Sociological Forum, Vol. 18, No.

2, June 2003 ( C 2003)

The Paradoxes of Modernity: Scientic Advances, Environmental Problems, and Risks to the Social Fabric?
Margarita Alario1,3 and William Freudenburg2

Recent reviews have contrasted U.S. sociologists empirical work on technological risks with the theoretical risk work of Giddens and Beck, but the reality is more complex. Most U.S. sociologists are less likely than Giddens or Beck to see risks as transcending socioeconomic and other divisions, but the United Statesbased work tends to interpret the trustworthiness of scientictechnical expertise in ways that lie between the arguments of Beck and Giddens. An examination of early nuclear technologies indicates that the United Statesbased perspectives provide a better t, for theoretical as well as empirical reasons. The development of nuclear technologies was mixed, rather than high or low, in its competence and trustworthiness, and it created social and environmental risks that did not so much transcend social divisions as to reinforce them.
KEY WORDS: Argonne National Laboratory; Chicago; Cold War; ecosystem protection; Forest Preserve; Manhattan Project; nuclear technology; reexive modernization theory; social theory of risk.

INTRODUCTION Discussions of technological risks have long been dominated by technical disciplines, such as engineering and applied mathematics, but since the 1980s, increasing numbers of sociologists have begun to analyze technological risks. Particularly in recent years, in fact, sociological contributions
1 Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana-

Champaign, 1023 PSL, MC-634, Urbana, Illinois 61801. Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara, California. 3 To whom correspondence should be addressed.
2 Environmental

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0884-8971/03/0600-0193/0
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2003 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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have become sufciently numerousand sufciently diverseto have created not just a certain level of confusion, but also a number of questions about 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 lines of macrosociological analysis of risk-and-society issuesinvolving the work of Ulrich Giddens, of Anthony Beck, and of a set of United Statesbased sociologists. Second, we compare the strengths and weaknesses of these three approaches for dealing with a particularly telling case, examining the way in which the prototypical hazards of a risk society, involving nuclear technologies, were originally developed. We conclude the paper by discussing implications for future research.

WHICH RISK SOCIETY IS THIS? To many of those who have offered observations on risk-and-society issues from outside of sociologya category that includes the vast majority of all those who have offered such observationsthe notion that the present world 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 achieved by the advanced industrialized societies. These widespread views have been summarized, critiqued, and dissected by any number of social scientists (see e.g. Fiorino, 1989; Freudenburg and Pastor, 1992; Rosa, 1998; Short, 1999; see also the compilations by Krimsky and Golding, 1992, and by Cohen, 2000a); briey, however, the emphasis of most of that work tends to be on statistical risks (particularly the risk of death) and on the fact that, at least for industrialized countries, the statistical risks of death have dropped dramatically over the course of the twentieth century. For the most part, when authors from this technologically oriented literature have discussed the relationships between technological risk and the broader society, they have called either for educating the public about real risk numbers, or else for removing the public from risk decisions altogether; some of the more extreme titles decry everything from phantom risk, to higher superstition, to eco-hysterics and the technophobes (see e.g. Beckmann, 1973; Foster et al., 1993; Gross and Levitt, 1994). With very few exceptions, sociological treatments of risk-and-society issues have expressed starkly different viewsalthough that is not to say that, save for a shared lack of enthusiasm for the sociologically naive arguments that still tend to dominate public policy discussions of risk in the United States, the sociological analyses have expressed anything like a uniformity

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of views. The roots of this sociological work date back at least to the time of Habermas (1970), with many sociologists having raised questions about the legitimacy of the social order, but much of the earlier thinking about questions of legitimation crisis tended to emphasize the challenges of maintaining legitimacy by minimizing economic risks and maximizing economic performance (see e.g., Block, 1987; Habermas, 1970, 1975; OConnor, 1973; Offe, 1985). Particularly beginning in the 1980s, however, increasing numbers of sociologists began to focus on potential challenges to legitimacy relating to technological risksand as the amount of attention has increased, the paths have tended to diverge. Today, even if we focus merely on those who have offered macrosociological lines of analysis, it is possible to discern three main patterns in the accumulated sociological work on risk. The rst two of these lines are associated with two well-known European social theorists of reexive modernization who are often discussed together, but whose work actually diverges in important and relevant ways. The third, by contrast, combines the work of several scholars, predominantly from the United States, whose work shows considerable convergence on relevant questions. We discuss all three briey, beginning with the two European theorists.

