杏吧原创

THE jacket of The Good Servant asserts that it is 鈥渁 vivid account of how America鈥檚 most brilliant nuclear scientists, in the once top-secret weapons laboratories at Los Alamos, are putting their talents to use for peace, with astonishing results.鈥� I am tempted to add 鈥渘ever before has a publisher鈥檚 blurb been more misleading鈥�.

The book claims to show how the Los Alamos researchers have turned in droves from war to peace. In so doing, it adopts a writing style that consistently outshines the blurb 鈥� arms controllers 鈥渢wo-stepped around a treaty for a couple of years鈥�, the US and the Soviet Union competed 鈥渙n and off the playing field of deterrence鈥�. Initially attractive, the style palls after a few pages.

The more fundamental problem, though, concerns the underlying theme, although this may be more the fault of the publisher than author. The book stems from visits and discussions carried out at the start of the 1990s. The Cold War might have been over, but with President George Bush in power there were few threats to defence budgets. Nearly half the book deals with the nuclear weapons work at Los Alamos at this time and, ignoring its style, there are some useful insights. An enduring impression is of a community of weapons designers deeply committed to their work in the near-absolute belief that they were making an essential contribution to peace. The belief in the absolute rightness of deterrence was basic, and justified the massive nuclear arsenals, more than 20 000 weapons in the US alone, together with every kind of exotic development.

This theme could have been developed and explored but Bailey then concentrates on describing some of the laboratory鈥檚 nonmilitary programmes 鈥� contributions to medicine, basic nuclear physics and space exploration 鈥� diverting the whole book into the swords and ploughshares theme. This simply does not work and is even internally inconsistent. Los Alamos certainly has increased its nonmilitary research, but to contend that it is the great arms conversion success story is just plain wrong. As Bailey reports, the numbers in the core nuclear weapons programme have been halved but still stand at 900 people. No new nuclear weapons are being developed currently, but one of the lab鈥檚 major efforts is on counter-proliferation as 鈥渞ogue states鈥� happily replace the Soviet Union as a handy new threat.

Even after all the current arms control treaties are fully implemented in 2003, the US and Russians will maintain combined nuclear arsenals of around 14 000 weapons, and one of the most significant current research programmes concerns simulation techniques needed to 鈥渢est鈥� new warheads after a comprehensive test ban is negotiated next year. Moreover, the nuclear strategists now advocate nuclear first-use in response to biological or chemical attack, a notion given new importance by the recent revelations of the Iraqi biological warfare programme in 1991.

Los Alamos may shrink, but it looks to have a safe future as a key military research centre. To suggest otherwise, as this book does, is deeply misleading.