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Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power 1945–1975
Chain Reaction seeks to explain how and why America came to depend so heavily on its experts after World War II, how those experts translated that authority into political clout, and why that authority and political discretion declined in the 1970s. Brian Balogh's pathbreaking research into the internal memoranda of the Atomic Energy Commission substantiates his arguments in impressive historical detail.
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First published October 25, 1991
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May 3, 2013
Balogh's book provides an important perspective on the process by which scientific experts and the U.S. government became bedfellows. According to Balogh, in the early 20th century, most university scientists (especially physicists- this story might actually be quite different told from the point of view of chemistry, which was already well-established industrially at this time) consistently refused federal funding for their research (save in agriculture), worrying about compromising their independent ideals. It was far more the norm for scientists to receive funds from private sources, such as the Carnegie or Rockefeller foundations, than from the government. This changed somewhat during WWI, when scientists were asked to help make aircraft, etc., but according to Balogh, following the war funding was immediately cut for many of these projects while scientists were rapidly demobilized.
During the interwar period, Americans experienced an explosion in useful home technologies, such as the radio and the automobile, giving scientists a certain heroic veneer. Increasingly the government made a point of seeking "expert" advice, even if they didn't use it. For example, Balogh suggests that Roosevelt's "brain trust" was much more for show than for practical purposes. Nevertheless, the interwar period saw an increase in scientific professionalization, at the same time that the government developed unprecedented management skills to deal with Depression-era relief programs.
Enter WWII. Scientists were once again, mobilized, but this time in far greater numbers than before. Physicists created the atomic bomb with secret military funds, but after the war it was unclear whether or how to demobilize. In fact, one of Balogh's points is that we never demobilized after WWII. In the immediate wake of the war, scientists felt responsible for their creations and so attempted to exercise political control in unprecedented ways. Specifically, many scientists opposed the militarization of nuclear technology, which would render vast amount of knowledge secret. However, the government needed experts to understand these dangerous new technologies put at its disposal. As the Cold War heated up, the government spent increasing amounts of money on recruiting and producing experts. Big Science was born, which required more money than could be got from the private sector, but the federal government was a willing employer. This is how most big science projects came under federal purview. Many political interests came into play, and many scientific experts wanted to institute international controls for nuclear weapons/energy before proceeding with research. The heyday of the scientific expert as politician came to and end with the retraction of Oppenheimer's security clearance. Scientists would be equated with just another "interest group" with no special say over the course of technology policy (this, by the way, is the back story to Shapin's comparatively vague claim about the government institutionalizing the is/ought distinction after WWII). Essentially, when scientists went political, they lost their expert clout based on disinterestedness.
Clearly, funds for the Manhattan Project would increase throughout the Cold War, which required the consistent presence of nuclear experts. The decision to be made at this point in history was whether nuclear science would come under military control. To prevent this, other actors, later forming the Atomic Energy Commission, would claim that nuclear energy could eventually be harnessed as power, displacing coal and oil. Since other utilities such as this were certainly not placed under military control (indeed, that would be unthinkable), they demanded that a portion of nuclear research remain under civilian control. Balogh goes on to explain (in excruciating detail) how there was never any public demand for nuclear energy. In fact, the notion of nuclear energy was a creation of the "proministrative state" (a term he uses to refer to the fusion of administrators and experts in the post-WWII government and the new reliance on their presence), that gained acceptance through combined decisions of key government officials, the newly formed AEC, and potential private sector suppliers. Initially, the only reliable demand for nuclear energy came from the military. Private energy companies remained skeptical about whether going nuclear could really reduce costs. The irony of this first part of development is that these proministrators wanted to use federal funding (or public money) to do enough research to establish the infrastructure and testing to create nuclear power plants to be run by private companies in order to prevent nuclear power from going public, or being funded by the federal government. There was no public demand for nuclear energy, and in fact significant resistance once particular sites began being proposed.
The rest of the story is about how the Atomic Energy Commission increasingly lost their monopoly on nuclear expertise, an almost completely novel technology after the war. The AEC, in concert with other private companies, had to train state experts to perform their own safety testing to convince their constituents to accept nuclear energy, so scarce was the necessary expertise at the time. In the end, as nuclear expertise proliferated, debates amongst experts once held behind closed doors came into public view, creating confusion and undermining consensus. In Balogh's words, "My account suggests that the nuclear experts' authority was shattered by projecting internal debate beyond the insulated forums that had once contained that debate (307)."
Balogh offers a very important account of when and how "the public" gets brought into the political process, especially in the context of broad technology-based policy changes. That is to say, not much, until it's politically expedient. And if they are brought in, this results in too much confusion for the proministrative state to function. That's depressing, if true.
While I maintain that Balogh's book is useful and important, there were many things that I didn't like about it. First, he begins and ends the book by insisting that there has been too much emphasis on a determinism in organizational theory, suggesting the inevitability of certain forms of governance and management depending on evolved level of complexity. His account, however, will focus more on contingent politics. He sort of did that, and also sort of failed to get away from the model he was trying to take down. You can see it even in his chapter headings, where he describes expanding nuclear expertise as a centrifugal force. I realize it's just a cute metaphor, but I do think it's telling about his view of how expertise needs to be localized, secret, or contained to be politically expedient. He seems to view the proliferation of expertise as necessarily damaging to political decision-making. I'm no political scientist, but that sort of argument doesn't sound too far from the structural-functionalism he set out to avoid. That said, Balogh gives us paper trails regarding many very interesting and conflicting views on whether and when the public, too, can be expert. That's interesting, so it's worth the read.
