Atoms for Peace, Atoms for War: Probing the Paradoxes

MARGARITA
O
ATOMS
riginal
Blackwell
Malden, FOR
Article
Sociological
SOIN
©2007
0038-0245
2May
77 2007
Alpha
USA PEACE,
V. ALARIO
Publishing
Inquiry
Kappa ATOMS
Delta
Inc and WILLIAM
FOR WARR. FREUDENBURG

of Modernity*

Margarita V. Alario, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

William R. Freudenburg, University of California, Santa Barbara

Macrostructural analyses have long dominated the field of social theories of moder-
nity, with the work of Habermas, Giddens, and Beck providing influential cases in point.
Empirical studies, however, have raised questions about the applicability and empirical
soundness of macrostructural approaches to risks, technology, and nature, and U.S.-
based sociologists have offered alternative theories that have been identified in some
studies as providing better predictions and explanations than the macrostructural analy-
ses. Informed by all of the above theories, this article examines the “Atoms for Peace”
program, which established the civilian uses of nuclear energy, providing one of the
central scientific and technological achievements of modernity. Given the mixed results
of nuclear technology development, the mid-range, structurally informed perspectives of
Short and other U.S.-based sociologists do appear to provide the best interpretations,
both for the “Atoms for Peace” program and for the broader legacy of the technological
and environmental risks of modernity.

Introduction
It can be tempting to contrast the risk-related work of middle-range U.S.
sociologists against the work of largely European-based macrostructural theo-
rists of modernity, most notably including Habermas, Giddens, and Beck. As
will be spelled out below, however, it is a mistake to accept a simplistic contrast
that treats the U.S. work as “empirical,” while the European work is treated as
being “theoretical.” Both bodies of work have roots in as well as contributions
to offer to sociological theory, but the work of the U.S.-based sociologists occupies
what in many ways is also a “middle range” in terms of theoretical expecta-
tions, which lie between those of Beck, on the one hand, and of Habermas and
Giddens, on the other, particularly with respect to key questions about the
trustworthiness of scientific and technical expertise.
To be sure, there is considerable convergence across the complex macro-
structural analyses of Habermas’s Communicative Rationality, of Giddens’s
Reflexive Modernization, and of Beck’s “Risk Society,” particularly with regard
to what all three depict to some degree as the universally embedded and global
process of discursive rationality, complete with implications for high-risk
technology. As noted by Alario and Freudenburg (2003, 2006), however, there

Sociological Inquiry, Vol. 77, No. 2, May 2007, 219–240

© 2007 Alpha Kappa Delta
220 MARGARITA V. ALARIO AND WILLIAM R. FREUDENBURG

is also considerable divergence among these authors, and U.S.-based theoretical

as well as empirical work on issues of “postmodern” risk appears in many ways
to offer deeper insights than does the work of macrostructural theorists.
The work that we are calling “U.S.-based” involves the work of multiple
authors, not all of whom are based in the United States. The common thrust of
this work involves a concern for what James Short, in his presidential address
to the American Sociological Association, described as “risks to the social fabric”
(Short 1984). Taken as a whole, this additional body of literature is neither as
pessimistic as the expectations of Ulrich Beck (see, for example, Beck 1992,
1995)—who argues that technology is essentially out of control—nor as opti-
mistic as the views of Giddens (e.g., Giddens 1990), according to whom the
inputs of science and technology are relatively unproblematic. Instead, particu-
larly as this literature has been developed through the recent work of Clarke
(1999) and Freudenburg (2000), this U.S.-based work has begun to examine
the challenges of understanding more of the most terror-inducing stimuli of the
postmodern world in ways that continue to deal thoughtfully with organizational
and social structural realities.
In the sections that follow, we spell out this argument in greater detail and
trace its implications for one of the major risk-related historical projects of the
modern era, the “Atoms for Peace” program. We do so in three stages. In the
first section of this paper, we offer a summary of the ways in which European
and U.S.-based risk theorists have conceptualized the management of the high
technological achievements of modernity. In the second section, we examine
some of the aspirations for peaceful uses of nuclear technology, noting in par-
ticular that the “Atoms for Peace” program actually became in many ways a his-
torical turning point in the history of nuclear proliferation. Third, we conclude
the paper with a discussion on the legacy of the “Atoms for Peace” program and
its implications for future social scientific theories of modernity and of risks.

Whose Modernity Is This, Anyway?

A. Habermas’s Discourse Ethics and the Challenges of “Realpolitik”
We begin our consideration of the macrostructural theorists with the work
of Habermas, whose political observations often strike observers as offering a
contrast to his philosophical and theoretical studies. Habermas’s (2001) politi-
cal observations of the twentieth century recognize “gruesome features of a
century that invented the gas chambers, total wars, state-sponsored genocide
and extermination camps, brainwashing, state security apparatuses, and the
panoptic surveillance of entire populations” (p. 45). At the same time, however,
Habermas argues that the communicative applications of human reason—
including communication free from domination, in scientific, moral, and political
 ATOMS FOR PEACE, ATOMS FOR WAR 221

