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Ways Of Knowing About Weapons: The Cold War's End At The Los Alamos National Laboratory, Laura Agnes Mcnamara

Anthropology ETDs

This dissertation addresses questions of knowledge, identity, scientific activity and social reproduction among nuclear weapons experts at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Throughout the Cold War, the laboratory's weapons community produced an enormous body of knowledge about nuclear weapons through engaging iteratively in an experimental cycle that consisted of designing, building and testing experimental nuclear explosives. This design and test cycle also fulfilled critical social functions. providing a site for the reproduction of skills and understandings in novice weaponeers as well as an engine for the ongoing integration of the many "ways of knowing" that existed in the laboratory. However, …