Ways of Knowing About Weapons: The Cold War's End at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (original) (raw)

Anthropologists, you miss a chance By examining not what makes A warhead scientist salivate. Homo Los Alamos! How deservedly unique!-Don Eduardo de Los Alamos (Edward B. Grothus) Local resident and antinuclear activist, Los Alamos, NM CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION I did not begin my doctoral fieldwork intending to write an ethnography of nuclear weapons scientists and engineers. When I arrived at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the summer of 1997, I knew a great deal about the town of Los Alamos, a little about the organization, and nearly nothing about nuclear weapons. Like most anthropologists, I came to my field site prepared to study the people in its margins, not at its center: I went to the laboratory to explore the formation of social networks among women and minority scientists, to see how they built supportive, career enhancing mentoring relationships in the traditionally white, masculine domains of physics and engineering, in a weapons laboratory whose management structure was replete with men, not women. However, after several months at my field site I found a more compelling topic: the fear, widely shared among many staff members, that crucial skills and understandings, local "ways of knowing" about nuclear weapons, might be disappearing. By the time I began my fieldwork, knowledge loss had been a major concern at Los Alamos since the late 1980s, when political trends at the end of the Cold War began to impact the laboratory's research environment. Throughout the Cold War, Los Alamos was the nation's flagship nuclear weapons research and development laboratory, one of three such facilities owned by the United States Department of Energy (DOE). Los The Nuclear Posture Review put the Clinton administration in the odd position of reaffirming the importance of nuclear weapons for American security while simultaneously seeking an international ban on nuclear testing. This meant that the Department of Energy would have to develop an alternative means of maintaining confidence in the nuclear stockpile without placing the test ban in jeopardy. In 1994, both President Clinton and Congress each issued separate official directives requiring the DOE to "establish a stewardship program to ensure the preservation of core intellectual and technical competencies of the United States in nuclear weapons" (United States