Alario & Freudenburg 2003

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Sociological Forum, Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2003 (C2003)

The Paradoxes of Modernity: Scientific Advances,Environmental Problems, and Risksto the Social Fabric?

Margarita Alario1,3 and William Freudenburg2

Recent reviews have contrasted U.S. sociologists empirical work on tech-nological risks with the theoretical risk work of Giddens and Beck, but thereality is more complex. Most U.S. sociologists are less likely than Giddensor Beck to see risks as transcending socioeconomic and other divisions,but the United Statesbased work tends to interpret the trustworthiness of

scientifictechnical expertise in ways that lie between the arguments of Beckand Giddens. An examination of early nuclear technologies indicates that theUnited Statesbased perspectives provide a better fit, for theoretical as wellas empirical reasons. The development of nuclear technologies was mixed,rather than high or low, in its competence and trustworthiness, and it cre-ated social and environmental risks that did not so much transcend socialdivisions as to reinforce them.

KEY WORDS: Argonne National Laboratory; Chicago; Cold War; ecosystem protection;Forest Preserve; Manhattan Project; nuclear technology; reflexive modernization theory;social theory of risk.

INTRODUCTION

Discussions of technological risks have long been dominated by tech-nical disciplines, such as engineering and applied mathematics, but sincethe 1980s, increasing numbers of sociologists have begun to analyze techno-logical risks. Particularly in recent years, in fact, sociological contributions

1Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 1023 PSL, MC-634, Urbana, Illinois 61801.

2Environmental Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, California.


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194 Alario and Freudenburg

have become sufficiently numerousand sufficiently diverseto have cre-ated not just a certain level of confusion, but also a number of questionsabout the usefulness of potentially competing approaches.

The present paper responds to this current state of affairs in two ways.First, we offer a relatively simple comparison of the three best-known linesof macrosociological analysis of risk-and-society issuesinvolving the workof Ulrich Giddens, of Anthony Beck, and of a set of United Statesbased so-ciologists. Second, we compare the strengths and weaknesses of these threeapproaches for dealing with a particularly telling case, examining the wayin which the prototypical hazards of a risk society, involving nuclear tech-nologies, were originally developed. We conclude the paper by discussingimplications for future research.

WHICH RISK SOCIETY IS THIS?

To many of those who have offered observations on risk-and-societyissues from outside of sociologya category that includes the vast majorityof all those who have offered such observationsthe notion that the presentworld might be considered a risk society would clearly come as a surprise.Particularly in the United States, much of the public policy discourse relating

to risk has focused instead on what low levels of risk have now been achievedby the advanced industrialized societies. These widespread views have beensummarized, critiqued, and dissected by any number of social scientists (seee.g. Fiorino, 1989; Freudenburg and Pastor, 1992; Rosa, 1998; Short, 1999; seealso the compilations by Krimsky and Golding, 1992, and by Cohen, 2000a);briefly, however, the emphasis of most of that work tends to be on statisticalrisks (particularly the risk of death) and on the fact that, at least for industri-alized countries, the statistical risks of death have dropped dramatically overthe course of the twentieth century. For the most part, when authors from

this technologically oriented literature have discussed the relationships be-tween technological risk and the broader society, they have called either foreducating the public about real risk numbers, or else for removing thepublic from risk decisions altogether; some of the more extreme titles decryeverything from phantom risk, to higher superstition, to eco-hystericsand the technophobes (see e.g. Beckmann, 1973; Fosteret al.,1993; Grossand Levitt, 1994).

With very few exceptions, sociological treatments of risk-and-society is-sues have expressed starkly different viewsalthough that is not to say that,

save for a shared lack of enthusiasm for the sociologically naive argumentsthat still tend to dominate public policy discussions of risk in the United


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The Paradoxes of Modernity 195

of views. The roots of this sociological work date back at least to the time ofHabermas (1970), with many sociologists having raised questions about thelegitimacy of the social order, but much of the earlier thinking about ques-

tions of legitimation crisis tended to emphasize the challenges of main-taining legitimacy by minimizingeconomicrisks and maximizing economicperformance (see e.g., Block, 1987; Habermas, 1970, 1975; OConnor, 1973;Offe, 1985). Particularlybeginningin the1980s, however, increasing numbersof sociologists began to focus on potential challenges to legitimacy relatingto technologicalrisksand as the amount of attention has increased, thepaths have tended to diverge.

