As parts of a centrally controlled research effort directed largely to national security, the national laboratories run by the Atomic Energy Commission might have seemed more appropriate to the Soviet Union than to the United States. Peter Westwick resolves the paradox by treating the labs as linked elements in a typically American competitive-cooperative system. He uses the same concept to explain the labs' increasing diversification and their apparent redundancy. Westwick's lively analysis of the national labs as a system is a significant contribution to U.S. history and a model for the historian of modern scientific institutions.
-- John L. Heilbron, author of The Sun in the Church (Harvard)
Oak Ridge, Hanford, Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, Livermore--all were laboratories to conjure with in the heyday of the Cold War. Westwick's book is the first to treat them together, as elements in the integrated national laboratory system that sprang up in the aftermath of World War II. He masterfully addresses their relationships to the larger Cold War culture and to each other. Deeply researched and clearly written, his book provides a rare close-up of the interplay of science, defense, and bureaucratic interest during a crucial period in the national labs' history.
-- Daniel Kevles, Stanley Woodward Professor of History, Yale University
A rich institutional history of the Atomic Energy Commission's laboratory system. It shows scientists and government officials working together creatively to produce the knowledge, skills, and technologies required by the national security state.
-- John Krige, Kranzberg Professor, School of History, Technology and Society, Georgia Institute of Technology
The system of national laboratories is the main American contribution to the transformation of science in the twentieth century. The labs were a major force in developments from radar to reactors, from computers to quarks. It is high time for a study of the system as a whole. Westwick's book, thoroughly researched and intelligently argued, will surely become the standard work on the subject, valuable to everyone who wants to understand how our scientific community took on its present shape.
-- Spencer Weart, Director of the Center for History of Physics, American Institute of Physics
The book is an almost encyclopedic review of the history and function of the national laboratories and therefore will be a very useful reference to the many scientists and historians interested in the subject.
-- Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, Director Emeritus, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University
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. Peter J. Westwick coins a new term, systemicity, as a unifying theme in this study, in the process emphasizing his contention that these facilities may only be understood as a diverse collection unified by a common goal and head but with significant centrifugal tendencies
The National Labs makes an important contribution to knowledge about the evolution of this set of research institutions between 1947, when the AEC began operation, and 1974, when the DOE took over responsibility for overseeing them
Westwick's synthesis is a valuable entrée into how these scientific institutions both altered and reflected the values of the United States during the Cold War.
-- Roger D. Launius Journal of American History
The present book is a useful contribution to the ever growing literature on 'Big Science'. Based on extensive archival research at the U.S. National Archives and the individual national laboratories of the United States (Argonne, Brookhaven, Berkeley, Livermore, Los Alamos and Oak Ridge), the author sets out the early history of the national laboratory system in the United States describing the major programs and missions and the administrative choices and disputes in the period running from 1972-1962
In an effort to keep a lid on this diversity, the author maintains a steady eye on the overall structure of the system while covering individual programs such as the aforementioned highly bureaucratic reactor and particle accelerator programs in considerable detail.
-- Peter Keating History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences