The Final Frontier: Science, America and Terror

In this highly original and provocative work, Dominick Jenkins provides a meticulously researched history of US weapons policy from the First World War to the present day. In the first part Jenkins shows how the US presidency and its advisers portrayed Americans as living on a new high-technology frontier, faced by a German outlaw whose chemical and air weapons would make it an ever greater threat. In so doing, they helped produce the very enemies they warned against, and raised the probability of further war and terror.

The comparisons Jenkins draws with the contemporary situation are clear and compelling: As with the German sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, the September 11 attacks are now being used to convince Americans to back the expansion of presidential power and a permanent war against rogue states armed with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. But the history of the weapons laboratories underscores the danger. With the end of the Cold War, the opportunity for a long-term just peace may be lost, and the memory of that chance erased.

Dominick Jenkins has worked for Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He is currently a researcher at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University.