The Good Servant: Making Peace with the Bomb at Los Alamos

An account of America's most brilliant nuclear scientists putting their talents to use for peace reveals how the once top-secret weapons laboratories at Los Alamos are being used for peacetime research to benefit humankind. 15,000 first printing.

Since the end of U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons testing in 1992 and the subsequent reduction in nuclear warheads, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico have modestly branched out into nonmilitary research, turning swords into plowshares. Bailey, who lives in New Mexico and writes about science for the Los Angeles Times, interviewed Los Alamos physicists for this report. Materials scientist Dave Cuchane is conducting a geothermal energy project for tapping heat from Earth's interior. A Los Alamos team is using superconducting sensors to construct a multidimensional model of human brain activity. Bailey also visited Neutrino Village in the Soviet Caucasus, where Los Alamos scientists have collaborated with Russian physicists on an underground telescope that examines subatomic particles to prove that the supposedly massless neutrino has mass. Interviews with weapon scientists, bomb designers and testers round out a sobering, hopeful appraisal of America's post-Cold War nuclear weapons program.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Journalist Bailey lives near Los Alamos, New Mexico, birthplace of the Bomb and still a national laboratory. Her premise is intriguing: what shall the bomb designers, physicists, and dreamers of destruction do now that the Cold War?and hence their work?is over? It turns out to be pretty much what one might expect: some are involved in cosmological research, others in particle physics; one group is developing geothermal energy technology, another group is working on medical imaging, but there is no wholesale swords-to-ploughshares program. (Indeed, most seem to prefer their nuclear work, if such work could be had.) That some of the researchers are working with their erstwhile enemies, the Russians, is salutary; that others are dedicated to preserving the stockpile of nuclear weapons is perhaps less so. In a gentle and pleasing style, Bailey relates nice conversations with economy and irony. She doesn't go as deeply into various tales and projects as some readers might like?which could be a plus for others. General collections with literate reading-room browsers and collections in the defense research sciences should procure. [See also "The Bombs of August, 1945-1995," LJ 7/95, p. 98-100.?Ed.]?Mark L. Shelton, Worcester, Mass.
-?Mark L. Shelton, Worcester, Mass.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

What are Los Alamos scientists working on during this post^-cold war era of funding cuts and unclear missions, 50 years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? A number of exciting and potentially beneficial projects, according to science journalist Bailey. Now that the superpowers are dismantling and disposing of nuclear warheads, the fine art of deterrence is aimed at Third World countries, so some Los Alamos scientists are pursuing improved surveillance technologies. Others are in Baksan, Russia, studying the neutrino, the most elusive of subatomic particles, as part of SAGE, the Soviet-American Gallium Experiment. Then there's Ed Flynn, a Los Alamos biophysicist experimenting with methods for studying and mapping the brain. And, finally, there's the Hot Dry Rock experiment, a search for a way to produce "clean energy" through harnessing the heat generated at the earth's core. Bailey's lively profiles of Los Alamos scientists and cogent descriptions of their work give us hope that physics, which became the science of death, can be turned back into the science of life. Donna Seaman