Today, even if we focus merely on those who have offered macrosoci-ological lines of analysis, it is possible to discern three main patterns in the

accumulated sociological work on risk. The first two of these lines are asso-ciated with two well-known European social theorists of reflexive modern-ization who are often discussed together, but whose work actually divergesin important and relevant ways. The third, by contrast, combines the work ofseveral scholars, predominantly from the United States, whose work showsconsiderable convergence on relevant questions. We discuss all three briefly,beginning with the two European theorists.

Reflexive Modernization

One of the most vital bodies of sociological work in recent decades hasinvolved the scholarship on reflexive modernization. While this body ofwork is both large and complex (for overviews/summaries, see e.g. Bauman,1991; Lash, 1993), perhaps its most important proponents are two majortheorists who are both based in Europe, namely Ulrich Beck and AnthonyGiddens.

In many ways, it is certainly understandable that the work of these two

theorists would be seen as involving important similarities. Both of these so-ciologistsarepartofwhatinGermaniscalled zeitdiagnostisches Soziologieliterally a time-diagnosing sociology, although in essence, the phrase sug-gests a down-to-earth sociology. In addition, their work reflects a good dealof compatibility on the important issue of risk, with both authors placing spe-cial emphasis on what Giddens calls high-consequence risks. In the workof Giddens, this phrase refers to truly formidable, global-scale risks, rangingfrom nuclear warfare and nuclear winter to chemical pollution of the seas(Giddens, 1990:124, 125)risks that he characterizes as creating a society-

wide concern so pervasive that it transcends all values and all exclusionarydivisions of power (Giddens, 1990:154). Beck, similarly, pays special atten-


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sees as involving uncontrollable consequences that are not limited in timeor space (Beck, 1995:31), and which he sees as presenting risks so massiveas to destroy the . . . principal pillars of insurance, being too large to be

underwritten even by modern-day insurance companies (Beck, 1995:127).Although both of these theorists place a good deal of emphasis on large

issues of reflexivity and risk, however, they do so in ways that include anumber of important differences, including differences in the concept of re-flexivity itself. Giddens draws largely from the work of ethnomethodologists,who have used the termreflexivityto emphasize the fact that our sense oforder is a result of conversational processes: it is created in talk, and thatto describe a situation is at the same time to create it (Marshall, 1994:149).In Becks theory, by contrast, reflexivity contains two key elements, namely,

awareness and reflectionawareness of the global consequences of indus-trial and technological developments, and reflection upon the risks they im-pose.

Perhaps more importantly, these two authors have also taken the no-tion of the self-referential nature of reflexivity in quite different directions.In hisConsequences of Modernity, Giddens (1990) emphasizes the founda-tional nature of expert systems, with particular reference to their functionin securing freedom from risks. According to this line of analysis, thereare interconnections between the systems of reflexive modernization that

have been developed for dealing with hazards (social, environmental, andeven psychological) and the liberating nature of expertise. InModernity andSelf-Identity, Giddens (1992) continues to develop these ideas, depicting thebreakup of traditional communities, in conjunction with globalization pro-cesses, as freeing individuals to reflect on their actions and to develop orchoose their identities. He sees scientific knowledge as playing an increas-ingly important role in that process, providing key potential inputs for theexercise of dialogic democracya concept involving open communica-tive exchanges, independent from formal political institutions, and spread-

ing social reflexivity in ways that condition both everyday life and collectiveaction (Giddens, 1994:115). Other scholars (e.g., Couch and Kroll-Smith,1997:189) have taken Giddenss idea further, tracing the movement of sci-entific knowledge away from its institutionally protected and privileged lo-cation in universities and corporations and into lay communities (see e.g.,Brown, 1987). Although Giddens is careful to distinguish his expectationsfrom the philosophical theorem of universal pragmaticsand from the idealspeech situationenvisioned by Habermas, he nevertheless sees high po-tential for contributions to the social order. As Giddens puts it, his vision

of dialogic democracy is based in part on the expectation that dialogue ina public space provides the means of living along with others in a relation


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Beck on the issue of transcendence, as we explain below, the United Statesbased work on a second key issue, involving the roles and trustworthiness ofscientific knowledge and technical experts in democratic systems, involves

not so much a counterpoint to as a position that is essentiallybetweentheviews of the two European theorists. We will explore both of these pointstranscendence and the roles of scientific/technical expertsin turn.

