Nuclear rites

Description

Based on fieldwork at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - the facility that designed the neutron bomb and the warhead for the MX missile - Nuclear Rites takes the reader deep inside the top-secret culture of a nuclear weapons lab. Exploring the scientists' world of dark humor, ritualized secrecy, and disciplined emotions, anthropologist Gusterson uncovers the beliefs and values that animate their work. He discovers that many of the scientists are Christians, deeply convinced of the morality of their work. An unexpected number are also liberals who opposed the Vietnam War and the Reagan-Bush agenda. . In a lively, wide-ranging account, Gusterson analyzes the ethics and politics of laboratory employees, the effects of security regulations on scientists' private lives, and the role of nuclear tests - beyond the obvious scientific one - as rituals of initiation and transcendence.

First Sentence

In a context in which policy makers, international relations experts, nuclear weapons scientists, and antinuclear activists have sought to persuade us that there is only one way to understand the world and that they knew what it is, the contribution of anthropology is to disturb comfortable understandings of the world by showing the simultaneous plausibility and arbitrariness of multiple ways of understanding and living in it.

Excerpt

In a context in which policy makers, international relations experts, nuclear weapons scientists, and antinuclear activists have sought to persuade us that there is only one way to understand the world and that they knew what it is, the contribution of anthropology is to disturb comfortable understandings of the world by showing the simultaneous plausibility and arbitrariness of multiple ways of understanding and living in it.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Nuclear rites: a weapons laboratory at the end of the Cold WarUniversity of California Press1996-01-01
• Nuclear RitesPaperbackUniversity of California Press1998-02-10