Reexive Modernization One of the most vital bodies of sociological work in recent decades has involved the scholarship on reexive modernization. While this body of work is both large and complex (for overviews/summaries, see e.g. Bauman, 1991; Lash, 1993), perhaps its most important proponents are two major theorists who are both based in Europe, namely Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. In many ways, it is certainly understandable that the work of these two theorists would be seen as involving important similarities. Both of these sociologists are part of what in German is called zeitdiagnostisches Soziologie literally a time-diagnosing sociology, although in essence, the phrase suggests a down-to-earth sociology. In addition, their work reects a good deal of compatibility on the important issue of risk, with both authors placing special emphasis on what Giddens calls high-consequence risks. In the work of Giddens, this phrase refers to truly formidable, global-scale risks, ranging from nuclear warfare and nuclear winter to chemical pollution of the seas (Giddens, 1990:124, 125)risks that he characterizes as creating a societywide concern so pervasive that it transcends all values and all exclusionary divisions of power (Giddens, 1990:154). Beck, similarly, pays special attention to nuclear, chemical, ecological, and genetic engineering risks, which he

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sees as involving uncontrollable consequences that are not limited in time or space (Beck, 1995:31), and which he sees as presenting risks so massive as 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 reexivity and risk, however, they do so in ways that include a number of important differences, including differences in the concept of reexivity itself. Giddens draws largely from the work of ethnomethodologists, who have used the term reexivity to emphasize the fact that our sense of order is a result of conversational processes: it is created in talk, and that to describe a situation is at the same time to create it (Marshall, 1994:149). In Becks theory, by contrast, reexivity contains two key elements, namely, awareness and reectionawareness of the global consequences of industrial and technological developments, and reection upon the risks they impose. Perhaps more importantly, these two authors have also taken the notion of the self-referential nature of reexivity in quite different directions. In his Consequences of Modernity, Giddens (1990) emphasizes the foundational nature of expert systems, with particular reference to their function in securing freedom from risks. According to this line of analysis, there are interconnections between the systems of reexive modernization that have been developed for dealing with hazards (social, environmental, and even psychological) and the liberating nature of expertise. In Modernity and Self-Identity, Giddens (1992) continues to develop these ideas, depicting the breakup of traditional communities, in conjunction with globalization processes, as freeing individuals to reect on their actions and to develop or choose their identities. He sees scientic knowledge as playing an increasingly important role in that process, providing key potential inputs for the exercise of dialogic democracya concept involving open communicative exchanges, independent from formal political institutions, and spreading social reexivity in ways that condition both everyday life and collective action (Giddens, 1994:115). Other scholars (e.g., Couch and Kroll-Smith, 1997:189) have taken Giddenss idea further, tracing the movement of scientic knowledge away from its institutionally protected and privileged location in universities and corporations and into lay communities (see e.g., Brown, 1987). Although Giddens is careful to distinguish his expectations from the philosophical theorem of universal pragmaticsand from the ideal speech situationenvisioned by Habermas, he nevertheless sees high potential for contributions to the social order. As Giddens puts it, his vision of dialogic democracy is based in part on the expectation that dialogue in a public space provides the means of living along with others in a relation of mutual tolerance. . . . Dialogue would be understood as the capability to

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create active trust . . . a means of ordering social relations across time and space (Giddens, 1994:11516). Becks Risk Society, on the other hand, could scarcely offer a less similar view of the role of science (Beck, 1992). In his view, the legitimacy of scientictechnological rationality has been called into question by its inability to control the very risks that it has brought into beingrisks that, unlike the personal risks of the industrial society, have become global in scope. As Beck puts it, One can possess wealth, but one can only be aficted by risks (23). In his risk society, accordinglyin contrast to the important role that Giddens ascribes to scientic knowledgeBeck argues that the sciences monopoly on rationality is broken (29). Instead, Becks risk society is characterized by communities of anxiety, with citizens nding solidarity not through a shared appreciation for scientic expertise, but through a shared skepticism toward it, inspired in good measure by their shared exposure to risks (see also Picou and Gill, 2000). In Becks risk society, in short, hazards are seen as having become so predominant that they have restructured global society, creating what amounts to a system of organized irresponsibility (Alario, 2000c; Beck, 1988). As noted by Beck, Giddens, and Lash (1994:116), Beck sees reexivity as involving a critique, but Giddens sees it as reecting an attitude of trust, both toward expert systems and toward the political system that is expected to govern them.

Risk and the Social Fabric If in some ways the work on reexive modernization is best understood as involving two different perspectives on risk, each associated with a single author; virtually the opposite is true of the multiple authors whose work has contributed to the study of what James Short, in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association, described as risks to the social fabric (Short, 1984). The scholars and researchers working in this second risk tradition, who are based principally in the United States, have offered analyses that differ quite starkly from the views of Giddens and Beck, and few of them would describe themselves as working from within a perspective of reexive modernization. Perhaps partly for that reason, it is common to contrast European and U.S. approaches. In what may be the most careful and balanced assessment to date, for example, Cohen (2000b:15) refers to two principal schoolsan American school of approximately two decades standing, grounded largely in a social problems perspective, and a European school of more recent vintage that operates within a more social theoretical framework. In substantive terms, however, although this United Statesbased work does tend to differ from the work of both Giddens and

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Beck on the issue of transcendence, as we explain below, the United States based work on a second key issue, involving the roles and trustworthiness of scientic knowledge and technical experts in democratic systems, involves not so much a counterpoint to as a position that is essentially between the views of the two European theorists. We will explore both of these points transcendence and the roles of scientic/technical expertsin turn.

Transcendence Like Giddens and Beck, United Statesbased risk researchers have devoted a good deal of attention to nuclear, chemical, and ecological risksthe work of Perrow (1984), for example, originally grew out of investigations for the presidents commission on the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear facility in 1979but much of the United Statesbased work has treated 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). The distinction is particularly clear because, in many respects, the early U.S. work on technological risks and disasters grew out of an earlier emphasis on so-called natural hazards and disasters, such as earthquakes and tornadoes. The earliest of the well-known studies of what are sometimes called technological disasters, in fact, was Eriksons study of a ood in West Virginia (Erikson, 1976) caused by the collapse of a coal mines earthen dam, leading to the ooding of a valley that left more than a hundred dead and more than a thousand homeless. As Erikson pointed out in considerable detail, however, rather than creating a communitywhether of anxiety or any other kindthe experience of risks from this humancaused disaster led to what the subtitle of his book called the destruction of community. Erikson emphasized the destruction of community partly because 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 disasters did indeed tend to be characterized by what had become known in that literature as a therapeutic community (e.g., Barton, 1970). In the commonly observed pattern, citizens from all walks of life would come together, more or less spontaneously, to offer aid to the victims in the aftermath a disaster. Such reports almost never occur in cases where the risk or disaster has been of human origin, as noted in a later review of the differences between natural versus anthropogenic, or technological, disasters; instead, the common pattern involves what that later review characterized as corrosive communities (Freudenburg and Jones, 1991; see also Erikson, 1976, 1994; Picou et al., 1992).

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In other ways as well, the United Statesbased work has tended to report just the opposite of a community of anxiety phenomenon. In their study of an underground coal mine re that released toxic fumes into the community above, Kroll-Smith and Couch (1990) reported that, in the words of the title of their book, The Real Disaster Is Above Ground. Rather than forming a community of anxiety, the affected citizens became increasingly angry, contentious, and even bitter, divided into numerous factions that battled over how dangerous the contamination actually was and what should be done about it (for comparable reports from other cases, see e.g. Edelstein, 1988; Fowlkes and Miller, 1987; Vyner, 1988). Rather than nding a shared solidarity in their rejection of ofcial risk estimates, the residents of each of the communities studied appear to have become deeply divided among themselves, trying hard to decide just what accounts to believe, and suffering increased 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 best seen not as opposing the arguments put forth by Beck and Giddens, but as being intermediate, between the views of the two European theorists. As described earlier, Giddens depicts the role of science and of technical experts as being relatively unproblematic, providing the broader citizenry with one important set of inputs for dialogic democracy. Beck, by contrast, depicts technological innovation as increasingly eluding the control of social and political institutions, in ways thatfar from creating the preconditions for trustcreate the belief that technological progress is out of control. In the United Statesbased literature on technological risk, to offer yet another contrast, the central tendency is to see most such technological systems as having worked properly, the vast majority of the timebut with even occasional exceptions being profoundly troubling, leading to the creation of what Short (1984) has termed risks to the social fabric. In what may be the most explicit statement of this perspective, Freudenburg (1993) traces the reasons 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 prosperity enjoyed by present-day citizens of the industrialized worldbut it has done so with one important catch. When Durkheim rst called attention to the division of labor, he referred

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approvingly to what he called organic solidarity, seeing the coordination of differing specializations as being relatively unproblematic. With increased specialization, 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 the stomach, for example, each lling its own specialized role. Unlike stomachs, however, humans have the capacity to discern specialized interests that can differ signicantly from the needs or interests of the collectivity. Although Durkheim did not treat such possibilities as being problematic, they lie at the core of what Freudenburg calls recreancythe failure of institutional actors to carry out their responsibilities with the degree 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 discussion of 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 Webers view, was not that the modern citizen could be expected to know more about the world around him/her, but very nearly the opposite. Unless he is a physicist, one who rides on the streetcar has no idea how the car happened to get into motion. And he does not need to know. He is satised that he may count on the behavior of the streetcar, . . . but he knows nothing about what 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 dependent on our technology. We need to count on that technology to work properlynot 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 competent to judge, and many of 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), nor as optimistic as those of Giddens (according to whose arguments the inputs of science and technology are relatively unproblematic). Instead, the U.S. work suggests that most present-day technology can be counted on to work properly, most of the timebut that citizens may be acting quite rationally if they become concerned when some key element of the sociotechnical system sends a signal (cf. Slovic, 1987) that matters are not being controlled as safely as they ought to be. Table I offers a simplied graphic summary of the differences spelled out so far. Both Giddens and Beck see risks as transcending most relevant social distinctions, while United Statesbased scholars such as Short are shown

The Paradoxes of Modernity Table I. Simplied Representation of Salient Differences in Authors Views Sociologically signicant risks Role of scientic/technical expertise Essentially unproblematic Generally helpful, but occasional failuresproblematic Highly problematicorganized irresponsibility Reinforce or Exacerbate Social Divisions Short, Erikson, and Freudenburg Beck

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Transcend Social Divisions Giddens

near the opposite end of that continuum. Regarding the role or fate of scientic 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 of dealing with the consequences of modernity in broad and abstract terms, but their approaches differ quite markedly in their implications. How might the conicting expectations be resolved? Among the options available, we have chosen to reanalyze a key part of the history of what may be the prototypical 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 textbook illustration of transcendent risks, since they have brought threats to the world that are obviously massive in scale and scope. In the words of Smith (1988:62), Nuclear energy was conceived in secrecy, born in war, and rst revealed to the world in horror. What was revealed was a warmaking technology so much more powerful than anything that had ever been developedor even imaginedthat just two bombs could end a world war. The capacity proved so horrifying that, for much of the latter half of the twentieth century, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists graphically depicted a sense of impending doom with a clock showing just a few minutes remaining before midnight, a metaphorical representation of the potential for ending all life on earth. Harry Kendall, a founding member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, even seemed to echo reexive modernization theorists such as Giddens and Beck when he subsequently argued for the need to 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 are pollution-induced climatic and ecological changes, and those that lie beyond the horizon, as for example, genetic manipulation (Kendall, 2000:11).

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Yet at the same time, most of the latter half of the twentieth century offered an abundance of benign atomic icons, as well, although many of these more positive images also seemed to involve the transcending of social boundaries. Even the mushroom cloud was seen as a symbol of national pride; it was soon joined by Albert Einstein, the Atomic Energy Commission logo, the Walt Disney cartoon genie, and even our friend the atom. In addition, the rapid expansion of the post-War economy and living standards seemed to demand cheap energy sources. The latter half of the twentieth century was one of those times when the conuence of science, nuclear technology, and economic interests all appeared to be in tune with military and national security goals, making the United States one nation, after all. From Truman to Reagan, presidents and Congresses generally agreed that advancing U.S. scientic, technological, and economic preeminence was worth any price; even a hint that the Soviet Union might challenge U.S. nuclear superiority was often enough to open Congressional pocketbooks (for a careful and more detailed historical examination of the period, see especially Boyer, 1994). Events that supported such reactions, moreover, were readily at hand. The Korean War and the Soviet nuclear explosion of the early 1950s were followed by the launching of the Sputnik satellite, on October 4, 1957; the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961; the Cuban missile crisis in 1962; and the Vietnam War, which stretched throughout the later 1960s and into the 1970s. In essence, national security seemed to demand an ever-increasing, shared emphasis on military, scientic, and technological readiness. In a completion of the circle, nally, much of that emphasis on readiness involved nuclear weapons. What began from the remnants of the Manhattan Project (which created the rst atomic weapons during the latter days of World War II) ultimately expanded into a labyrinthine network of research and production facilities, sponsored rst by the Atomic Energy Commission 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; National Research Council, 2000). Furthermore, the concerns of warboth hot and colddid stimulate scientic discoveries and technological developments, which generated enthusiasm in turn because of their potential market applications. To borrow a metaphor from Vannevar Bush, who played a key role in 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 endless frontier, but an exciting one. If any form of human technology could be said to transcend all values and all exclusionary divisions of power, of course, a technology with the potential capacity to destroy all life on earth would certainly qualify. Still,

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the current postCold War situation provides the analytic distance that can help us to gain a deeper understanding not only of the historical context of the massive military buildup, along with its associated scientic and technological developments, but also of the broader societal implications of the process. From the perspective of this paper, in other words, it is worthwhile to examine the major implications of this process for the relationships among technological risks, society, and nature. To be more specic, the Cold War experience offers an important opportunity for dealing with the two key points of difference in the existing sociological literature. First, were the most important sociological implications of the Cold War experience the ones that transcended or the ones that reinforced all values and all exclusionary divisions of power (Giddens, 1990:154)? Second, did the Cold War experience of nuclear technologies lead to trust in expert systems (a ` la Giddens), to a pervasive distrust (a ` la Beck), or to a more complex set of risks to the social fabric (a ` la Short)? To answer the question, it is important to recognize that, particularly after the end of World War II (WWII), the risks associated with nuclear weapons were not limited to the possible use of these weapons in time of war. Instead, beginning even in the years before the dissolution of the former Soviet Block, and continuing afterwards, a different form of nuclear risk emergeda problem of peacetime contamination that proved to be pervasive. One article in the New York Times, for example, noted that, from simmering tanks of high-level nuclear waste in Washington State and plutonium laced with chemical poisons in Idaho to production of radioactive gases in South Carolina, the federal governments nuclear weapons program has festering technological and environmental problems like no one else in the country (Wald 2000:C1). The research community has taken note of the extent of the problem, 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. Ofce of Technology Assessment, 1991), a large number of independent scholars and scientists have found the U.S. track record in nuclear weapons production to have been sorely lacking. Perhaps the earliest concise summary of the verdict was the one offered by Zinberg (1984:241): As more of the history of nuclear waste management has become public knowledge, there has been a growing awareness that bad judgment and incompetence have often been masked by military and industrial secrecy. Subsequent analysts have generally concurred with and, if anything, reinforced the verdict, generally doing little to provide condence about the kinds of

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commitment to openness and environmental preservation that will be required for the ongoing, long-term, institutional management of these nowcontaminated sites. Instead, regrettably, the relevant federal agencies have sometimes showed greater concern over the release of potentially harmful publicity than of potentially harmful substances. Still, although the problems have been socially pervasive in at least one sense of the word, in that they have affected hundreds of sites around the country, the risks at each site have been relatively localized, extending a few miles at most (for details, see National Research Council, 2000). Particularly in the United States, moreover, much of the attention to this problem has been focused on the most severely contaminated areasa focus that is understandable. As noted above, however, our focus here is on activities that started in the earliest days of nuclear technology development, and in the intellectual center of much of the earliest work, where we might expect the level of attention to safety to have been higher than in the case of weapons facilities that were deliberately placed far from the nearest population centers. The key early activities, to be more specic, took place within the secondlargest 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 the Manhattan Project and continuing with some of the key scientic and technological developments of the Cold War, had deep roots in the heart of the windy city. The worlds rst controlled nuclear chain reaction took place under the seats of Stagg Field, at the University of Chicago. Even after that time, however, when the project had grown large enough that it needed to be relocated, the nerve center of the emerging atomic age shifted to a site that was roughly a mile south of downtown Chicagoan area known as the Red Gate Woods of the Palos Altos in Cook County. The newly developing weapons, however, were not just potent instruments for ghting wars, both hot and cold; instead, these new weapons systems, both nuclear and chemical, also became important sources of health and ecological risks in times of peace. These war technologies were generating the new patterns of environmental impacts of the post-War era.

