As a graduate student in anthropology in the era of President Reagan’s talk of “winnable nuclear wars,” Hugh Gusterson was not too enthused by arcane discussions of kinship terminologies and totemic symbolism. He dropped out of his graduate program and headed to California, where the antinuclear movement was just beginning to gather momentum. A job on the staff of the Nuclear Freeze Campaign in San Francisco offered him the opportunity of getting involved with actors on both sides of the nuclear fence: the antinuclear protestors and the weapons designers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This experience renewed Gusterson’s interest in anthropology, focused this time not on distant, “other cultures” but on the tribe and culture of nuclear weapons scientists, and it led to his prolonged engagement as a participant-observer of the belief systems and rituals of nuclear weapons designers. The result has been a series of passionate and sophisticated articles and a highly influential earlier book, Nuclear Rites (University of California Press, 1996). In People of the Bomb, Gusterson continues his insightful and engaged analyses of the U.S. nuclear industrial complex.

Comprisingarticles previously published elsewhere, People of the Bomb represents Gusterson’s expansion of his existing interest in the U.S. nuclear establishment to the larger canvas of international security. He introduces the concept of “securityscapes” to add to the existing plethora of “scapes” generated after Arjun Appadurai’s coinage. “Securityscapes” are defined as “asymmetrical distributions of weaponry, military force, and military-scientific resources among nation-states and the local and global imaginaries of identity, power, and vulnerability that accompany these distributions” (p. 166). Deftly exploring the intricate interconnections between nuclear weaponry and the changing terrain of international relations, Gusterson deploys a critical constructivist and feminist perspective to provide insightful and reflexive analyses of a very wide range of issues. A chapter on the lifeworld of Sylvia, the Japanese American weapons scientist whose aunt was a victim of the Hiroshima bomb and whose father was interned by the U.S. state, provides a nuanced understanding of her motivations and beliefs. In a scintillating essay on the largely staged hysterical reactions to nuclear tests in India and Pakistan, Gusterson introduces the concept of “nuclear orientalism” to deftly dissect the explicit racial overtones of the manner in which the issue was discussed in the U.S. media. He accomplishes this without giving up his antiproliferation position. A chapter that describes watching and discussing the movie Short Circuit (John Badham, dir, Twentieth Century Fox, 1986) with Ray, a nuclear weapons scientist, provides Gusterson with the opportunity to reflect on the dynamics of how the same text can be open to mutually opposed interpretations. He takes Samuel Huntington’s absurd cultural determinism sharply to task in yet another lively essay. As a card-carrying anthropologist, Gusterson had long bemoaned the lack of attention to culture in studies of international conflict and security. What he had not expected was the total reification and ossification of the concept of “culture” in the hands of Huntington. In a chapter titled “The Death of the Authors of Death,” he reflects on the irony of scientists engaging in research the results of which will never be published. In discussing the movement to prevent the construction of a nuclear incinerator at Livermore, Gusterson provides a detailed account of the nuts and bolts of the strategies for challenging expert discourses on risk. One of the most riveting essays in this collection happens to be the brief postscript. Here Gusterson examines some of the factors underlying the dramatic shifts in the discourse of nuclear weapons that led up to the scrapping of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and to the real possibility of a new nuclear arms race.

A brief book review like this one is obviously totally insufficient to even hint at the value and significance of this important collection. In People of the Bomb, Gusterson has accomplished the remarkable feat of deploying the ideas of a very wide range of social theorists to illuminate critical issues in a text that is accessible to readers outside the card-carrying anthropological community. More often than not, critical analyses of significant issues are couched in arcane theoretical discourse designed to impress tenure committees. Gusterson does not view social theory as primarily a tool for self-enjoyment, nor does he believe in constructing purely political rants. He succeeds in striking an appropriate balance among theory, empirical analysis, and political passion. People of the Bomb is an outstanding book in which Gusterson’s formidable anthropological imagination is on display. He emerges as a major public intellectual in the tradition of C. Wright Mills.