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People of the Bomb: Portraits of America's Nuclear Complex. Hugh Gusterson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 328 pp.
Hugh Gusterson's People of the Bomb is a collection of chapters written from 1995 to 2003. Several of the chapters draw directly from Gusterson's fieldwork at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a nuclear weapons laboratory; others are analyses of cultural texts of various types from the security studies or nuclear weapons communities. Gusterson's primary message is that an anthropological consideration of globalization is far from complete without consideration of the nation-state and what Gusterson calls "securityscapes: 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).
Gusterson is at his best when he uses textual techniques to critique the narrative and epistemological frames of the national security arena, including the nuclear weapons domain. For example, his discussion of changes in the premises of legitimate knowledge that occurred when the cessation of nuclear weapons tests moved knowledge production from an experiential base to simulation touches on concerns that still echo throughout the nuclear weapons community....