Transcendence

Like Giddens and Beck, United Statesbased risk researchers have de-voted a good deal of attention to nuclear, chemical, and ecological risksthe

work of Perrow (1984), for example, originally grew out of investigations forthe presidents commission on the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclearfacility in 1979but much of the United Statesbased work has treated thesocially salient risks as being precisely those risks that donottranscendall values and all exclusionary divisions of power (Freudenburg, 2000:112;emphasis in original). The distinction is particularly clear because, in manyrespects, the early U.S. work on technological risks and disasters grew outof an earlier emphasis on so-called natural hazards and disasters, such asearthquakes and tornadoes. The earliest of the well-known studies of what

are sometimes called technological disasters, in fact, was Eriksons studyof a flood in West Virginia (Erikson, 1976) caused by the collapse of a coalmines earthen dam, leading to the flooding of a valley that left more than ahundred dead and more than a thousand homeless. As Erikson pointed outin considerable detail, however, rather than creating a communitywhetherof anxiety or any other kindthe experience of risks from this human-caused disaster led to what the subtitle of his book called thedestructionofcommunity. Erikson emphasized the destruction of community partly be-cause the phenomenon was so different from the pattern that had been seen

more commonly in so-called natural hazards and disasters up to that time.As the disaster literature had clearly shown by the 1970s, natural disas-

ters did indeed tend to be characterized by what had become known in thatliterature as a therapeutic community (e.g., Barton, 1970). In the com-monly observed pattern, citizens from all walks of life would come together,more or less spontaneously, to offer aid to the victims in the aftermath adisaster. Such reports almost never occur in cases where the risk or disasterhas been of human origin, as noted in a later review of the differences be-tween natural versus anthropogenic, or technological, disasters; instead,

the common pattern involves what that later review characterized as cor-rosive communities (Freudenburg and Jones, 1991; see also Erikson, 1976,


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Inotherwaysaswell,theUnitedStatesbasedworkhastendedtoreportjust the opposite of a community of anxiety phenomenon. In their study ofan underground coal mine fire that released toxic fumes into the community

above, Kroll-Smith and Couch (1990) reported that, in the words of the titleof their book, The Real Disaster Is Above Ground. Rather than forminga community of anxiety, the affected citizens became increasingly angry,contentious, and even bitter, divided into numerous factions that battledover how dangerous the contamination actually was and what should bedone about it (for comparable reports from other cases, see e.g. Edelstein,1988; Fowlkes and Miller, 1987; Vyner, 1988). Rather than finding a sharedsolidarity in their rejection of official risk estimates, the residents of eachof the communities studied appear to have become deeply divided among

themselves, trying hard to decide just what accounts to believe, and sufferingincreased stress in part because of their inability to agree or decide.

The Trustworthiness and Roles of Experts

When it comes to the second dimension of trust and trustworthiness,by contrast, the United Statesbased literature presents a view that is bestseen not as opposing the arguments put forth by Beck and Giddens, but

as being intermediate,betweenthe views of the two European theorists. Asdescribed earlier, Giddens depicts the role of science and of technical expertsas being relatively unproblematic, providing the broader citizenry with oneimportant set of inputs for dialogic democracy. Beck, by contrast, depictstechnological innovation as increasingly eluding the control of social andpolitical institutions, in ways thatfar from creating the preconditions fortrustcreate the belief that technological progress is out of control.

In the United Statesbased literature on technological risk, to offer yetanother contrast, the central tendency is to seemostsuch technological sys-

tems as having worked properly, the vast majority of the timebut with evenoccasional exceptions being profoundly troubling, leading to the creation ofwhat Short (1984) has termed risks to the social fabric. In what may bethe most explicit statement of this perspective, Freudenburg (1993) tracesthe reasons back to European social theoretical frameworks of an earliervintage, deriving largely from Durkheim ([1893] 1933) and Weber ([1918]1946).

Much as Durkheim spelled out, Freudenburg argues, the division oflabor in society does appear to have permitted tremendous increases in the

overall level of expertise and prosperity enjoyed by present-day citizensof the industrialized worldbut it has done so with one important catch.


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approvingly to what he called organic solidarity, seeing the coordinationof differing specializations as being relatively unproblematic. With increasedspecialization, he argued, different kinds of people would come to need each

other just as much as do different organs of the body, with the heart and thestomach, for example, each filling its own specialized role. Unlike stomachs,however, humans have the capacity to discern specialized interests that candiffer significantly from the needs or interests of the collectivity.