During the interwar period, Americans experienced an explosion in useful home technologies, such as the radio and the automobile, giving scientists a certain heroic veneer. Increasingly the government made a point of seeking "expert" advice, even if they didn't use it. For example, Balogh suggests that Roosevelt's "brain trust" was much more for show than for practical purposes. Nevertheless, the interwar period saw an increase in scientific professionalization, at the same time that the government developed unprecedented management skills to deal with Depression-era relief programs.
Enter WWII. Scientists were once again, mobilized, but this time in far greater numbers than before. Physicists created the atomic bomb with secret military funds, but after the war it was unclear whether or how to demobilize. In fact, one of Balogh's points is that we never demobilized after WWII. In the immediate wake of the war, scientists felt responsible for their creations and so attempted to exercise political control in unprecedented ways. Specifically, many scientists opposed the militarization of nuclear technology, which would render vast amount of knowledge secret. However, the government needed experts to understand these dangerous new technologies put at its disposal. As the Cold War heated up, the government spent increasing amounts of money on recruiting and producing experts. Big Science was born, which required more money than could be got from the private sector, but the federal government was a willing employer. This is how most big science projects came under federal purview. Many political interests came into play, and many scientific experts wanted to institute international controls for nuclear weapons/energy before proceeding with research. The heyday of the scientific expert as politician came to and end with the retraction of Oppenheimer's security clearance. Scientists would be equated with just another "interest group" with no special say over the course of technology policy (this, by the way, is the back story to Shapin's comparatively vague claim about the government institutionalizing the is/ought distinction after WWII). Essentially, when scientists went political, they lost their expert clout based on disinterestedness.
Clearly, funds for the Manhattan Project would increase throughout the Cold War, which required the consistent presence of nuclear experts. The decision to be made at this point in history was whether nuclear science would come under military control. To prevent this, other actors, later forming the Atomic Energy Commission, would claim that nuclear energy could eventually be harnessed as power, displacing coal and oil. Since other utilities such as this were certainly not placed under military control (indeed, that would be unthinkable), they demanded that a portion of nuclear research remain under civilian control. Balogh goes on to explain (in excruciating detail) how there was never any public demand for nuclear energy. In fact, the notion of nuclear energy was a creation of the "proministrative state" (a term he uses to refer to the fusion of administrators and experts in the post-WWII government and the new reliance on their presence), that gained acceptance through combined decisions of key government officials, the newly formed AEC, and potential private sector suppliers. Initially, the only reliable demand for nuclear energy came from the military. Private energy companies remained skeptical about whether going nuclear could really reduce costs. The irony of this first part of development is that these proministrators wanted to use federal funding (or public money) to do enough research to establish the infrastructure and testing to create nuclear power plants to be run by private companies in order to prevent nuclear power from going public, or being funded by the federal government. There was no public demand for nuclear energy, and in fact significant resistance once particular sites began being proposed.
The rest of the story is about how the Atomic Energy Commission increasingly lost their monopoly on nuclear expertise, an almost completely novel technology after the war. The AEC, in concert with other private companies, had to train state experts to perform their own safety testing to convince their constituents to accept nuclear energy, so scarce was the necessary expertise at the time. In the end, as nuclear expertise proliferated, debates amongst experts once held behind closed doors came into public view, creating confusion and undermining consensus. In Balogh's words, "My account suggests that the nuclear experts' authority was shattered by projecting internal debate beyond the insulated forums that had once contained that debate (307)."
Balogh offers a very important account of when and how "the public" gets brought into the political process, especially in the context of broad technology-based policy changes. That is to say, not much, until it's politically expedient. And if they are brought in, this results in too much confusion for the proministrative state to function. That's depressing, if true.
While I maintain that Balogh's book is useful and important, there were many things that I didn't like about it. First, he begins and ends the book by insisting that there has been too much emphasis on a determinism in organizational theory, suggesting the inevitability of certain forms of governance and management depending on evolved level of complexity. His account, however, will focus more on contingent politics. He sort of did that, and also sort of failed to get away from the model he was trying to take down. You can see it even in his chapter headings, where he describes expanding nuclear expertise as a centrifugal force. I realize it's just a cute metaphor, but I do think it's telling about his view of how expertise needs to be localized, secret, or contained to be politically expedient. He seems to view the proliferation of expertise as necessarily damaging to political decision-making. I'm no political scientist, but that sort of argument doesn't sound too far from the structural-functionalism he set out to avoid. That said, Balogh gives us paper trails regarding many very interesting and conflicting views on whether and when the public, too, can be expert. That's interesting, so it's worth the read.
October 15, 2024
Hmm…this is a hard book to review in part because I took some liberties in my reading process to make it go faster… My goal for this book is to compare it to others that talk about nuclear power. This one is unique in its focus on experts and how the use of scientific experts shifted public opinion. Can’t say I loved it, can’t say I need to either.
April 11, 2025
Interesting perspective on the role of expertise and insular decision-making in the rise and decline of commercial nuclear power development. Relatively even-handed, and well-sourced.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews