BOOK REVIEW : Life Inside the Doomsday Machine

AT THE HEART OF THE BOMB The Dangerous Allure of Weapons Work by Debra Rosenthal Addison-Wesley $18.95, 244 pages

Welcome to New Mexico: “Land of Enchantment,” birthplace of the atomic bomb, and home of the post-industrial factory towns where the tools of Armageddon are forged.

“Imagine that the Land of Enchantment is really the center of the Earth,” writes political scientist Debra Rosenthal in “At the Heart of the Bomb.” “In the machine at the center of the world, preparing for the worst possible earthly disaster becomes a routine.”

“At the Heart of the Bomb” is Rosenthal’s Orwellian exploration of the innermost workings of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, the research-and-development facilities in the mountains of New Mexico where America’s nuclear arsenal is nurtured and tended. “The bombheads,” as the weapons designers of Los Alamos and Sandia are sometimes known, are preoccupied with science and technology in the purest sense: “What the thing would look like if the angels made them.” But Rosenthal is more interested in the moral implications of bomb-making, and she favors the use of irony to make her point that Los Alamos and Sandia are the engines that drive “the doomsday machine.”

Rosenthal’s irony, however, is about as delicate and subtle as Fat Man or Little Boy.

She points out that “Puppy Palace” is the nickname for the cafeteria at the Inhalation Toxicology Lab, where airborne radioactive toxins are tested on beagles. A venerable old scientist from the days of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “historical conscience” of Los Alamos, shows home movies of the bombing of Hiroshima. A glass blower who makes specialized glass vessels and components has hung a sign on his shop: “Are You Prepared to Meet God?”

Rosenthal spent five years or so observing Los Alamos and Sandia, and talking to the men and women who work there. I suspect that she set out to find men and women who were plagued by doubt and guilt over their work. But what Rosenthal actually found at Los Alamos and Sandia were fairly ordinary government employees who have made their peace--and, of course, their living--with the technology of war.

Some have distanced themselves from the moral dilemma by focusing on pure science: “Being a Peeping Tom on Mother Nature is what it is,” says one woman who specializes in bomb design and “Star Wars” research. “I get a big kick out of seeing how the physics is working inside the device.”

Others have settled into comfortable self-rationalization:

“Once I got past the fact that other countries are doing it full tilt, but don’t have the Christian ethics I have,” says another engineer at Los Alamos, “I thought it was OK.” Some just like the scenery: “It’s situated in the mountains,” says one computer expert about Los Alamos, “and I like the mountains.”

A few disenchanted bomb makers are allowed to speak their piece.

“In the main, we are building toys for professional soldiers who need them to justify their existence, and for an industrial society which requires them to provide jobs for its workers, at the bidding of politicians who lie and manipulate us and prey upon our fears . . . ,” wrote one physicist-turned-poet who was about to leave Sandia when Rosenthal found him.

“I prejudge our guilt to be the same as that of all the good Nazis who obediently followed orders.”

But such chest-thumping is rare. Mostly, Rosenthal resorts to the distorting lens of selective description to make her point. For example, when she finds one weapons designer named Karl who is untroubled by the moral implications of his work, she makes sure that we see him as “overweight,” “middle-aged,” and “eerie.” “This is the closest you get to playing God,” he says.

Karl is shown boasting that the bombs he designs are “so much more subtle, so much more beautiful than they were in the old days.”

And he boasts, too, that our bombs are better than their bombs: “If those megatons roll, this country is going to have the best.”

More often, though, Rosenthal’s sources begin to sound more sensible than the author.

“I have a friend who’s a Jungian analyst and she’s convinced that . . . a place that is working on something that can destroy the world must have a very dark shadow side,” observes a Unitarian minister in Los Alamos.

“But I just don’t see the evidence for it. When the kids take drugs, it is not because they’re in Los Alamos, home of the bomb. It is because that’s what teens do in affluent smallish towns.”

Rosenthal expected to find a moral inferno at the heart of the bomb, but she shows us only a slice of suburbia in the service of weapons technology.

She looked for Dr. Strangelove and found Ozzie and Harriet instead. In that sense, of course, her vision of Los Alamos as “a metaphor for America” is chilling enough.