institutions—are not merely historical contingencies (of the West), but univer-
sally embedded in the most fundamental human capacity: the ability to speak,
argue, and reach understanding. In most cases, Habermas argues, communication
does not involve power plays, but rather involves reaching understanding and
establishing successful collective practices. There remains a question, however,
of whether any tendencies toward the universal and transcendental intersub-
jective concept of rationality can trump all others—or, by contrast, whether it is
Habermas’s normative commitment to the ideals of modernity that trumps the
theoretical consequences of any diagnosis that dwells on the major historical
events of the twentieth century. The belief in discursive rationality, in short,
may be misleading if it is not tested against political-economic power, or for
that matter, against the scientific, technological, and ecological consequences of
expert systems that developed during the modern era; Habermas’s social scien-
tific theory needs to be tested on empirical historical and sociological grounds,
not normative ones alone.
The starting points of Habermas’s reflections involve the classical conception
and critique of modernity drawn from Marx, Weber, and the Frankfurt School.
These thinkers share a descriptive approach that proceeds from the assumption
that modernity is synonymous with the institutionalization process of one type
of rationality, characterized by its technologically exploitative nature. From
Marx to Weber and the Frankfurt School, in Habermas’s view, the traditional
concept of rationality met with its aporetic and self-referential critique of a
totalizing instrumental reason. Karl Marx’s political economic writings saw the
problem with modernity to lie in the contradictory nature of social rationaliza-
tion process within the capitalist system. Weber added to the list of modernity’s
predicaments the paradoxical nature of rationalization via the bureaucratization
process, with modernization being characterized by the institutionalization of a
purposive type of rationality, above all in the capitalist economic and the
state-administrative system. It is this understanding that led Weber ([1920–1]
1985:xix) to refer to it as an “iron cage” with the consequences for individuals’
“loss of freedom and of meaning.”
In the view of the Frankfurt School, particularly as spelled out in Dialectic
of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horckheimer [1944] 1979), modernity promised
freedoms achievable through the application of scientific thinking and reason in
the mastery of nature—including the subjugation of nature, the development of
forces of production, and as Weber (1946:57) put it, “the disenchantment of the
world.” But in the process of learning how to subjugate nature, in this later
view, humans developed the technology to subjugate self and others, effectively
meaning that reason had turned upon itself. This diagnosis may reflect in part
the historical context of the early Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School—some
of whom escaped Nazi Germany, witnessed the transformation of theoretical
222 MARGARITA V. ALARIO AND WILLIAM R. FREUDENBURG

socialism into empirical Soviet totalitarianism, and upon their emigration to the
United States, experienced a different tyranny of capitalist mass culture.
In short, Habermas inherited a Critical Theory that had become con-
templative and largely resigned to a less-than-rosy fate. In some ways, such
outcomes had come to seem virtually preordained—rationality was wholly
instrumental, and every action had become an act of domination. Habermas saw
this pessimistic surrender to instrumental rationality as being both theoretically
limiting and historically problematic. Against this background, Habermas’s
so-called “communicative turn” adopted a theoretical strategy to deal with two
competing pictures of rationality—functional and communicative—along with
their corresponding action realms, namely system and lifeworld. Through com-
municative action, in Habermas’s work, it is possible to reach understanding
and to coordinate activities of different subjects, thus overcoming the deperson-
alized nature of bureaucratic organization so dreaded by Weber. Communicative
action also makes it possible to replace the reified capitalist form of production
and the impersonal mechanisms of social organization and the coordination of
action. Still, at the system level, the capitalist economy and the administrative
state are seen as reflecting integrative functions steered by money and power.
With the concept of communicative rationality, meanwhile, Habermas’s
historical work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere ([1962] 1989),
expanded on the concept of modernity to reflect the institutionalization of
deliberative political bodies in democratic states, along with the communicative
processes embodied in civil society and the political public sphere. Once the
historical work is left behind, however, Habermas’s theory-building strategy
largely reflects his normative commitment to a carefully sanitized diagnosis of
modernity. From the less-sanitized environs of an empirical world, by contrast,
it is important to ask what happens if actors invest in war, for example, rather
than in peaceful communicative negotiations. As shown by the experiences of the
twentieth century— or for that matter those so far in the twenty-first century—
the list of such “what ifs” is too long to be ignored.
All in all, Habermas’s idea of communicative rationality is an impressive
conceptual achievement, with the discursive truths of communicative rationality
being aimed at the critique of administrative-bureaucratic and market-capitalist
systems in order to win spaces for the lifeworld. His work also draws attention
to the value of discursive institutions of global governance, such as the Inter-
national Atomic Energy Agency, which will be considered later in this article.
As that later consideration will suggest, however, Habermas may have placed
too much trust in the (stated) desire of social actors and even of democratic
nation-states to reach understanding and to engage dialogically rather than
militarily. Even in the best possible discursive scenario, the experiences of the
twentieth century make it difficult to think of communicative rationality as
 ATOMS FOR PEACE, ATOMS FOR WAR 223

being institutionalized and functioning in a power vacuum. In this light, it is

worth examining the later, complementary work of Giddens and Beck, before
turning to perspectives that reflect differing views.
B. Giddens, Beck, and the Consequences of Modernity
Giddens’s Consequences of Modernity (1990) elaborates a theory of reflex-
ive modernization that opens up the possibility for modernity to appraise itself
critically. Paralleling Habermas’s guiding trust in the proliferation of communi-
cative rationalities, Giddens sees reflexive modernization as being rooted in
pluralistic democratic institutions, empowering social actors to turn a critical
eye upon themselves. In a new twist to the “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” Gid-
dens implicitly asks, what if modernization began to reflect critically on its con-
sequences for nature and society? Like Habermas, Giddens (1990:63) insists on
the global and inherently globalizing potential of this reflexive twist. From this
perspective, Giddens (1990) argues that the task at hand is to understand the
institutional mechanisms of disembedding of social life from local contexts—
that is, globalization, or as he puts it, to understand “social life as it is ordered
across time-space distanciation” (p. 50).
Giddens’s working hypothesis is not modernity, but a globalization process
that, he argues, must replace the conventional sociological preoccupation with
social systems in the context of nation-states. As one more parallel to the work
of Habermas, however, Giddens’s trust in the globalizing reach of democratic
(dialogical) institutions may not fully be matched by empirical outcomes in
practice.
Giddens provides a relatively integrated view of modernity, with four main
dimensions: industrialism, capitalism, surveillance, and military power
(1990:51). He sees the general tendency of all four toward increasing globaliza-
tion, which takes a Durkheimian form of division of world labor and of world
economies, coordinated by self-generating, self-controlling, and self-regulating
social systems. Giddens sees the key to the institutional discontinuity of moder-
nity from previous societies as involving the development of mechanisms of
disembeddedness and of reflexivity. Disembedding mechanisms depend on sep-
arating action from local contexts and on reorganizing social relations across
time and space. Reflexive mechanisms depend on the development of expert
systems (Giddens 1994). In the accumulation of expert knowledge, the intrinsic
process of specialization leads to a world of multiple authorities. These expert
authorities do not necessarily have the same view on similar issues, much in the
way in which, for instance, physicians do not necessarily share the same diagnosis
on a particular malady. Competing claims may arise, and according to Giddens,
in the tension between skepticism and the universal validity of their claim, critical
knowledge is possible. Of course, these mechanisms can be understood in
224 MARGARITA V. ALARIO AND WILLIAM R. FREUDENBURG