The Chicago Connection The Manhattan Project needed a safe, adequate site for a full-sized experimental pile. The secretive work had to be concealed yet located

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reasonably close to the laboratory. . . . [W]hile on a Saturday afternoon horseback ride, [the] University of Chicago physics professor, Nobel laureate, and coordinator of the program, found an attractive site in the Argonne Forest (Holl et al., 1997:13). At this historic site the worlds rst two nuclear reactors would be built, in 1942 and in 1943, under the leadership of the Nobel Prizewinning physicist, Enrico Fermi. Before the atomic scientists arrived, however, Red Gate Woods was a legally protected area. It had been secured for preservation purposes decades before, under the Illinois Forest Preserve District Act of 1913, which strictly forbade the transfer or use of the land for any other purpose. Still, the legal protection for this natural sanctuary proved to be too weak to keep it from being used for nuclear research. The federal government simply appropriated the lands, in the name of the urgencies of war, to build its military-industrial complex. In other respects, however, matters were not quite so simple. In compliance with the friendly condemnation procedures of the Department of War, Cook Countys Argonne Forest Commission did agree to lease the Forest Preserve to the federal government for the duration of war pursuits (see Board of Forest Preserve Commissioners, 1961:1619). Yet the Forest Commission also sought to deal with the legal prohibition against such an arrangement. As one key part of that effort, the president of the board simply refrained from requesting a lease fee. Instead, he requested complete restoration of all property to its former use, once all of the military and atomic research facilities were relocated, although the date of such a relocation was never specied. The starting date for weapons activities in the Forest Preserve, on the other hand, can be identied far more precisely. On August 13, 1942, the bomb-making Manhattan Project moved to the Forest Preserve. Site A, as this area is known, is the place where Fermi moved the nuclear reactor that was 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, known simply as Plot M, was the research teams nuclear waste depository. Not until many years later would the world realize what such activities might imply for the complete restoration of all property to its former use. Still, even though the impacts of the Manhattan Project would not end as soon as the war did, there was a small window of opportunity for non-warrelated policies between the end of WWII and the full-force arrival of the Cold War shortly thereafter. During that time, the Cook County Advisory Committee invoked the Forest Preserve District Act of 1913 and successfully rejected the Department of Wars request for a permanent lease. This window, however, proved to be very small. Soon, the logic of the Cold War would impose a new set of national security priorities that would lead to

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further demands on the ecosystems of the Greater Chicago areademands that 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 have a legal monopoly over all forms of nuclear science and expertise, specically including reactor technologies and applications. The Argonne Laboratory was designated as the rst National Laboratory on July 1, 1946, and the search for a permanent site soon began.4 As part of that search, Secretary of War Robert L. Patterson requested for the second time retention of 265 acres from Cook County in perpetuity. The request, clearly, was not without complications of its own. As the Forest Preserve Commissioners Advisory Committee emphasized, the desired site happened not just to be legally designated for environmental protection, but also to be close to the center of one of the nest and undoubtedly the largest of the County Forest Preserves, which was carefully planned and acquired to incorporate these particular hills and valley, a topography which is rare in Cook County (see Carmody, 1997:1.1). Due in large part to such concerns, the commissioners indicated that, once again, rather than relinquishing the site in perpetuity, they were willing only to offer something that would be much smaller and shorter in durationcontinued use of a reduced area of the Forest Preserve for a reasonable period of time, during which arrangements may be consummated for acquiring and developing another site . . . for a permanent National Atomic Research Laboratory (Board of Forest Preserve Commissioners, 1961:19). By September 10, 1946, Colonel Frye, chief of the Army Corp of Engineers of Chicago, had asked local engineers to survey other potential sites for the new laboratory. The site they identied, however, was one that happened to be located in another Forest Preserve, covering 3367 acres in the southeast 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, the Department of War appropriated 1700 acres of the Forest Preserve to serve as 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 Korean War in 1949 insured that the entanglement of the federal government in
4 In addition to Argonne, the network of National Laboratories would soon include Brookhaven,

New York; Los Alamos, New Mexico; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Hanford, Washington; and Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore, California.

