| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The National Labs: Science in an American System, 1947–1974. By Peter J. Westwick. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. xii, 403 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-674-00948-7.)
To help win the Cold War, the United States created a set of research institutions throughout the nation with the mission of ensuring that cutting-edge science and technology found its way into the defense establishment. This set of "national laboratories" had become so powerful by 1961 that President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address warned the American people not only about the "military-industrial complex" but also of the "danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite." These laboratories have been under the nominal authority of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and later the Department of Energy (DoE). They included several entities associated with the Manhattan Project of World War II—Argonne, Berkeley, Brookhaven, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge—as well as later additions, such as the Lawrence Livermore installation. Together, these facilities undertook extensive strategic weapons research and development during a forty-year Cold War.	1
This collection of laboratories, manufacturing plants, test sites, and think tanks possesses complex origins and evolution and has attracted sustained historical inquiry. The National Labs is a fine addition to this extensive and sophisticated literature. It works best as a synthesis of previous arguments about the role of the weapons labs in recent American history and as a vehicle for understanding the relationship between American science and the modern federal establishment.	. . .

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