Abstract
A military base near Porton in Wiltshire has been the home of the United Kingdom’s chemical weapons programs for almost a century now, with research into biological warfare entering the fray a few decades later. In stark contrast to the permanent protest presence found at the home of the UK’s nuclear arsenal in Faslane, the biological and chemical weapons programs at Porton Down (the name of the base) have only very occasionally been subject to serious public or media scrutiny. As a British secret service official in Graham Greene’s 1978 novel The Human Factor told a confidant: “‘That place Porton gives me the shivers. People talk so much about the atom bomb, but they quite forget our little country establishment. Nobody has ever bothered to march there. Nobody wears an anti-bacterial button, but if the bomb were abolished there’d still be that deadly little test-tube.’” Even government ministers whose purview includes Porton Down have admitted that they do not fully grasp what goes on there. Brian Balmer’s account of British biological and chemical warfare helps us understand how government officials and scientists alike were able to maintain this veil of secrecy even as they navigated various episodes that threatened to attract unwanted attention and opprobrium.
Secrecy and Science also goes well beyond Porton Down and the history of the United Kingdom’s biological and chemical weapons programs to make a series of ambitious claims about the way uneven access to knowledge shapes modern science and its impact on society. At the outset, Balmer introduces a deceptively simple question—”who knows what, where?”—as the basis of his intriguing “topographical” approach to secrecy and science. Then, over the course of several case studies encompassing the generation or so after World War II, Secrecy and Science pushes the reader time and again to jettison the notion of secret science as normal science conducted behind closed doors. Instead, we are urged to consider the moral economies of secret science, the different actor-networks it gives rise to, and the way that the designation of something as a “secret” is itself a product of classification and sometimes contention. Indeed, a great virtue of this book is its insistence that we pry open the notion of secrecy in science to see how it fundamentally changes knowledge production itself, not just who is privy to the knowledge science produces.
We sometimes find it hard not to think of science and secrecy as intrinsically opposed to one another. And yet, as Balmer forcefully argues, drawing on a range of recent work in science studies, the norm of communalism that Merton famously argued was essential to the modern scientific endeavor only captures a historically contingent ideal type: secrecy has been an accepted part of science in other times and places, and in many respects it remains an integral feature of scientific practice to this day. One need only consider the many ongoing efforts to encourage sharing and transparency in order to see how much work it takes to vivify the norm of openness in contemporary science. In this context, Balmer is wise to assemble so much of the relevant literature on science and secrecy in one place and to present ways of thinking about secrets that could be usefully taken up by sociologists of science working on other topics.
It is therefore disappointing that Secrecy and Science does not directly address how the lessons learned from the study of British biological and chemical weapons programs might be adopted elsewhere. For one thing, the reader is left wondering about other national contexts. As Lord Peter Hennessy put it in his authoritative history of the British civil service (1989:346–7): “Secrecy is the bonding material which holds the rambling structure of central government together . . . secrecy is as much a part of the English landscape as the Cotswolds.” And yet, despite several hints that the United States adopted a more open approach (U.S.-UK cooperation crops up repeatedly), Balmer never addresses the specificity of the United Kingdom and its notorious culture of secrecy in his account of who knew what, where about biological and chemical weapons research. For another, we are never told how one might adapt a topographical approach to study secrecy in other areas of government research, commercial research and development, or the scientific disciplines with their divergent “epistemic cultures” (Knorr Cetina 1999).
The main problem with Secrecy and Science, however, is its failure to compellingly show us what such a topographical analysis of secret science might actually look like empirically. Some of its material is fascinating, to be sure—especially the final chapter’s account of how a media kerfuffle about a publicly available patent related to VX gas led to debates over what was and was not a “secret” and, ultimately, an important shift in the legal criteria for keeping information hidden from the British public. However, far-reaching discussions of science, secrecy, and knowledge production are too often paired with a case study of public relations management or shifting attempts to justify biological and chemical weapons research.
Take the example of Chapter Three. We begin and end with an ambitious discussion of the way that secrecy fundamentally changes the enterprise of scientific research and the knowledge that is produced. In between, we learn the story of an offshore biological weapons experiment involving Pasteurella pestis (the bacterium that causes plague) that went awry when a commercial fishing boat passed within the restricted area set up by the Royal Navy. While Porton Down researchers were certain there was virtually no danger of infection, steps were taken to monitor the ship and its crew, to prepare for any potential outbreak of plague in the ports they visited, and to ensure that the affair remained hidden from the public. Balmer argues that this episode represented an accidental extension of the original experiment—of secrecy transforming the actor-network and therefore the science itself. Inthe end, however, there is no evidence that any new knowledge was produced or even sought during this episode of crisis management.
On the one hand, then, the book’s many literature reviews tend to meander from one concept to another without stopping to really delve into or productively combine the insights of authors ranging from Weber and Simmel through to a host of contemporary science studies scholars. On the other, one cannot help but come away with the distinct sense that Secrecy and Science’s empirical material cannot bear the weight of its analytic goals. Balmer’s very interesting accounts of the way state actors managed perceptions of the United Kingdom’s chemical and biological weapons programs mostly fail to cogently engage the bigger questions about the production, control, and distribution of secret scientific knowledge that he wants to tackle. This mismatch may well stem from the very classification of more pertinent material as “secret” in the relevant archives. Nevertheless, the failure to provide a robust analysis of “who knew what, where?” about British chemical and biological weapons research leaves Secrecy and Science unable to fully deliver on the promise of its worthy ambitions. We can hope that future work by Balmer and others will take up the challenge anew and examine material that truly gets at the uneven topography of access to scientific knowledge.