Although Durkheim did not treat such possibilities as being problem-atic, they lie at the core of what Freudenburg calls recreancythe fail-ure of institutional actors to carry out their responsibilities with the de-gree of vigor necessary to merit the societal trust they enjoy (Durkheim,1993:909)and they appear to be important, as well, in terms of what Short

has called risks to the social fabric. As Weber pointed out in his discussionof what it meant to live in a world of intellectualized rationality; moreover,this point is potentially vital. What made the world a rational one, in We-bers view, was not that the modern citizen could be expected to know moreabout the world around him/her, but very nearly the opposite. Unless he isa physicist, one who rides on the streetcar has no idea how the car happenedto get into motion. And he does not need to know. He is satisfied that hemay count on the behavior of the streetcar, . . . but he knows nothing aboutwhat it takes to produce such a car so that it can move. The savage knows

incomparably more about his tools (Weber [1918] 1946:138139).In short, far more than was the case for our great-great-grandparents,

the citizens of todays world tend to be not so much in control of as depen-dent on our technology. We need to count on that technology to workproperlynot just inprinciple, but also in practice. As a result, we are de-pendent not just on the technologies, but also on the social relations thatbring them into being, involving whole armies of specialists, most of whomhave areas of expertise that we may not be competent to judge, and manyof whom we will never even meet, let alone have the ability to control. This

perspective, accordingly, is neither as pessimistic as the expectations of Beck(according to whose arguments technology is essentially out of control), noras optimistic as those of Giddens (according to whose arguments the inputsof science and technology are relatively unproblematic). Instead, the U.S.work suggests that most present-day technology can becountedontoworkproperly, most of the timebut that citizens may be acting quite rationallyif they become concerned when some key element of the sociotechnical sys-tem sends a signal (cf. Slovic, 1987) that matters are not being controlledas safely as they ought to be.

Table I offersa simplified graphic summary of the differences spelled outso far. Both Giddens and Beck see risks as transcending most relevant so-


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Table I. Simplified Representation of Salient Differences in Authors Views

Sociologically significant risks

Reinforce or Exacerbate TranscendRole of scientific/technical expertise Social Divisions Social Divisions

Essentially unproblematic GiddensGenerally helpful, but Short, Erikson, and Freudenburg

occasional failuresproblematicHighly problematicorganized Beck

irresponsibility

near the opposite end of that continuum. Regarding the role or fate of sci-entific and technical expertise, on the other hand, the same U.S. scholars are

shown as having views that are actually between those of Giddens and Beck.

THE NUCLEUS OF RISK

Clearly, all three of these bodies of work take seriously the challenge ofdealing with the consequences of modernity in broad and abstract terms, buttheir approaches differ quite markedly in their implications. How might theconflicting expectations be resolved? Among the options available, we have

chosen to reanalyze a key part of the history of what may be the prototyp-ical example of risky, modern activities (e.g., see Rosa and Clark, 1999),involving nuclear technologies in general, and nuclear weapons in particular.

In one sense, the risks of nuclear weapons appear to provide a text-book illustration of transcendent risks, since they have brought threatsto the world that are obviously massive in scale and scope. In the wordsof Smith (1988:62), Nuclear energy was conceived in secrecy, born in war,and first revealed to the world in horror. What was revealed was a war-making technology so much more powerful than anything that had ever

been developedor even imaginedthat just two bombs could end a worldwar. The capacity proved so horrifying that, for much of the latter half of thetwentieth century, theBulletin of the Atomic Scientistsgraphically depicteda sense of impending doom with a clock showing just a few minutes remain-ing before midnight, a metaphorical representation of the potential forending all life on earth. Harry Kendall, a founding member of the Unionof Concerned Scientists, even seemed to echo reflexive modernization the-orists such as Giddens and Beck when he subsequently argued for the needto consider a broadened range of risksnot just the risks that are upon

us as in the nuclear arms race, but also those that are imminent, as arepollution-induced climatic and ecological changes, and those that lie beyond


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Yet at the same time, most of the latter half of the twentieth centuryoffered an abundance of benign atomic icons, as well, although many ofthese more positive images also seemed to involve the transcending of so-

cial boundaries. Even the mushroom cloud was seen as a symbol of nationalpride; it was soon joined by Albert Einstein, the Atomic Energy Commis-sion logo, the Walt Disney cartoon genie, and even our friend the atom. Inaddition, the rapid expansion of the post-War economy and living standardsseemed to demand cheap energy sources. The latter half of the twentiethcentury was one of those times when the confluence of science, nucleartechnology, and economic interests all appeared to be in tune with militaryand national security goals, making the United States one nation, afterall. From Truman to Reagan, presidents and Congresses generally agreed

that advancing U.S. scientific, technological, and economic preeminence wasworth any price; even a hint that the Soviet Union might challenge U.S. nu-clear superiority was often enough to open Congressional pocketbooks (fora careful and more detailed historical examination of the period, see espe-cially Boyer, 1994).