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scientic and technological research would continue at an unprecedented pace. A fundamental issue in this raceand it was indeed a racewas the military 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 democracy and the West depended on the research being pursued in this and other national research laboratories. The protection of democratic rights seemed to depend on high-risk technologies, which in turn imposed a toll on the health and ecological integrity of the surrounding ecosystems. By 1956, the rst of the two Forest Preserve sites, in the Red Gate Woods, had been cleared of all nuclear structures and returned to Cook County, even though nuclear waste continued to be buried there. More than a third of a century later, in 1992, pieces of still-dangerous uranium were found on the site. After a ve-year moratorium and an announcement by the Department of Energy that it had completed a $6 million cleanup to rid the site of radioactive materials and chemicals, the site reopened in the October of 1997 (see Ziemba, 1997). As these words are being written, more than a dozen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and a decade after the end of the Cold War in 1991, Argonne National Laboratory continues to occupy 1,700 acres of the Rocky Glen Forest Preserve in DuPage County. Although the preserve commissioners tried to protect the ecological integrity of the Forest Preserves at the end of WWII, they could not have anticipated the results of a later study from the National Academy of Sciences (National Research Council, 2000), which acknowledged that some nuclear sites may be contaminated indenitely, containing hazards that, while localized, are nevertheless beyond the capacity of present-day science and technology to remediate, even half a century after they were rst created. The practical consequence is that some such sites may never be cleaned up enough to allow public access; instead, as the New York Times (2000) stated, there was evidence that, for practical purposes, many nuclear sites may be toxic in perpetuity.

DISCUSSION: LEGITIMACY, EXPERT SYSTEMS, AND DEMOCRATIC 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/Beck emphasis on transcendence, or the focus on risks that transcend all values and all exclusionary divisions of power (Giddens, 1990:154). The activities

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at these sites, after all, involved the production of nuclear weapons, and for most of the latter half of the twentieth century, at least the citizens of the United States were largely united in seeing such weapons as providing an important deterrent against the threats that were perceived to emanate from the other side of the former Iron Curtain. Even if the risks involved in this nuclear standoff could not be said to transcend all values and all exclusionary divisions of power, there was, in other words, a good deal of transcendence at the national level. Most U.S. citizens, after all, felt a good deal of shared commitment to the policies of the time, and most citizens on the other side of the former Iron Curtain apparently felt a good deal of shared commitment to the policies of their own leaders, as well. At a broader level, moreover, it would be possible to argue that full transcendence was in evidence with respect to the greatest risk of all: Virtually all people on earth could be said to have had a shared recognition that all-out nuclear war presented unacceptable risksa point underscored by the fact that, despite all the tensions of the Cold War, the weapons have never again been used in anger, to date, after the two atomic bombs that were widely seen as helping to end World War II. Despite these successes, however, the failures and exceptions appear to have been both telling and troubling. They are telling in that they involved the federal governments failure to comply with relevant laws for the protection of public health and the environment, resulting in levels and types of contamination that subsequent analyses have found to be genuinely troubling. In terms of the issue of transcendence, however, the exceptions have tended to be troubling in a way that is socially concentrated, not widespread. These exceptions, in other words, point to a shared weakness in the logic put forward by both Giddens and Beck. Although the weapons were not actually used against those who were dened as enemies, they created signicant problems for those who were ofcially seen as friendsfor some of the very people for whose benet, in part, the weapons were claimed to have been created, and from whom came some of the tax dollars that made the weapons activities possible. From the perspective of the present, it is clear that, on both sides of the former Iron Curtain, the weapons activities led to the contamination or loss of areas that had been set aside for other purposessome of them for environmental protection, as in the case of Chicago, and others for peoples farms and homes. Even though some of the disruptions were intended to be temporary, as in Chicago, todays scientists warn that the levels of contamination may be so high as to prohibit the return of some areas to other socially valued uses more or less forever (National Research Council, 2000). Human health concerns are also an issue; government estimates indicate that more than 8000 workers nationwide may have been harmed (see the summary in

