to the fallout controversy of the 1950s and early 1960s. The rise of a persistent antiweapons peace movement composed of scientists and religious groups with adherents around the globe takes this story beyond the traditional U.S.-centered treatment found in most texts. It makes it far easier for students to grasp the common international roots of later movements against the Reagan-era military buildup and the Chernobyl accident.
Melosi’s sensitivity to international developments also enlivens his treatment of the rise of civilian nuclear power. He supplements his discussion of the U.S. civilian industry with an excellent analysis of Soviet, British, Japanese, French, and German development programs in the 1950s. This global race to promote the peaceful atom helps explain why the U.S. Congress lavished enormous resources to give birth to civilian nuclear power.
Most chapters include superb reviews of nuclear-themed films. Melosi contextualizes well-known films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), On the Beach (1959), Dr. Strangelove (1964), The China Syndrome (1979), and Silkwood (1983), but adds insightful discussions of lesser known gems such as The Atomic City (1952) and Invaders from Mars (1986). My only quibble is that he devotes extensive space to the television movie The Day After (1983) but skips the hit 1984 film Red Dawn (1984), a classroom favorite whenever I’ve used it. Few films better outline the 1980s conservative perspective of the Cold War.
While Melosi has created a very readable and wonderfully contextualized textbook, it could do more to prod classroom debate. The histories of nuclear weapons and power are tailor-made for pro and con analysis of some of the most important issues of the postwar period, such as the wisdom of Truman’s decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, the legitimacy of the pursuit of Communists in the federal government, the wisdom of Kennedy’s confrontation over Soviet missiles in Cuba, and whether the precautionary principle, a foundation of environmental thinking, has really created greater safety in the development of radiation standards and nuclear plant design. Sidebars in the text on these topics would be useful.
A second, more important concern is that Atomic Age America does not deliver the promised single narrative on nuclear power and weapons. This book is really two separate books on atoms for war and atoms for peace. Efforts to show interconnections between the two are limited and strained. The chapters on nuclear power are so distinct from the main narrative about weapons that they could be deleted, and the reader might never suspect. Born from the same energy source, students might conclude, the paths of nuclear weapons and power rarely crossed.
Admittedly, creating a combined narrative about nuclear weapons and power has always been difficult and previous attempts have had a split narrative.[2] Nuclear weapons and power were distinct technical systems that operated in different contexts and often had unique political constituencies supporting and opposing them. Atomic Age America is not able to overcome these difficulties because it focuses on the distinct technical artifacts—the weapons and power plants—rather than the technical processes of the nuclear fuel cycle that unite them.
Many of the key themes that would interest H-Environment subscribers in nuclear history are embedded in the fuel cycle. Nuclear war and accidents certainly worried experts and activists, but so did losing control of radioactive material by other means. Atoms for war and peace are vulnerable at similar points in the fuel cycle when fissionable material is mined, processed, transported, diverted, reprocessed, and disposed.
Take long-term waste disposal. This topic is covered in just six pages. Related waste issues, in what critics call “sacrifice zones” of disposal/storage sites, and weapons facilities such as the Hanford Reservation and the Rocky Flats arsenal are not discussed in much detail. The text would have also benefited from a discussion of the risks to workers and the environment from the international uranium trade and mining operations.
Diversion is another issue that unites nuclear weapons and energy. Activists made much of the diversion of fissionable material from India’s Tarpur research reactor and the alleged diversion of U.S. uranium to Israel that was intended for U.S. Navy reactors. Many feared similar diversions were possible with civilian reactors for nuclear weapons or dirty bombs. This concern led to a great deal of crossover membership in the antiweapons and antinuclear power movements.
Even with the end of the Cold War, the fuel cycle continues to join the histories of nuclear power and weapons. On a promising note, nuclear power helped solve one of the vexing questions that worried security experts after the collapse of the Soviet Union: how to ensure that Soviet weapons-grade material was not diverted to terrorists groups and rogue nations. The United States purchased it in the Megatons to Megawatts program to fuel U.S. civilian reactors for over two decades. Atoms for war could sometimes become atoms for peace.
Less hopefully, the process of enrichment necessary for nuclear power and weapons continues to destabilize international security. The similarities between nuclear weapons and nuclear power have never seemed as close as in Iran today. Much of the debate over the Iranian program hinges on the paper-thin differences between the enrichment technology needed for peaceful applications and those for weapons development. Greater emphasis on connections such as these would have united nuclear weapons and nuclear power history.
Nevertheless, given the obvious strengths of the book, Atomic Age America is an excellent reference text for classroom use. Some of the limitations mentioned above can be solved with supplementary readings highlighting the fuel cycle and other uses of radioactivity. In particular, I recommend Gabrielle Hecht’s Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (2012) and Angela Creager’s Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine (2013).
Notes
[1]. Brian Balogh, Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
[2]. Gerard H. Clarfield and William M. Wiecek, Nuclear America: Military and Civilian Nuclear Power in the United States, 1940-1980 (New York: Harper and Row, 1984).
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Citation:
Thomas Wellock. Review of Melosi, Martin V., Atomic Age America.
H-Environment, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=40485
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