Abstract
Efforts at control often set off unpredictable, unintended consequences. The start of the nuclear age promised unprecedented technical control: the ability to split atoms, the most basic building blocks of the natural world. But the unintended consequences set in motion by the work of atomic scientists to harness the control of nature to produce nuclear weapons transformed the twentieth century and laid the foundation for the institutional management of risk in the twenty-first. In Downwind of the Atomic State: Atmospheric Testing and the Rise of the Risk Society, James C. Rice investigates what led the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to fail to protect the public from radioactive fallout. In doing so, he provides a case study in how organizations still downplay the sociotechnical risks they produce in pursuit of maximizing profitability or other institutional imperatives. The book is unexpectedly timely, as industry leaders in Artificial General Intelligence today compare their work to the development of nuclear weapons in the 1940s. The lessons Rice draws in this book will be helpful in understanding who is likely to profit from the risks these modern self-described Oppenheimers produce, who is likely to suffer because of them, and why.
Fallout from nuclear detonations is an excellent metaphor for modernity’s dance between technical control and unintended consequences, Rice argues. He writes that “splitting the atom is not synonymous with dominion over the nonhuman world but with provocation of it, along with the occurrence of rebound effects” (p. 120). Practically speaking, for Rice’s purposes, this provocation was shaped by the methods the United States used to test its nuclear weapons in the Nevada desert. Starting with the Trinity detonation in the summer of 1945, the U.S. nuclear weapons program relied heavily on “tower shots,” which held the bombs steady at a known altitude over a precise location so that scientific instruments could be arranged around them to produce reliable data about the blasts and their effects for use in refining the weapons. Later, as the military sought to develop tactical maneuvers for ground troops moving around atomic explosions, soldiers were brought in to the Nevada Test Site to conduct drills in concert with the blasts. This made tower shots, as opposed to air drops, even more important, so troops could be moved as close to the “safe” edge of the predicted blast radius as possible. The downside of the reliance on tower shots was that this local control increased downwind risks that could neither be controlled nor accurately predicted. Tower shots irradiated large amounts of alluvial soil at ground zero and lofted the material high into the atmosphere, in plumes that took meandering paths across the continental United States. Highly radioactive debris would “rain out” of these plumes or otherwise fall back to earth, sometimes close to the test site, sometimes as far away as Indiana, Michigan, and New York State.
Atmospheric testing moved the science of the Manhattan Project “beyond the orderly industrial facility, the cleanliness of the laboratory, and the pacing of the seminar room to entanglement with the world,” Rice writes, an entanglement that left government officials “chasing radioactive debris across the desert” (p. 53). The Atomic Energy Commission, the civilian agency overseeing the nuclear weapons testing program, was meant to keep the public safe from the dangers of radioactive fallout, but instead it downplayed the risks, failed to properly monitor radioactive debris, and failed to recommend adequate protective measures for people in harm’s way. But why? To answer this question, Rice mines the archives and applies the causal model of organizational deviance developed by Diane Vaughan to make sense of NASA’s disastrous decision to launch the space shuttle Challenger (Vaughan 1996; Vaughan 1999). So, Rice describes the pressures the agency navigated to preserve its legitimacy as the main arm of civilian control over atomic testing while the military aggressively expanded its authority and the role of the nuclear enterprise in U.S. national security. We see how the agency’s early failures of foresight about the spread of fallout hazard trapped the AEC in a material-discursive bind that led officials to downplay and misinterpret even clear evidence that atmospheric testing was causing sickness and death.
Theoretically, Rice leans heavily into Andrew Pickering’s concept of the mangle of human and nonhuman agency (Pickering 1995). Human technoscience may act to impose order on the nonhuman world, but prevailing winds, thunderstorms, and radioactive isotopes act too, and can all too easily thwart human purposive action. Sociologists have long debated the limits of nonhuman agency and whether or not it even makes sense to ascribe agency as such to nonhumans. This book does not settle the argument, but it is easy to draw important lessons about the risk society and organizational deviance from Rice’s work either way. It’s enough to say that in our present age humans work at industrial scale to shape the nonhuman world, and the unintended consequences of that activity are every bit as consequential as the intended outcomes of purposive social action.
Overall this book is a lively and enlightening read for scholars of organizational theory and the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology. Rice’s crucial intervention is to tie theories of organizational deviance to the broader sweep of Risk Society theory and show how mistake, misconduct, and disaster emerging from specific organizations can and do have global social consequences. Rice is a gifted writer, equally at home describing the desert of the Great Basin, the technical details of atomic weapons testing, and abstruse theories about the production of knowledge about risk and uncertainty.