historical and/or in sociological dimensions, embodied by technological or

expert systems. Reflexivity in this sense means that systemic mechanisms are
capable of self-correcting the unintended consequences of their global reach.
In the end, although he is careful to distinguish his expectations from those
of Habermas, Giddens reaches conclusions that are at least comparably optimistic.
As he puts it, he envisions a “dialogic democracy” in which “dialogue in a public
space provides the means of living along with others in a relation of mutual
tolerance” and where dialogue provides “a means of ordering social relations
across time and space” (1994:115–16).
Perhaps in part because the two of them collaborated on a 1994 book on
Reflexive Modernization (Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1994), many observers
tend to lump Giddens and Beck together when it comes to discussions of social
theories involving risks. As pointed out by Alario and Freudenburg (2003),
however, seeing the two as comparable may in fact be appropriate in only one
of two respects. On the one hand, it is clearly true that both are major figures in
theoretical work on Reflexive Modernization, and when it comes to issues of
Risk, both tend to focus on truly massive, global-scale risks—those that Giddens
(1990:154) characterizes as creating the kind of society-wide concerns, so per-
vasive that they “transcend all values and all exclusionary divisions of power,”
and that Beck (1995:31) sees as involving “uncontrollable consequences” of the
sort that cannot be limited in time or space. On the other hand, Beck’s Risk
Society (1992) could scarcely differ more starkly from the views of Giddens
when it comes to issues of trust in the globalizing reach of democratic (dialogical)
institutions and the legitimacy of scientific-technological rationality.
In Beck’s view, scientific and technological systems have demonstrated an
inability to control the massive, global-scale risks that they themselves have
brought into being. In Beck’s “risk society,” accordingly, rather than agreeing
with Giddens about a largely unproblematic nature of scientific knowledge,
Beck argues that “the sciences’ monopoly on rationality is broken” (1992:29).
In Beck’s view, citizens of today’s world can now achieve a kind of solidarity
not through a shared appreciation for scientific expertise but through their
shared exposure to risks and their shared skepticism about the potential for con-
trolling those risks. In his view, in short, society has come to be characterized
by “communities of anxiety,” with hazards having become so pervasive that
they have restructured global society in a very different way than the world
envisioned by Habermas or Giddens, in a system of “organized irresponsibility”
(Beck 1988, 2000; Bauman 1991; Lash, 1993; Alario 2000; see also Picou and
Gill 2000). As noted in the joint work by Beck and Giddens (Beck, Giddens,
and Lash 1994:116), reflexivity is seen by Beck as involving a critique, but seen
by Giddens as reflecting an attitude of trust toward expert systems and toward
the political system that is expected to govern them.
 ATOMS FOR PEACE, ATOMS FOR WAR 225

Perhaps the key implication of Beck’s Risk Society ([1986] 1992) for
reflexive modernization, then, involves Beck’s view that the risks generated by
the system (which are analogous to what Giddens terms the “consequences” of
modernity) can no longer be externalized. If only because the technological and
ecological risks of modern society have by now become global, they cannot be
“exported” in the ways in which, for instance, toxic waste can be shipped to
other countries. Beck, like Giddens, is thinking about mega-risk events such as
the Chernobyl nuclear accident (1986) or the potential ecological risks associated
with genetic manipulation or climate change.
It is against this background that Beck writes about reflexive modernization.
He sees modern societies as having become self-reflective, in that collective
actors, as for instance via the formation of citizens’ political will, become self-
aware of such risks and act to remediate them. Much like Giddens, Beck has
effectively drawn from Habermas’s views on expert systems and on institutions
that structure de facto public spheres of democratic will formation, meaning
that Beck maintains a modest sense of trust in the potential for democratic
institutions to be amenable to discursive rationality. Beck, however, clearly does
not embrace the optimistic buoyancy of Giddens’s modernity and the role of
expert systems in it (see also Alario and Freudenburg 2003, 2006).
It may be this notion of the self reflexive/correcting mechanisms of moder-
nity that needs to be weighed against empirical experience—including the fact
that the world’s terrifying array of nuclear weapons have not been used in
warfare for well over half of a century—but that the same era has seen a dizzy-
ing array of other and less comforting experiences, including two world wars,
the creation of ever-more-lethal weapons of mass destruction, and an ongoing
process of global environmental harm, among other developments. Both reflex-
ivity and its reach, in short, need to be tested on historical and empirical as well
as on theoretical grounds—a point that is largely ignored by Habermas and
Giddens, but that in many ways is better handled by another body of literature
that pays more attention to the value of tying theory to empirical evidence.
C. Middle-Range Structural Work by U.S. Researchers
Like their European counterparts, U.S.-based risk theorists appear to have
responded in part to their experiences, but the experiences that have shaped their
thinking appear to have been considerably more divisive than the experiences
that have been most salient to Habermas, Giddens, and Beck. The major focus
of Giddens has been on the kind of risk that is so pervasive that it “transcends
all values and all exclusionary divisions of power” (1990:154). Freudenburg (2000),
however, has argued that much of the U.S.-based work has seen “the socially salient
risks” as being “precisely those risks that do not ‘transcend all values and all
exclusionary divisions of power’ ” (Freudenburg 2000:112, emphasis in original).
226 MARGARITA V. ALARIO AND WILLIAM R. FREUDENBURG

