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Plutonium: A History of the World's Most Dangerous Element by Jeremy

Bernstein

Article in Technology and Culture · January 2011

DOI: 10.2307/23020591

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B O O K R E V I E W S

projects. For instance, it discusses the air force’s Mach 3 spy plane, the SR-
71, which did not enter service until many years after Eisenhower’s presi-
dency. It also briefly discusses the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, which was
started under Kennedy and canceled in 1969 by Richard Nixon. But it does
not contain information on the Gambit high-resolution reconnaissance
satellite, which started under Eisenhower, first flew in 1963, and operated in
upgraded versions until the mid-1980s, and was arguably nearly as impor-
tant as Corona. Early Gambit photography was declassified in 2002, and it
was substantially better than the broad-coverage Corona imagery. Bru-
gioni does not explain how this significantly better imagery changed the in-
telligence community. The omission cannot be due to security concerns,
because the book contains other information, such as a brief discussion of
the Quill radar satellite flown once in 1964, which remains more classified
than Gambit.
The book also has one rather glaring copy-editing mistake, occasionally
referring to the National Photographic Interpretation Center—Brugioni’s
employer—as the National Photographic Intelligence Center. But overall,
Eyes in the Sky is a useful addition to the literature on the development of
these vital intelligence systems, and a fun read.
DWAYNE DAY
Dwayne Day is a program officer for the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board of the
National Research Council where he directs studies on NASA space science programs. He has
written frequently about the history of military and intelligence space systems.

Plutonium: A History of the World’s Most Dangerous Element.

By Jeremy Bernstein. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009.
Pp. xii+194. $17.95.

Plutonium is an exemplary case of fine science writing, combining scientific

expertise and smooth narrative, enlivened by a personal touch. A physicist
and former staff writer for The New Yorker, Jeremy Bernstein has a deep
well of experience from which he can draw, and he has a gift for bringing
even the most obscure technical points into the clear light of day. Readers
will come away with an enhanced understanding of the scientific strange-
ness of plutonium, an appreciation of the periodic table of elements, and a
fresh store of interesting anecdotes about Einstein, Bohr, Meitner, Fermi,
and others less well-known.
As a history, however, Plutonium suffers from its brevity: there are seri-
ous omissions in the book and some important issues receive superficial
treatment. Bernstein is at his best describing the questions that plagued sci-
entists about the periodic table, the inner workings of the nucleus, and the
physical properties of plutonium. As he demonstrates, plutonium is bi-
zarre. For example, it behaves weirdly in its allotropic phases (a term

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describing how the atoms are bonded together). In two of these, volume
actually decreases when the temperature is raised. Bernstein also provides
an accessible account of some of the early history of X-rays and radioac-
tivity. He takes the story into World War II to describe the production of
plutonium, first by co-discoverers Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan and
then by large-scale reactors in the American bomb project.
APRIL
Plutonium is a tale of discovery, ingenious solutions, and priority dis-
2011 putes. Bernstein devotes considerable, perhaps disproportionate, attention
VOL. 52 to the German atomic bomb (Bernstein also annotated the 2000 book Hit-
ler’s Uranium Club), though precious little on the Soviet one, to showcase
differences with the Americans. His commentary about nonscientific sub-
jects is usually anecdotal and is openly subjective. For example, discussing
Otto Hahn’s work on chemical weapons in World War I, he writes, “As far
as I know, he never stated that the use of poison gas was morally wrong” (p.
41). When discussing science, Bernstein injects his own views without ex-
plaining how they have any particular weight. Again on Hahn: “My own
view is that Hahn never understood the physics of fission” (p. 48). This kind
of offhand comment is hard to take seriously when describing a man who
won the Nobel Prize for discovering fission, even if some scholars today
contest the award.
Bernstein is most comfortable describing what happens inside an atom
and in telling the tale of plutonium’s discovery, not in trying to understand
controversies and practices since World War II. The only explicitly postwar
chapter is one called “Now What?” which skips lightly over much of the
cold war. When he broaches the tricky subject of radiation exposure to sci-
entists (including the IPPU group, “I pee plutonium”), he does not attempt
his own analysis. Instead, he employs long quotes by scientists at the time.
For example, we have pages from George Voelz, the health physicist who
studied the IPPU group and later assessed the Karen Silkwood case. Voelz’s
recollections are fascinating, but some analysis by Bernstein would have
been helpful. Instead he simply writes, “How convincing one finds it can, I
am sure, be debated.” (p. 126). This is hardly an enlightening summation.
There is nothing at all in Bernstein’s book on the human experiments
conducted with plutonium under the Manhattan Project and Atomic
Energy Commission. The details of these can be found in journalist Eileen
Welsome’s 1999 book The Plutonium Files, or simply by pointing one’s
internet browser to the U.S. Department of Energy’s website. Bernstein
does devote some attention to the Hanford nuclear site, in a fifteen-page
chapter that runs down a host of other contemporary issues: environmen-
tal damage, health risks, energy policy, and weapons proliferation. It is a
thin treatment, but Bernstein lets himself off the hook with the following
statement on Hanford’s pollution from plutonium production: “This is
such an enormous and emotional subject that to do justice to it, if justice
can be done, would require another and different book” (p. 163). Evidently

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not a book called Plutonium: A History of the World’s Most Dangerous Ele-
ment. Bernstein instead has played to his laudable strengths, namely in
explaining scientific concepts, tracing the paths of scientific discovery, and
providing a bit of historical and anecdotal context along the way.
JACOB DARWIN HAMBLIN
Jacob Darwin Hamblin teaches the history of science at Oregon State University. He is the
author of Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age
(2008), and Oceanographers and the Cold War (2005).

The Road to Yucca Mountain: The Development of Radioactive

Waste Policy in the United States.
By J. Samuel Walker. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Pp. xi+228. $34.95.

Once again, J. Samuel Walker has demonstrated that there is an important

place for public history in the scholarly arena. The Road to Yucca Mountain
is the fifth in a series of official histories of nuclear regulation. As with the
other volumes in the series, the monograph is well-researched, objective,
and informative. Although the story that Walker tells is primarily Atomic
Energy Commission/Nuclear Regulatory Commission document-driven,
the author engages sources from other key agencies as well. He also pauses
to provide important context, especially regarding public reaction to the
problem of nuclear waste disposal.
Solving the problem of waste disposal is not unlike a scene from Monty
Python and the Holy Grail: the noble knights gallop toward their destination,
yet the next scene finds them just as far away. At least the Pythons finally
arrive at the castle. No such luck for the Department of Energy (DOE). As
Walker concludes about where we stand today: “The quest for a long-term
solution to high-level waste disposal remained a perplexing national prob-
lem that was too important to ignore, too controversial to compromise eas-
ily, and too complicated to settle conclusively” (p. 186).
Early advocates for weapons development and commercial nuclear
power predicted a far different outcome. For instance, Herbert M. Parker,
who supervised health physics at the Hanford Engineer Works, was con-
vinced that “present disposal procedures may be continued . . . with the as-
surance of safety for a period of perhaps 50 years” (p. 8). The scientists at
Hanford were so confident about their margin for error that they consis-
tently placed national security concerns over safety concerns, going so far
as to intentionally release iodine-131 into the air in 1949 in order to glean
information about Soviet plutonium production. The results troubled even
Parker, who balked at further intentional releases.
The road from Hanford to the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, nuclear waste
repository, the object of DOE’s 8,600-page licensing application issued in

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