Events that supported such reactions, moreover, were readily at hand.The Korean War and the Soviet nuclear explosion of the early 1950s werefollowed by the launching of the Sputnik satellite, on October 4, 1957; theerection of the Berlin Wall in 1961; the Cuban missile crisis in 1962; and

the Vietnam War, which stretched throughout the later 1960s and into the1970s. In essence, national security seemed to demand an ever-increasing,shared emphasis on military, scientific, and technological readiness.

In a completion of the circle, finally, much of that emphasis on readi-ness involved nuclear weapons. What began from the remnants of theManhattan Project (which created the first atomic weapons during the lat-ter days of World War II) ultimately expanded into a labyrinthine networkof research and production facilities, sponsored first by the Atomic EnergyCommission and ultimately by the Department of Energy, growing to a total

of some 30 laboratories, employing close to 30,000 scientists and technicians,by the latter days of the Cold War (Holl et al.,1997: Appendix 2; NationalResearch Council, 2000). Furthermore, the concerns of warboth hot andcolddid stimulate scientific discoveries and technological developments,which generated enthusiasm in turn because of their potential market appli-cations. To borrow a metaphor from Vannevar Bush, who played a key rolein designing U.S. science policy in the latter half of the twentieth century(see Kleinman, 1995), science truly did seem to offer not just an endlessfrontier, but an exciting one.

If any form of human technology could be said to transcend all valuesand all exclusionary divisions of power, of course, a technology with the


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the current postCold War situation provides the analytic distance that canhelp us to gain a deeper understanding not only of the historical context ofthe massive military buildup, along with its associated scientific and tech-

nological developments, but also of the broader societal implications of theprocess. From the perspective of this paper, in other words, it is worthwhileto examine the major implications of this process for the relationships amongtechnological risks, society, and nature. To be more specific, the Cold War ex-perience offers an important opportunity for dealing with the two key pointsof difference in the existing sociological literature. First, were the most im-portant sociological implications of the Cold War experience the ones thattranscended or the ones that reinforced all values and all exclusionary divi-sions of power (Giddens, 1990:154)? Second, did the Cold War experience

of nuclear technologies lead to trust in expert systems (a la Giddens), to apervasive distrust (a la Beck), or to a more complex set of risks to the socialfabric (a la Short)?

To answer the question, it is important to recognize that, particularlyafter the end of World War II (WWII), the risks associated with nuclearweapons were not limited to the possible use of these weapons in time ofwar. Instead, beginning even in the years before the dissolution of the for-mer Soviet Block, and continuing afterwards, a different form of nuclearrisk emergeda problem of peacetime contamination that proved to be

pervasive. One article in the New York Times, for example, noted that, fromsimmering tanks of high-level nuclear waste in Washington State and plu-tonium laced with chemical poisons in Idaho to production of radioactivegases in South Carolina, the federal governments nuclear weapons programhas festering technological and environmental problems like no one else inthe country (Wald 2000:C1).

The research community has taken note of the extent of the prob-lem, as well, rendering quite consistent verdicts. Whether at Rocky Flats(Lodwick, 1993), Hanford (Gerber, 1992), Fernald (Hardert, 1993; Sheak

and Cianciolo, 1993), Oak Ridge (Cable et al.,1999), Pantex (Del Tredici,1987), or across the weapons complex as a whole (Dunlap et al., 1993; Hooks,1991; Jacob, 1990; Morone and Woodhouse, 1989; Shrader-Frechette, 1993;Slovic, 1993; U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, 1991), a large number ofindependent scholars and scientists have found the U.S. track record in nu-clear weapons production to have been sorely lacking. Perhaps the earliestconcise summary of the verdict was the one offered by Zinberg (1984:241):As more of the history of nuclear waste management has become publicknowledge, there has been a growing awareness that bad judgment and in-

competence have often been masked by military and industrial secrecy. Sub-sequent analysts have generally concurred with and, if anything, reinforced


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commitment to openness and environmental preservation that will be re-quired for the ongoing, long-term, institutional management of these now-contaminated sites. Instead, regrettably, the relevant federal agencies have

sometimes showed greater concern over the release of potentially harmfulpublicitythan of potentially harmful substances.