Part of the reason may be that the U.S.-based work went through extensive
development during the years just before much of Continental Europe would be
talking about the widespread radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl reactor in
1986, but also in a starkly different political context. As is noted in what in
some ways is the central publication within the U.S.-based tradition—the Presi-
dential Address to the American Sociological Association by James F. Short
(1984)—public discussions during the 1970s and 1980s had come to be focused
on a series of risk issues that affected citizens’ everyday lives, including air and
water pollution, hazardous wastes, industrial residues in food, toxic contamina-
tion at Love Canal, and more. During the same era, however, political discourse
in the United States had become dominated by the business-friendly, antiregu-
lation policies of the Reagan administration. Much of the public discourse on
risk, in particular, was dominated by basically accurate claims that Americans
were living longer than ever before, in combination with more questionable
claims that public concerns about “risky” technologies were thus irrational and
should be ignored in actual policy decisions—claims that Goss and Kamieniecki
(1983) found to have had significant effects on actual Congressional voting.
During this time, the “technical” studies were beginning to be called into
question, criticized by many as having been less than pure in their scientific
calculations—a problem that may well have been particularly pronounced in
the case of nuclear technologies. The earliest discussions of nuclear power plant
risks, around the time of the first “Earth Day” in 1970, led the U.S. Atomic
Energy Commission (AEC) to ask for assessments of how bad the risk of a
nuclear accident might be. According to documentation seen by one of the
authors of this article while he was serving as a Congressional Fellow during
the early 1980s, the initial answers to this inquiry pointed to the possibility of
genuinely disastrous outcomes. Whether there was a direct causal connection or
not, this initial line of inquiry was quickly abandoned; instead, the AEC and its
successor agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) encouraged the
development of what came to be known as probabilistic risk assessment—in
which any potentially negative outcome essentially needed to be multiplied by
its estimated probability. The results of the landmark Reactor Safety Study (U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission 1975) reported that the probabilities were
so close to zero that the calculated risks were almost vanishingly small. The
forcefully worded executive summary for the multivolume study—later with-
drawn as having been a bit too forceful—proclaimed that the average American
had a much greater chance of being killed by a falling meteorite than by a
malfunctioning nuclear power plant.
Only three years later, however, a review for the same agency (U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission 1978) concluded that this early landmark
study had badly underestimated its calculation of uncertainties, and as if to
 ATOMS FOR PEACE, ATOMS FOR WAR 227

underscore the point during the following year of 1979, the nuclear power plant
at Three-Mile Island, just outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, experienced an
accident that should have been virtually impossible in terms of the Reactor
Safety Study calculations (for more detailed reviews, see Freudenburg and Rosa
1984; Mitchell 1984).
By the time of his Presidential Address, accordingly, Short focused a
heavy emphasis on issues of “Fairness, trust, fiduciary responsibility, moral
responsibility, competence, [and] legitimacy” as the kinds of relationships that
“lie at the heart of the social fabric”—and that were potentially subject to
threats from failures of the very sort that showed evidence of occurring within
the worlds of science and policy at the time (Short 1984:716). These were also
the kinds of issues, Short noted, that were highlighted in Bernard Barber’s The
Logic and Limits of Trust (1983).
In short, by the time that growing numbers of U.S.-based sociologists
began to pay increased attention to theoretical issues of risk, questions of trust
and responsibility had perhaps become too salient for sociologists to accept
either the kinds of optimism associated with the thinking of Habermas and
Giddens or the equally extreme pessimism that would subsequently characterize
the work of Beck. Instead, the thoughtful assessments of the issue that were put
forth by U.S.-based researchers during the 1980s and 1990s tended to offer a
kind of balancing act—readily acknowledging and even applauding the overall
trend toward improved longevity on the one hand, but also explaining why the
public might be quite rational to express continuing or even deepening concerns
over specific forms of technological risk on the other (see, for example, Fiorino
1989; Freudenburg and Pastor 1992; Rosa 1998; Short 1999; see also Mitchell
1984 and the compilations by Krimsky and Golding 1992 and by Cohen 2000).
In what may be the most explicit statement of the “risks to the social
fabric” perspective, Freudenburg (1993) traces the roots of this literature back
to European social theoretical frameworks of an earlier vintage, deriving largely
from Durkheim ([1893] 1933) and Weber ([1918] 1946). Much as Durkheim
spelled out, Freudenburg argues, the division of labor in society does appear to
have permitted tremendous increases in the overall level of expertise and pro-
sperity enjoyed by present-day citizens of the industrialized world—but it has
done so with one important catch. With increased specialization, Freudenburg
argues, different kinds of people would come to need each other just as much
as do different organs of the body, with the heart and the stomach, for example,
each playing its own role. Unlike stomachs, however, humans have the capacity
to discern specialized interests that can differ significantly from the needs or
interests of the collectivity. Although Durkheim did not treat such possibili-
ties as being problematic, they lie at the core of what Freudenburg calls
“recreancy”—“the failure of institutional actors to carry out their responsibilities
228 MARGARITA V. ALARIO AND WILLIAM R. FREUDENBURG

