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People Of The Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex
Rather than relying on archives and published sources, Gusterson (anthropology and science studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) interviewed people who took part in the birth of nuclear warfare: weapons scientists, policy makers, and activists at the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories, and in Russia and Washington, D.
344 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 18, 2026
This is, by far, the most transformative and enriching nonfiction text that I've ever read. I can't sing its praises enough - a total reinvention/reclamation of anthropological codes of study and a profound condemnation and transformation of its Orientalist roots. Assigning present-day (1980s-90s) nuclear scientists as your tongue-in-cheek "native" population is genuinely brilliant.
For personal use/reference, the strongest chapter was "Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination." I learn the best when I have an example to work with (and by "example" I mean anything that's more material than reading Foucault and company straight through), and Gusterson's qualification of Cold War nuclear proliferation as a discourse community, including both the pro-nuclear and antinuclear, and as a piece of ideological machinery illuminated SO much for me. His invocations of Raymond Williams and Foucault specifically (throughout the entire book) are both profound and educational for me, as someone who struggled only recently with those texts and ideas.
Beyond that direct application to my own studies, however, I found this super rewarding to read because it was a strong revisit to what I enjoyed studying so much in history and political science, especially in the ways Gusterson problematizes both fields. While he writes at a very accessible level, realist theory, game theory, imagined communities, statehood, sovereignty, nationalism (which actually needed some clarification, I'd argue), "ethnoscapes," Samuel Huntington the individual, global systems theory, and on and on, all required some preexisting knowledge - which I'm glad to say that I still have! Knowing the familiar thinkers around CW game theory (@ my nemesis, Lawrence Freedman) was also helpful in situating Gusterson's position as an anthropological CRITIC, which I didn't know you could be.
And! Above all, this is such a strong emblem of interdisciplinarity. While I've made my bed in literary studies, I hope to emulate this kind of scholarship. The list of scholars he invokes in very grounded and realistic ways, and not for the sake of intellectual posturing, is inspiring to me. I will be returning to this text over and over again - he's even helped me clarify my burgeoning idea of Cold War subjectivity!
(Shoutout to him also for writing in the social sciences as a Brit, both of which demand passive voice, but it was pretty absent across the board. Greatly improved the reading experience at the line-by-line level).
For personal use/reference, the strongest chapter was "Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination." I learn the best when I have an example to work with (and by "example" I mean anything that's more material than reading Foucault and company straight through), and Gusterson's qualification of Cold War nuclear proliferation as a discourse community, including both the pro-nuclear and antinuclear, and as a piece of ideological machinery illuminated SO much for me. His invocations of Raymond Williams and Foucault specifically (throughout the entire book) are both profound and educational for me, as someone who struggled only recently with those texts and ideas.
Beyond that direct application to my own studies, however, I found this super rewarding to read because it was a strong revisit to what I enjoyed studying so much in history and political science, especially in the ways Gusterson problematizes both fields. While he writes at a very accessible level, realist theory, game theory, imagined communities, statehood, sovereignty, nationalism (which actually needed some clarification, I'd argue), "ethnoscapes," Samuel Huntington the individual, global systems theory, and on and on, all required some preexisting knowledge - which I'm glad to say that I still have! Knowing the familiar thinkers around CW game theory (@ my nemesis, Lawrence Freedman) was also helpful in situating Gusterson's position as an anthropological CRITIC, which I didn't know you could be.
And! Above all, this is such a strong emblem of interdisciplinarity. While I've made my bed in literary studies, I hope to emulate this kind of scholarship. The list of scholars he invokes in very grounded and realistic ways, and not for the sake of intellectual posturing, is inspiring to me. I will be returning to this text over and over again - he's even helped me clarify my burgeoning idea of Cold War subjectivity!
(Shoutout to him also for writing in the social sciences as a Brit, both of which demand passive voice, but it was pretty absent across the board. Greatly improved the reading experience at the line-by-line level).
August 20, 2015
Especially:
Chapter 2 “Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination”
Chapter 4 “Hiroshima, the Gulf War, and the Disappearing Body”
Chapter 2 “Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination”
Chapter 4 “Hiroshima, the Gulf War, and the Disappearing Body”
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews