Book Review

Canada and the United States

The American embrace of the atom and the culture that it spawned have highlighted some of the most important dilemmas of the post-1945 world. They shout questions about reliance on technological systems, about the nature of human conflict, and, from the perspective of many scholars, about the nature of human morality. It is clearly one of the most vexing issues that contemporary historians encounter.	1
The study of atomic culture has also become central to a crucial argument about the nature of regionalism in the United States: can an activity that is of national scope but that plays out largely within a specific region be classed as either regional or national? Can it in the end be both? If so, how does that position regional and national history? With the development of America's atomic and nuclear weapons complex, did the nation—and its regions—become part of a progressive use of technology or did it become flawed, as cracked as the Liberty Bell itself, embracing a technology so destructive that it marred the very idea of democracy?	2
The second of these questions has many strident and powerful claimants on both sides. In his widely renowned history, Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project (1997), Peter B. Hales sees the rise of the atom bomb as a pretext for the continuation of the flawed principles of post-Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) America and regards the development and use of the atom bomb as a fault line, a point at which the American nation went inherently and irredeemably wrong one final time. There is an idealism to this argument, a belief in a kind of democracy our age embraces but that has few precedents in the past. In this sense, Hales's argument is truly national, with the regions he discusses pawns in a national process, unflinching receptors of a national impulse in a one-way process reminiscent of Marxist descriptions of colonialism.	3
Gerald D. Nash has long argued the opposite of Hales: that the development and use of the atom bomb was inevitable, a continuation of the expansion of the American nation into its most colonized section, the West. It is here that Nash engages the regionalism that Hales looks past. By looking from different points of view—to borrow from Patricia Nelson Limerick, one looks from Chicago and the other from Albuquerque—they see these realities in different and largely irreconcilable terms. Both announce their views, certain that they have defined the critical question.	4
Bruce Hevly and John M. Findlay, coeditors of the present volume, tilt the discussion in a new way. Findlay, a renowned urban and cultural historian who is a keen observer of western regionalism, and Hevly, a prominent historian of science, have attempted to pull back from the emotions that define this set of issues and assess them as clearly and directly as possible. Here is the beauty of this comparatively thin volume: it dispenses with polemics as its searches for the evidence to support the contentions of both and neither side. The various atomic administering agencies, Hevly and Findlay tell us, "chose western locales for numerous atomic tasks, especially the dirtier ones" (p. 4). In this they encompass both points of view, the regionalist and the national. "The Atomic West," they write, "succeeded in marrying the purposes of the nation with those of the region" (p. 5). Their book attempts to show how, to provide the context for the melding of regional and national.	. . .