with the degree of vigor necessary to merit the societal trust they enjoy” (Freu-
denburg 1993:909)—and they appear to be important, as well, in terms of the
“risks to the social fabric.”
In this third body of literature, in short, the expectation is that—far more
than was the case for our great-great-grandparents—the citizens of today’s
world tend to be not so much in control of as dependent on our technology. We
need to “count on” that technology to work properly, not just in principle but
also in practice. As a result, we are dependent not just on the technologies but
also on the social relations that bring them into being, involving whole armies
of specialists, most of whom have areas of expertise that we may not be com-
petent to judge, and many of whom we will never even meet, let alone have the
ability to control.
Extending this line of thought, more recent authors such as Clarke (1999)
have added that what might be the most irrational would be to treat corporate
statements of good intentions, specifically including contingency plans, as
having a “real” rather than a predominantly symbolic function. As noted by
Erikson (1994), for example, the very idea that it is possible for a federal
agency to come up with “objective” projections of the risks that are likely to be
created by storing highly toxic nuclear wastes for the next 10,000 years—a
period of time roughly twice as long as that generally reckoned as the history
of civilization—is at the very least remarkable. More remarkable still would be
the capacity to foresee outcomes with reasonable degrees of plausibility even
further into the future, as the U.S. Environmental Protection agency has since
argued (see the discussion in Weiss 2003:41–42) .
As if to underscore the point that work within what we are here calling the
“U.S.-based” tradition is not exclusively limited to U.S. scholars, notably,
Clarke’s insightful analyses are in many ways an extension of the earlier work
by the British historian of science, Brian Wynne (1982). Other, more recent
work that contributes importantly to this tradition has been done by other Britons
(see especially Turner and Pidgeon 1997). Intriguingly, British citizens have
experienced in what may be a more salient fashion than have most other
European citizens the results of expert systems that have fulfilled their duties of
vigilance and responsibility only imperfectly, particularly in the spread of Bovine
Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE, better known as “mad cow disease”
(Eldridge and Reilly 2003; see also Shaw 2002, 2004), although there is of course
no way of knowing whether the degree to which British scholarship, in particular,
has been shaped by this kind of exposure to the problems of recreancy.
Overall, this third and somewhat larger body of work suggests that the vast
majority of present-day technology can in fact be “counted on” to work properly
the vast majority of the time—but that citizens may be acting quite rationally if
they become concerned when some key element of the sociotechnical system
 ATOMS FOR PEACE, ATOMS FOR WAR 229

sends a “signal” (cf. Slovic 1987) that matters are not being controlled as safely
as ought to be the case. To understand the reasons, however, it would be helpful
to turn from the overall arguments to the examination of empirical, historical
evidence. For such a purpose, perhaps no case study can serve as well as an
examination of what in some ways proved to be the crowning achievement of
modern technology, involving what its proponents carefully called the “peaceful”
atom.
“Atoms for Peace” and Paradoxes of Rationalization
The “Atoms for Peace” program was an economic and foreign policy of
the Eisenhower administration, intended to promote civic and industrial uses of
nuclear technology. In principle, the “Atoms for Peace” program can be seen as
illustrating the logic of Habermas and Giddens: The program was consistent
with an emphasis on communication, and it was intended to promote strictly
peaceful uses of nuclear technology for civic and industrial purposes rather than
in more extreme forms of the military purposes for which the technologies had
originally been developed. In practice, however, the record of the “Atoms for
Peace” program not only challenges Habermas’s assumption of the discursively
rational and Giddens’s confidence in the reflexive structures of modern institutions
but it also throws light on some of the underlying risks built into modernity’s
paradoxes.
Looking back, most experts now agree that the record of the “Atoms for
Peace” program is a paradoxical one. On the one hand, rather that mirroring
closely Beck’s expectation that we would see only a system of “organized irre-
sponsibility” (Beck 1988; 2000), it needs to be recognized that atoms have not
been used in warfare since 1945, and the majority of the nations that received
nuclear technologies through the “Atoms for Peace” program have complied
with their promises to devote the technologies only to peaceful purposes. On
the other hand, a significant minority of the “Atoms for Peace” recipients not
only ignored Eisenhower’s initial intentions (see, for example, Weiss 2003) but
also went further along the path of promoting nuclear weapon proliferation. As
will be spelled out in this section, in short, although the program was developed
in a context of optimism about science and technology and trust in political
systems, it depended on systems of institutional and technological constraints
that were insufficient to assure that the resultant uses of atomic energy would in
fact be peaceful ones.
A Closer Look
We begin with a brief overview. Nuclear technology was first developed as
a sword in times of war, and then further developed as a shield in times of Cold
War. Still, in the early years of that Cold War, on December 8, 1953, President
230 MARGARITA V. ALARIO AND WILLIAM R. FREUDENBURG

Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed that nuclear technology should also become an

instrument of peace. In his speech to the General Assembly of the United
Nations, “Atoms for Peace,” he called on the United States and the Soviet
Union “to make joint contributions from their stockpiles of normal uranium and
fissionable materials . . . to devise methods whereby fissionable material be
allocated to serve the peaceful pursuits of mankind.”
When President Eisenhower proposed his “Atoms for Peace,” few observers
seem to have seen anything paradoxical in that expression nor much recognition
that, as the Nobel Laureate Hanes Alfvén would later warn, “atoms for peace
and atoms for war are Siamese twins” (as quoted in Ferguson 2003:70). More
than 50 years after Eisenhower’s speech, by contrast, most observers agree that
the “Atoms for Peace” program in fact provided at least the potential for creat-
ing Atoms for War, accelerating nuclear proliferation by spreading advanced
scientific and industrial nuclear technology to a number of countries that are not
noted for their commitments to world peace—including Iraq, Iran, and both of
the Koreas. To be fair, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—an
institution that combines technical with discursive capacities—has often been
vigorous in its efforts to maintain global safety, and the IAEA’s assessments
regarding the presence/absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq proved
to be substantially more accurate than the dismissals of those same assessments
by U.S. officials. For example, the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld,
stated in an interview on March 30, 2003, on This Week with George Stephan-
opoulos, that even though no such weapons had been found in the early days
after the invasion of Iraq, “We know where they are.” As Rumsfeld later noted
in response to skeptical questioning by a Congressional hearing, his own remark
“probably turned out not to be what one would have preferred, in retrospect”
(see, for example, the CNN story at http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/
02/04/sprj.nirq.rumsfeld.congress.ap/).
Still, as has been argued by critics such as the Union of Concerned Sci-
entists (see http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/nuclear_safety/12/03/05), the
highly enriched uranium associated with the “Atoms for Peace” reactors clearly
can be used to build nuclear weapons. In addition, in a world of heightened
concerns about terrorism, it needs to be recognized that those reactors may well
be highly attractive to terrorists, including those who are not formally affiliated
with any national governments. Given this complex state of affairs, it may be
useful to consider the ways in which the ultimate outcomes began to depart so
significantly from the originally stated intentions.
A Nucleus of History?
At the dawn of the nuclear age, the United States enjoyed a monopoly on
nuclear science and technology, in the form of the Manhattan Project, which
 ATOMS FOR PEACE, ATOMS FOR WAR 231