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Roe and Manier, 2001). Under the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, the federal government ofcially acknowledged its responsibility for the 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 were concentrated on those who were directly but often involuntarily exposed to nuclear radiation in their work. Indeed, even the governments ofcial acknowledgment of responsibility has proved to have only limited transcendence. The federal government began paying compensation under the Act 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 to do with the roles played by scientic and technical expertise. For Giddens, as we noted, reexivity in modernity involves a signicant degree of trust in expert systems. Reexivity is possible via a double hermeneutic that involves the self as the rst medium of interpretation, and experts as the second. For Giddens, the project of modernity has become the search for trust in a risk society, where subjects rely on their reexivity and that of interpersonal/expert relations against the uncertainties of fortuna. The reverse is the case of Becks notion of reexive modernization, where risk society reaches its paroxysm in the manufacturing of risk, as represented by nuclear technology, because of its statistically unlikely yet potentially devastating impact. This means that, for Beck, reexivity leads not to trust but to distrust of scientic institutions. For scholars who represent the third school of thought 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 relatively rare exceptions can lead to relatively high levels of distrust. This third perspective, as we read the data, comes closer to tting the facts of the case than do either the more optimistic views of Giddens or the more pessimistic views of Beck. As noted in our introductory comments, earlier work on what Habermas (1970) termed a Legitimation Crisis (see also Block, 1987; Offe, 1985) emphasized the challenges of maintaining legitimacy via economic performance. From the perspective of the twenty-rst centurywith the threats of the Cold War now more than a decade in the past, but with spending on the U.S. Department of Defense continuing to rival the peak levels of the Cold Warthe implications for the maintenance of legitimacy via economic

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prosperity may continue to have some relevance. At the same time, however, partly because growing numbers of citizens have become aware of the evidence of extensive (and expensive) contamination, there has been a growing loss of legitimacy of a different sort. In some ways, this loss of legitimacy could be seen as consistent with Becks emphasis on hazards that are so 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 most part, the uncontrollable risks were not those that were scientic or technological; instead, as stressed by U.S. sociologists such as Perrow (1984) or especially Clarke (1999), the relevant risks proved to be socialbureaucratic or organizationalin their nature and origin. This point deserves emphasis. As already documented by the National Research Council (2000), the key problems of contaminationwhether in chunks of radioactive uranium that have shown up at abandoned sites in the Chicago region, or in more broadly diffused plumes of toxic materials at hundreds of other sites that are so badly contaminated that they cannot be fully cleaned uphave not been that the scientic or technological risks have been uncontrollable or beyond the capacity of government and science. Instead, in a set of ndings that may actually be more troublesome, the problem is that the relevant federal agencies put so much emphasis on developing and building the weapons that, in some cases, they did not even take the simplest or most basic steps to protect citizens rights and the environment. In this respect, the ndings from Chicago are generally consistent with those from more remote corners of the country. Even the explicit legal protections built into the 1913 Forest Preserve Act proved insufcient to safeguard these ecosystems; instead, national security priorities were used to overturn all other forms of rightsincluding the relatively minimal attention to rights that would have been involved in nding other, nearby sites, whether during WWII or during the era of similarly heightened patriotism that characterized the early days of the Cold War. Virtually all of these risks would have been entirely possible to contain, technologically, even at that time. To put the matter simply, the problem proved to be that, for years, the responsible institutions failed to act responsibly, at least with respect to the control of contamination. This case, in short, ts the classic denition of recreancy, or institutional failure, with institutional actors not being totally irresponsible and yet failing to carry out their responsibilities with the degree 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 differences in detailand in precisionare important. On closer examination, what emerges is something more paradoxical than depicted by either of these

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well-known theoristsnot an uncontrollable or all-transcending form of risk, but a more prosaic form of institutional failure in the management of known risks, leading to the creation of signicant risks to the social fabric. The situation offers not so much a clear case of success or failure as it does a combination of two faces of modernity. Impressive advances in science and technology became entangled with the social imposition of risk something that happened partly because of the failure to give due weight to organizational performance, democratic rights, and environmental concerns. REFERENCES
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