Still, although the problems have been socially pervasive in at least onesense of the word, in that they have affected hundreds of sites around thecountry, the risks at each site have been relatively localized, extending a fewmiles at most (for details, see National Research Council, 2000). Particularlyin the United States, moreover, much of the attention to this problem hasbeen focused on the most severely contaminated areasa focus that is un-derstandable. As noted above, however, our focus here is on activities that

started in the earliest days of nuclear technology development, and in theintellectual center of much of the earliest work, where we might expect thelevel of attention to safety to have been higher than in the case of weapons fa-cilities that were deliberately placed far from the nearest population centers.The key early activities, to be more specific, took place within the second-largest metropolitan region of the United States at the time, namely Chicago.

THE REDS AND THE RED GATE WOODS

The entire process of nuclear weapons production, beginning with theManhattan Project and continuing with some of the key scientific and tech-nological developments of the Cold War, had deep roots in the heart of thewindy city. The worlds first controlled nuclear chain reaction took placeunder the seats of Stagg Field, at the University of Chicago. Even after thattime, however, when the project had grown large enough that it needed tobe relocated, the nerve center of the emerging atomic age shifted to a sitethat was roughly a mile south of downtown Chicagoan area known as the

Red Gate Woods of the Palos Altos in Cook County. The newly develop-ing weapons, however, were not just potent instruments for fighting wars,both hot and cold; instead, these new weapons systems, both nuclear andchemical, also became important sources of health and ecological risks intimes of peace. These war technologies were generating the new patterns ofenvironmental impacts of the post-War era.

The Chicago Connection

The Manhattan Project needed a safe, adequate site for a full-sized ex-


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reasonably close to the laboratory. . . . [W]hile on a Saturday afternoonhorseback ride, [the] University of Chicago physics professor, Nobel laure-ate, and coordinator of the program, found an attractive site in the Argonne

Forest (Holl et al., 1997:13). At this historic site the worlds first two nu-clear reactors would be built, in 1942 and in 1943, under the leadership ofthe Nobel Prizewinning physicist, Enrico Fermi.

Before the atomic scientists arrived, however, Red Gate Woods was alegallyprotectedarea.Ithadbeensecuredforpreservationpurposesdecadesbefore, under the Illinois Forest Preserve District Act of 1913, which strictlyforbade the transfer or use of the land for any other purpose. Still, the legalprotectionforthisnaturalsanctuaryprovedtobetooweaktokeepitfrombe-ing used for nuclear research. The federal government simply appropriated

the lands, in the name of the urgencies of war, to build its military-industrialcomplex.

In other respects, however, matters were not quite so simple. In com-pliance with the friendly condemnation procedures of the Department ofWar, Cook Countys Argonne Forest Commission did agree to lease theForest Preserve to the federal government for the duration of war pursuits(see Board of Forest Preserve Commissioners, 1961:1619). Yet the ForestCommission also sought to deal with the legal prohibition against such anarrangement. As one key part of that effort, the president of the board

simply refrained from requesting a lease fee. Instead, he requested com-plete restoration of all property to its former use, once all of the militaryand atomic research facilities were relocated, although the date of such arelocation was never specified.

The starting date for weapons activities in the Forest Preserve, on theother hand, can be identified far more precisely. On August 13, 1942, thebomb-making Manhattan Project moved to the Forest Preserve. Site A, asthis area is known, is the place where Fermi moved the nuclear reactor thatwas simply called Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1). It is also the place where the second

reactor, Chicago Pile-2 (CP-2), was built from scratch. A nearby area, knownsimply as Plot M, was the research teams nuclear waste depository. Not untilmany years later would the world realize what such activities might implyfor the complete restoration of all property to its former use.

Still, even though the impacts of the Manhattan Project would not endas soon as the war did, there was a small window of opportunity for non-war-related policies between the end of WWII and the full-force arrival of theCold War shortly thereafter. During that time, the Cook County AdvisoryCommittee invoked the Forest Preserve District Act of 1913 and success-

fully rejected the Department of Wars request for a permanent lease. Thiswindow, however, proved to be very small. Soon, the logic of the Cold War


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further demands on the ecosystems of the Greater Chicago areademandsthat would continue for decades.

Congruent with the national security demands of the time, the Atomic

Energy Act of 1946 insured that the Atomic Energy Commission would havea legal monopoly over all forms of nuclear science and expertise, specificallyincluding reactor technologies and applications. The Argonne Laboratorywas designated as the first National Laboratory on July 1, 1946, and thesearch for a permanent site soon began.4 As part of that search, Secretary ofWar Robert L. Patterson requested for the second time retention of 265 acresfrom Cook County in perpetuity.

