The Moral Dilemmas of Nuclear Weapons Development

When reading “Becoming a Weapons Scientist,” the main idea of the article was about how Gusterson’s perspective of the nuclear weapons scientist profession changed after hearing the unique story of a woman named Sylvia, a nuclear weapons scientist. Gusterson used to be an anti-nuclear activist, so the entire article is about how his predilections about someone in Sylvia’s position were challenged when he learned about her story. He addressed the effects of Sylvia being a woman in a male-centric environment, how her aunt was affected by radiation after the Hiroshima bombs, how her father was put in a Japanese internment camp by the U.S. government. All of these factors play into why Sylvia chose the profession she did, and why she did not succumb to the moral conflicts of her job that Gusterson anticipated.

The aspect of the article that struck me most was the way in which Gusterson described Livermore scientists’ approaches the moral dilemmas of their jobs. Despite the political diversity among the employees at the laboratory (starting on pg. 10), they are brought together under a few common principles and produce nuclear weapons. Gusterson describes the Livermore scientists as Consequentialists, which means that they believe that “actions should be judged not by their intrinsic purity but by their consequences; hence if threatening to destroy an entire city helps save the city, then it is moral to make the threat” (Gusterson 12). Therefore, one of the big themes that Gusterson learned in his research (and that he is trying to convince his readership) is that scientists like Sylvia are working on developing nuclear weapons to make our society safer, not more dangerous. In fact, Clark, one of Sylvia’s colleagues, said that he felt more comfortable working on nuclear weapons than he would on conventional weapons because conventional weapons are used to kill people more routinely because of their non-genocidal nature (13).

In the context of the class, this reading is relevant because it shows an example of how accepted social constructions can be challenged and changed by researching, interviewing, and uncovering specific life stories and perspectives. Gusterson believed that all nuclear scientists had some kind of skewed moral compass in order to do what they do. Instead, Gusterson learned that Sylvia wanted to work in a nuclear lab because she was afraid of the unknown and the uncertain of these powerful weapons. Perhaps most interestingly, morality still plays a huge role in why Sylvia wants to work on nuclear weapons, just not in the way Gusterson anticipated. Sylvia wants to make the world safer and to understand the most dangerous weapons so that she can take measures to tame their effects. Like Gusterson, by reading this article, I have changed my opinion on a social construction that I used to accept as fact.