ABSTRACT
102A striking feature of nuclear weapons science – as a science – is that its experimental form would seem to have been most powerfully determined by non-scientists. From the 1963 Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty through the 1992 Underground Test Moratorium, the experimental regimes open to nuclear weapons scientists have been predominately defined by international treaties and governments’ nuclear policies rather than by experts within the laboratory. In the post-Cold War period, this means that American nuclear weapons scientists cannot conduct what would appear to be the most basic experiment in their profession: namely, detonating a nuclear device. Moreover, the stated goal of post-Cold War nuclear weapons science is not to produce an explosive technology per se, but rather to provide the technological infrastructure for a nuclear deterrent – a means of preventing a particular species of war. Thus, at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the center of U.S. nuclear weapons science, scientists today self-consciously devote their careers to engineering the bomb so that it will never actually be used as a bomb. Caught between the competing demands of a shifting experimental foundation, state secrecy and the increasingly symbolic role nuclear weapons have come to play in (inter)national politics, the reality of the bomb as both a machine and a weapon of mass destruction for all but its most direct victims has become difficult to locate in post-Cold War America. Outside the national laboratories, U.S. nuclear weapons have come to exist primarily as political constructs.