The request, clearly, was not without complications of its own. As theForest Preserve Commissioners Advisory Committee emphasized, the de-

sired site happened not just to be legally designated for environmental pro-tection,butalsotobeclosetothecenterofoneofthefinestandundoubtedlythe largest of the County Forest Preserves, which was carefully planned andacquired to incorporate these particular hills and valley, a topography whichis rare in Cook County (see Carmody, 1997:1.1). Due in large part to suchconcerns, the commissioners indicated that, once again, rather than relin-quishing the site in perpetuity, they were willing only to offer something thatwould be much smaller and shorter in durationcontinued use of a reducedarea of the Forest Preserve for a reasonable period of time, during which

arrangements may be consummated for acquiring and developing anothersite . . . for a permanent National Atomic Research Laboratory (Board ofForest Preserve Commissioners, 1961:19).

By September 10, 1946, Colonel Frye, chief of the Army Corp of Engi-neers of Chicago, had asked local engineers to survey other potential sites forthe new laboratory. The site they identified, however, was one that happenedto be located in another Forest Preserve, covering 3367 acres in the south-east corner of the Rocky Glen Forest Preserve of nearby DuPage County.Although WWII had ended by that time, the federal governments ability to

lease the land it wanted had not. Invoking the 1946 Atomic Energy Act, theDepartment of War appropriated 1700 acres of the Forest Preserve to serveas the permanent site of the Argonne National Laboratory.

The Cold War Context: Not Out of the Woods?

In the years that followed, the Cold War and the outbreak of the KoreanWar in 1949 insured that the entanglement of the federal government in

4InadditiontoArgonne,thenetworkofNationalLaboratorieswouldsoonincludeBrookhaven,New York; Los Alamos, New Mexico; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and


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scientific and technological research would continue at an unprecedentedpace. A fundamental issue in this raceand it was indeed a racewas themilitary application of nuclear science and technology. By 1952, all efforts

at the Argonne National Laboratory were concentrated on securing U.S.nuclear superiority. At the time, it seemed as if the future of democracyand the West depended on the research being pursued in this and othernational research laboratories. The protection of democratic rights seemedto depend on high-risk technologies, which in turn imposed a toll on thehealth and ecological integrity of the surrounding ecosystems.

By 1956, the first of the two Forest Preserve sites, in the Red GateWoods, had been cleared of all nuclear structures and returned to CookCounty, even though nuclear waste continued to be buried there. More than

a third of a century later, in 1992, pieces of still-dangerous uranium werefound on the site. After a five-year moratorium and an announcement bythe Department of Energy that it had completed a $6 million cleanup torid the site of radioactive materials and chemicals, the site reopened in theOctober of 1997 (see Ziemba, 1997).

As these words are being written, more than a dozen years after the fallof the Berlin Wall in 1989 and a decade after the end of the Cold War in1991, Argonne National Laboratory continues to occupy 1,700 acres of theRocky Glen Forest Preserve in DuPage County. Although the preserve com-

missioners tried to protect the ecological integrity of the Forest Preservesat the end of WWII, they could not have anticipated the results of a laterstudy from the National Academy of Sciences (National Research Council,2000), which acknowledged that some nuclear sites may be contaminated in-definitely, containing hazards that, while localized, are nevertheless beyondthe capacity of present-day science and technology to remediate, even half acentury after they were first created. The practical consequence is that somesuch sites may never be cleaned up enough to allow public access; instead,as theNew York Times(2000) stated, there was evidence that, for practical

purposes, many nuclear sites may be toxic in perpetuity.

DISCUSSION: LEGITIMACY, EXPERT SYSTEMS, ANDDEMOCRATIC RIGHTS

Transcendence?

In some senses, the events of the early nuclear age within the Chicago

metropolitan region can be seen as being consistent with the Giddens/Beckemphasis on transcendence, or the focus on risks that transcend all values


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Roe and Manier, 2001). Under the 1990 Radiation Exposure CompensationAct, the federal government officially acknowledged its responsibility forthe increased risk of injury and disease that workers experienced while

serving in the nations national security war industry during the 1940s1960s.Rather than transcending all social boundaries, clearly, these risks wereconcentrated on those who were directly but often involuntarily exposedto nuclear radiation in their work. Indeed, even the governments officialacknowledgment of responsibility has proved to have only limited tran-scendence. The federal government began paying compensation under theAct in 1992, but the fund ran out of money in the spring of 2000since then,claimants have received only IOUs (see Graham, 2001).