created the two first atomic weapons during World War II. This monopoly ended
on August 29, 1949, when the Soviets successfully tested their own fission
weapon, thus beginning the Cold War with an arms race that would reach its
acme in October 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis. By then, the nuclear arms
race between the two superpowers had led to the development of arsenals that
had literally global destructive capacities. Ultimately—despite the efforts by
small parts of the globe, such as New Zealand, that declared themselves to be
nuclear-free zones—the U.S.–Soviet Cold War rivalry spilled over East and West
Europe, South and Central America, South Asia, the Middle East, Australia, and
almost the entire continent of Africa.
During the early years of the arms race, in April of 1952, the Truman
administration established a nuclear advisory committee, chaired by Robert
Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” to explore peaceful uses of
nuclear technology. The Oppenheimer report was filed on January 15, 1953—
just days before Eisenhower was inaugurated president. The report concluded
that, as Leonard Weiss (2003:35) explains, “large increases in production of fis-
sile material had made it virtually impossible to verify nuclear disarmament
agreements because of the uncertainty in accounting for all the material that
had been produced. . . .” Despite this conclusion, the Eisenhower administration
became committed to a policy that would lead to the further distribution of
fissile materials such as uranium—apparently in part because the president
thought there would be a zero-sum game between uranium for peace and
uranium for war.
Given the times and the context of the Cold War, there was something
intrinsically attractive in Eisenhower’s vision, particularly in a world that was
worried about a nuclear third world war. As Weiss noted, this was especially so
with memories of the nuclear ending of World War II still fresh in the public
memory. Still, the relevant question for a rigorous social scientific analysis has
less to do with the initial appeal of a proposal than with the actual outcomes
that resulted, and with the implications that such outcomes represent for social
scientific theory.
Eisenhower’s 1953 initiative was bold. Under the aegis of the United
Nations, Eisenhower proposed a new Atomic Energy Agency to come up with
ways to channel fissionable material to the production of energy for civic uses.
Among others, one of the purposes would be to provide electrical energy in the
power-starved areas of the world. The 1954 Atomic Energy Act followed, and
within a year of Eisenhower’s speech, the United States had begun its own
program.
Reversing earlier policies of secrecy, the United States began training
foreign scientists at a new School of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the
Argonne Laboratory and declassified nuclear cooperation agreements with
232 MARGARITA V. ALARIO AND WILLIAM R. FREUDENBURG

more than two dozen countries. Those initial moves would prove to be only the
tip of the iceberg. In August 1955, the first United Nations conference on
Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy was held in Geneva, Switzerland. While
French nuclear scientists shared their expertise on plutonium extraction, U.S.
colleagues shared declassified data and technologies. All in all, some 25,000
nuclear scientists and engineers attended—one of whom was Homi Bhabha, the
future “father of India’s atomic bomb.” He and roughly a thousand other Indian
nuclear scientists participated in United States–India nuclear research projects
from 1955 to 1974. The International Atomic Energy Agency was founded
in 1957, and by 1962, 37 “peaceful bilateral agreements” had been signed to
promote the industrial and civic application of nuclear technology.
With this open nuclear export policy initiated by the United States and
endorsed by other Western suppliers, the “Atoms for Peace” framework offered
legitimacy, as well as significantly increasing the technical and financial feasi-
bility of building and operating uranium-enriching plants, plutonium-reprocessing
facilities, and nuclear reactors. Nuclear scientists had convincing arguments
and powerful sponsors on their sides when they sought to persuade national
leaders to pursue nuclear technology. In a small but significant number of cases,
unfortunately, those national leaders also produced nuclear weapons.
It would be inappropriate to create the impression that weapons proliferation
had resulted from anything more than a small minority of cases, so in that
sense, the peaceful vision enunciated by Eisenhower could be seen as having
been largely justified. At the same time, however, even “a few cases” of nuclear
weapons proliferation can have ominous implications—potentially including
ominous implications for the future of life on earth—and it is because the
program ultimately included enough such “cases” that most experts appear to
have reached the conclusion that a central outcome of the “Atoms for Peace”
program was a significant increase in the proliferation of atoms for war (see,
for example, Sokolski 2001; Pilat et al. 1985; Weiss 2003). With the benefit of
hindsight, in short, the “Atoms for Peace” terminology seems far more ironic
than President Eisenhower would have wished.
This irony has reached into the virtual reality of the proliferation of what
are now sometimes called virtual nuclear power states (see, for example, Broad
2004). Virtual nuclear weapon states are nations that have the “know-how” of
nuclear power and could build nuclear weapons in a matter of months. Some of
these states include Japan, Germany, Iran, Canada, Brazil, Taiwan, and Kazakhstan.
Even if the IAEA gives a nation a clean bill of health regarding nuclear pro-
liferation, that nation can still retain the kind of scientific and technological
capability that can permit it to become a member of the “nuclear club” in short order.
To illustrate the magnitude of this problem, Table 1 offers a fourfold typo-
logy of nations with nuclear technology. The first category includes recognized
 Table 1
The “Atoms for Peace” Program and the Global Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons

States receiving nuclear technologies under “Atoms for Peace”

States developing
nuclear weapons
independently
Status regarding Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty
Present at 1955 UN Peaceful Current Some of the states
Uses of Atomic Energy proliferation with “virtual”
Conference; subsequently concerns knowledge of nuclear
developed nuclear weapons weapons development
Signatories to Nuclear China India North Korea* Argentina***
Nonproliferation Treaty France Israel Iran* Brazil***

ATOMS FOR PEACE, ATOMS FOR WAR

Russia Pakistan Iraq** Canada
United Kingdom Germany
United States Japan
South Africa***
Recent adherent to Nuclear Algeria
Nonproliferation Treaty Belarus
(2004) Kazakhstan
Libya
Ukraine

*North Korea had a successful nuclear test on October 9, 2006, as the international community had raised concerns about Iran’s
nuclear technology development.
**Presumably destroyed during the 1991 Gulf War.
***While not present at the United Nations (UN) 1955 meeting, these countries acquired nuclear technology under the “Atoms

233
for Peace” program.
234 MARGARITA V. ALARIO AND WILLIAM R. FREUDENBURG

nuclear nations that developed their own nuclear technologies without the
“help” of the “Atoms for Peace” program. It may well be noteworthy that all of
the states in this first category are signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation
(NPT) Treaty. The states in the three remaining categories all received nuclear
technologies through the “Atoms for Peace” program, and among these states,
compliance with the NPT Treaty is less complete. The second category includes
nations that were initial recipients of the “Atoms for Peace” program and that
went on to develop nuclear weapons programs of their own. The third category
includes those nations that acquired nuclear technologies either directly or indi-
rectly under the auspices of the “Atoms for Peace” program and have since
raised proliferation concerns. The fourth and final category includes those
nations that have nuclear capabilities or the know-how, as the jargon goes, that
are “real or virtual” nuclear nations and that acquired their nuclear technology
under the “Atoms for Peace” program, but that to the best of our knowledge,
have adhered to the Nonproliferation Treaty, at least to date.
Two points about Table 1 are especially worth noting: (1) contrary to
Beck’s expectations for “organized irresponsibility,” there are more nations in
category four of this table (eight) than in categories two and three (a total
of six). (2) This fact may provide at best only modest support for the more
cheerful expectations of Habermas and Giddens—or for that matter, little
comfort in a world where nuclear weapons are continuing to proliferate, which is
one of the key reasons why so many analysts have reached less than optimistic
conclusions about the long-term impacts of the “Atoms for Peace” program.
The proliferation of communicative or reflexive institutions on par with
such real and virtual nuclear capabilities—à la Habermas or Giddens—remains
at best a heuristic proposition. Helpful procedures have been proposed for
moving toward such a solution, but the proposals have not necessarily been
accompanied by the proof of actual behavioral change. Communicative or
reflexive institutional ability has not matched the inherent risks of these
organized technological developments. Instead, as argued by the largely U.S.-
based scholars, working results have included a set of risks to the social fabric,
as well as to the ecosystems on which all social activities depend.
The nuclear inspection programs of the IAEA may help in the endeavor of
promoting civilian energy uses. Indeed, Habermas and Giddens might even
argue that such inspections attest to the reflexive capacity of contemporary
institutions. Such arguments do have a degree of plausibility, given that the
IAEA has often been one of the most successful organizations in the ranks of
global governance. Against great odds—and in a world where the stakes could
scarcely be higher—the IAEA has played one key role in an international
regime that so far has kept nuclear weapons from being used in battle since
1945.
 ATOMS FOR PEACE, ATOMS FOR WAR 235

As noted earlier, however, that degree of success may still provide only
partial reassurance. With the exception of the five recognized Nuclear Weapon
States identified in the left column of Table 1, all of the nations that have devel-
oped nuclear weapons capacities have done so through the civilian nuclear
fuel cycle—including Israel, North Korea, India, Pakistan, and South Africa,
and most recently, Iran. The development of nuclear arsenal occurs in large
industrial complexes, where the work on civilian nuclear power and nuclear
weapons resemble genetic twins: Even the most skilled and experienced of
nuclear engineers and scientists have reported difficulties identifying one from
the other. To paraphrase Weber, this form of technological modernization is no
“horse-drawn carriage which one could climb out of at will.” Nuclear technology
is no doubt one of the crowning technological achievements of the modern era,
but one whose record is mixed, at best. Its acceptance under the assumptions of
universal grounds (Habermas) or the globalizing reach of reflexive institutions
(Giddens), in short, may well be another form of universal risk.
Discussion: Dealing with the Genie, Out of the Bottle?
Since 1991, the year that marked the dissolution of the Soviet Union and
the end of the Cold War, where do we stand on nuclear weapons? And what are
the consequences to social theories of modernity? The record stands as follows:
Britain and France continue to have nuclear weapons, which they first devel-
oped during the Cold War, as defenses against potential U.S. isolationism.
China has them because Russia has kept them, Russia has kept them because
the United States has them, and vice versa. India and Pakistan both now pub-
licly acknowledge having nuclear weapons after having tested them in May
1998. Despite the pressure of the Cold War, superpowers in the context of the
Israeli–Arab conflict and the pressure of the United States afterward, Israel is
widely seen as continuing to possess “secret” nuclear forces.
The legitimacy of the war in Iraq rested on the possession of weapons of
mass destruction by the regime of Saddam Hussein. No nuclear weapons were
found after the United States and its allies occupied Iraq in early 2003. This was
a major failure by the intelligence agencies responsible for tracking down Iraq’s
nuclear program which shows, among other things, the extraordinary difficulty
of tracking any adversary’s nuclear capacities. Authoritarian regimes such as
North Korea and unstable states such as Pakistan have opted out of the nuclear
nonproliferation treaty to develop their own nuclear weapons. The same appears
increasingly likely to prove true for Iran. Today, terrorists groups seek weapons
of mass destruction—and a global black market delivers nuclear fuel, equip-
ment, and even physicists. In another potential paradox, as noted by Robert
O’Neill, “With the end of the Cold War, the utility of nuclear weapons has
changed. Formerly, they were the weapons of the top dogs; now they are
236 MARGARITA V. ALARIO AND WILLIAM R. FREUDENBURG

