Hugh Gusterson: Who Are Nuclear Weapons Scientists? (Full Transcript)

Watch and read here the full transcript of anthropologist Hugh Gusterson’s TEDx Talk: Who Are Nuclear Weapons Scientists? at TEDxFoggyBottom conference.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here: who-are-nuclear-weapons-scientists-by-hugh-gusterson-at-tedxfoggybottom

TRANSCRIPT:

I’m an anthropologist. When you think of anthropologists, you think of people who study cannibals in New Guinea, people in grass skirts in Samoa. I’ve spent my career as an anthropologist studying American nuclear weapons scientists. I wanted to know why someone, when they graduate from university would want to give the rest of their life to designing weapons that could kill millions of people, what it feels like to do that for a living, what effect it has on people and how they talk about it.

So, towards the end of the Cold War, I started talking to weapons scientists of the Lawrence Livermore Lab, about an hour east of San Francisco. I’ve also spent time at the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico, where the weapons scientists designed the weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This resulted in a couple of books: Nuclear Rites and People of the Bomb, and I’m just finishing up a third book on the nuclear weapons labs this summer.

Anthropologists like to hang out with the people they study, they like to follow them around, listen to what they say, watch what they do, write it all down in notebooks. I obviously could not do that with the weapons scientists. They work behind that barbed wire fence. They have top secret clearances, which I didn’t have. So except from being allowed to go to the cafeteria at the lab, I wasn’t allowed inside the lab.

So, how do you study people when you can’t follow them to work? Well, I did a lot of interviews. When I arrived in Livermore, I knew one person. He was the son of a nuclear weapons scientist, and he introduced me to his father. His father was kind enough to invite me to his house and spent three hours telling me his life story. At the end of that evening he said, “Tomorrow I’ll call you with the names and phone numbers of five colleagues,” which he did. And they referred me to other people. So soon I had dozens of nuclear weapons scientists, willing to talk to me.