The Limits of Trust?

The second issue highlighted in our earlier literature review had todo with the roles played by scientific and technical expertise. For Giddens,as we noted, reflexivity in modernity involves a significant degree of trustin expert systems. Reflexivity is possible via a double hermeneutic thatinvolves the self as the first medium of interpretation, and experts as thesecond. For Giddens, the project of modernity has become the search for

trust in a risk society, where subjects rely on their reflexivityandthat of in-terpersonal/expert relations against the uncertainties offortuna. The reverseis the case of Becks notion of reflexive modernization, where risk societyreaches its paroxysm in the manufacturing of risk, as represented by nucleartechnology, because of its statistically unlikely yet potentially devastatingimpact. This means that, for Beck, reflexivity leads not to trust but to dis-trust of scientific institutions. For scholars who represent the third school ofthought considered in this paper, meanwhileU.S. scholars such as Short,Erikson, or Freudenburgthe expectations are more mixed: Most citizens

feel able to trust most of societys experts most of the time, but even rela-tively rare exceptions can lead to relatively high levels of distrust. This thirdperspective, as we read the data, comes closer to fitting the facts of the casethan do either the more optimistic views of Giddens or the more pessimisticviews of Beck.

As noted in ourintroductory comments, earlier work on what Habermas(1970) termed a Legitimation Crisis (see also Block, 1987; Offe, 1985)emphasized the challenges of maintaining legitimacy via economicperfor-mance. From the perspective of the twenty-first centurywith the threats

of the Cold War now more than a decade in the past, but with spending onthe U.S. Department of Defense continuing to rival the peak levels of the


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prosperity may continue to have some relevance. At the same time, how-ever, partly because growing numbers of citizens have become aware ofthe evidence of extensive (and expensive) contamination, there has been a

growing loss of legitimacy of a different sort. In some ways, this loss of legit-imacy could be seen as consistent with Becks emphasis on hazards that areso pervasive as to have structured a global society; but on closer inspection,the loss of legitimacy proves to be more focused than that. For the mostpart, the uncontrollable risks were notthose that were scientific or tech-nological; instead, as stressed by U.S. sociologists such as Perrow (1984) orespecially Clarke (1999), the relevant risks proved to besocialbureaucraticor organizationalin their nature and origin.

This point deserves emphasis. As already documented by the National

Research Council (2000), the key problems of contaminationwhether inchunks of radioactive uranium that have shown up at abandoned sites inthe Chicago region, or in more broadly diffused plumes of toxic materials athundreds of other sites that are so badly contaminated that they cannot befully cleaned uphave notbeen that the scientific or technological risks havebeen uncontrollable or beyond the capacity of government and science.Instead, in a set of findings that may actually be more troublesome, the prob-lem is that the relevant federal agencies put so much emphasis on developingand building the weapons that, in some cases, they did not even take the sim-

plest or most basic steps to protect citizens rights and the environment.In this respect, the findings from Chicago are generally consistent with

those from more remote corners of the country. Even the explicit legal pro-tections built into the 1913 Forest Preserve Act proved insufficient to safe-guard these ecosystems; instead, national security priorities were used tooverturn all other forms of rightsincluding the relatively minimal atten-tion to rights that would have been involved in finding other, nearby sites,whether during WWII or during the era of similarly heightened patriotismthat characterized the early days of the Cold War. Virtually all of these risks

would have been entirely possible to contain, technologically, even at thattime. To put the matter simply, the problem proved to be that, for years, theresponsible institutions failed to act responsibly, at least with respect tothe control of contamination. This case, in short, fits the classic definitionof recreancy, or institutional failure, with institutional actors not being to-tally irresponsible and yet failing to carry out their responsibilities with thedegree of vigor necessary to merit the societal trust that they once enjoyed(e.g., see Freudenburg, 1993; Short and Clarke, 1993).

To some extent, this understanding of the problem is compatible with

the ones that Giddens and Beck have spelled out, and yet the differencesin detailand in precisionare important. On closer examination, what


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well-known theoristsnot an uncontrollable or all-transcending form ofrisk, but a more prosaic form of institutional failure in the management ofknown risks, leading to the creation of significant risks to the social fabric.

The situation offers not so much a clear case of success or failure asit does a combination of two faces of modernity. Impressive advances inscienceandtechnologybecameentangledwiththesocialimposition of risksomething that happened partly because of the failure to give due weight toorganizational performance, democratic rights, and environmental concerns.

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