becoming weapons of the underdog” (2000:191). To complicate matters still

more, even if the IAEA is able to keep a tight watch on a nation’s nuclear
capacities, the agency is unlikely to be able to inspect the arsenal of terrorist
groups that are not associated with nation-states.
From the context of the present, the “Atoms for Peace” program offers an
important opportunity to deal with key macrosociological conceptions of
modernity and to ask what lessons can be learned in the process. Nuclear
powers—big and small, real and virtual—have built expensive facilities and
complex bureaucracies that often defy detection or comprehension, let alone
public trust. Are the most sociologically important implications of this history
the ones that lead to the understanding of communicative rationality, as suggested
by Habermas? Alternatively, does the worldwide development of civilian (and other)
uses of nuclear energy support the view that the consequences of modernity are
best associated with trust in expert systems, as suggested by Giddens?
In our view, the answer is no. To be sure, Habermas displays trust that
institutions and actors will engage in communicative action, while Giddens
trusts in their reflexive capacity, both in acting independently and by engaging
experts systems, in the process that Giddens understands as a double herme-
neutic. Yet as appealing as this perspective may be to any macrostructural social
theory, we see the overall pattern of outcomes as providing reasons for caution
about simply embracing these relatively unproblematic expectations.
To accept the strongly pessimistic views of Beck would seem to us to err
in the opposite direction. In a world of great complexity, much anger, and many
conflicts, the nuclear weapons that have proliferated throughout even the most
unstable portions of the globe have still not been used in anger—not since the
main proponent of the “Atoms for Peace” program, the United States, used
nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in an effort to speed the conclu-
sion of World War II. The system is not perfect. Yet as we read the evidence, to
see the world as having become characterized by “communities of anxiety,”
united in a shared skepticism toward science and a belief that the world is
increasingly dominated by “organized irresponsibility” would be too harsh.
As we survey the landscape of technological risks, we see greater strengths
in diagnoses that trace more directly to the tradition of Weber, who emphasized the
paradoxical outcomes of the social rationalization process of modern society.
As Weber first pointed out, bureaucratic organizations may be necessary to
manage complex social systems, and it may even lead to more efficient forms
of administration, but this organizational accomplishment comes at a price—
and in the age of nuclear technology, it also comes at a risk. We are thinking as
well about Adorno and Horkheimer, who discussed the dialectics of instrumental
rationalization, and more recently, scholars such as Short, Erikson, Freudenburg,
and Clarke. Technological rationality may also lead to its own irrationalities,
 ATOMS FOR PEACE, ATOMS FOR WAR 237

and yet it may do so in ways that are varied and variegated rather than being
predictably and consistently negative or positive (Alario and Freudenburg 2003).
The pessimistic view, in short, needs to be kept in perspective as well. As
stressed by scholars working in the tradition of Short, even though it is impor-
tant to recognize the risks of potential nuclear disaster, it is also important to
emphasize that not a single nuclear weapon has been employed in war since the
end of World War II. In broader ways as well, the modern world has experi-
enced a series of political, socioeconomic, and scientific innovations that have
changed the character and structure of social systems—often in beneficial
directions, including ideas of democracy, equality, scientific research, and more
(see, for example, the discussion by Freudenburg 1993). Still, although nuclear
weapons have not for the past half-century been used in anger against enemies,
there are a disturbing number of cases in which the development, testing, and
use of nuclear technologies have created serious threats to the health and the
environmental conditions of presumed “friends” (see, for example, the assess-
ments by Jacob 1990; Shrader-Frechette 1993; Dunlap, Kraft, and Rosa 1993;
Flynn et al. 1995). Finally, although nuclear technologies continue to hold the
promise of peaceful as well as military uses, the record shows that the military
possibilities of nuclear technologies have introduced a number of important
perils, both real and potential, that are yet to be adequately anticipated or
controlled.
Conclusion
It is possible to learn from a number of theoretical traditions and to
draw on a number of ideas to understand the paradoxical conditions of modern
technological innovations. Weber understood organizations to be rational to
the degree that they constrained actors to act in purposive-rational ways—
calculably, reliably, and efficiently. He also identified some of the potential
traps of this structural arrangement, including those relating to scientific and
technological systems. Still, those who have followed in his footsteps have not
always done so well.
The “Atoms for Peace” program was an illustrative, historical turning
point. In an important test of Habermas’s and Giddens’s trust in the communi-
cative and reflexive capacities of modern institutions, it offered an ideal of
turning war-making technology to peaceful uses. In the years since it was
announced, the program has instead become responsible for nuclear prolifera-
tion. At the same time, however, it could not be said that the record to date has
been sufficiently negative to fit with the perspective of Beck.
In view of the paradoxes of scientific and technological developments,
even if we assume as a working hypothesis well-functioning and reflexive
democratic institutions, we must contend with the ecological risks brought into
238 MARGARITA V. ALARIO AND WILLIAM R. FREUDENBURG

the world in association with such advanced technological systems. At the same
time, we must also be fair in recognizing cases of at least relative success in
preventing “organized irresponsibility.” In the end, the work of scholars such as
Short, Erikson, Clarke, and Freudenburg—who have devoted more extensive
attention to the interplay between theory and evidence—appears to offer the
more fruitful guide to our research and our findings.

ENDNOTE

*Please direct all correspondence to Margarita V. Alario at the Faculty of Sociology and
Environmental Studies, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, WI 53190.
E-mail: alariom@uww.edu.

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