Hugh Gusterson | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Do professional ethics matter in war?

Hugh Gusterson — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:58:55 -0800

What happens when the U.S. military decides that an academic discipline's professional ethics code is a nuisance?

That is the situation in which anthropology now finds itself.

An American suicide bomber?

Hugh Gusterson — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:05:10 -0800

"As for the Taliban fighters, they not only don't cherish life, they expend it freely in suicide bombings. It's difficult to imagine an American suicide bomber," Washington Post pundit Richard Cohen opined in a recent column.

Afghanistan: Vietnam all over again

Hugh Gusterson — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:48:03 -0800

"Today they are ringing the bells; tomorrow they will be wringing their hands," Sir Robert Walpole.

We don't know the intimate details of the discussions in President Barack Obama's recent war councils, so it's impossible to know what the chess-player-in-chief is thinking as he sends 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. We only know what he is telling us.

How to get out of Afghanistan

Hugh Gusterson — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:35:13 -0700

It's nice to hear from readers of this column, even if they ask pointed questions. Anne Winterfield, a graduate student at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, read my recent article on the futility of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and called me up with a question about the last sentence of that article: "Say our job is done now, Mr.

The shared sins of Soviet and U.S. nuclear testing

Hugh Gusterson — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 08:16:16 -0700

Gerald Sperling's new film, Silent Bombs: All for the Motherland, recounts the effects of decades of nuclear testing on Kazakh villagers near the Soviet nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk. The film is at once very particular to Kazakhstan, the exotic ambience of which is evoked with a sad lyricism, and, in a disturbing way, generic to the nuclear age. It evokes something that is simultaneously strange and familiar.

Why the war in Afghanistan cannot be won

Hugh Gusterson — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:44:57 -0700

A number of commentators have remarked of late on the ominous parallels between the situation in Afghanistan today and the quagmire in Vietnam in the 1960s:

Thinking creatively about the North Korean stalemate

Hugh Gusterson — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:47:42 -0700

We all know the saying that you can't be a little bit pregnant--either you are or you aren't. According to Henry Kissinger, getting nuclear weapons is like getting pregnant. In a Washington Post op-ed published on Nagasaki Day, Kissinger wrote, "The root cause of our decade-old controversy with Pyongyang is that there is no middle ground between North Korea being a nuclear-weapons state and a state without nuclear weapons."

Hiroshima and the power of pictures

Hugh Gusterson — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 15:10:27 -0700

Sixty-four years ago this week the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by atomic bombs. Whether we endorse or condemn the bombings, how do we grasp the enormity of the destruction that befell those two unfortunate Japanese cities? The last survivors of the bombings are passing into history, taking with them the power of their living witness. But for me, the full force of the bombings has always come from pictures more than words.

Iran: Looking forward

Hugh Gusterson — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:01:02 -0700

Ayatollah Khamenei and the Iranian regime had two choices when their blatant rigging of the election was met with massive street protests. They could stand aside, a la the decrepit regimes of Eastern Europe in 1989; or they could send out uniformed thugs to beat, kill, and intimidate the protesters until their movement buckled, a la China's Tiananmen Square strategy.

They chose the latter, and we will all pay the price.

The CTBT debate begins again

Hugh Gusterson — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:25:48 -0700

North Korea's nuclear test on May 25 has increased the urgency of the nuclear test ban cause but also raised further questions about the feasibility of achieving a truly universal ban. President Barack Obama has promised to seek "aggressive" and "immediate" ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Signed by Washington in 1996, the CTBT was brought before the Senate for ratification once before in 1999.

Why Thomas Friedman is wrong about the National Ignition Facility

Hugh Gusterson — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 09:31:28 -0700

Tom Friedman's brain is flat. That is the only conclusion I can reach after reading his New York Times piece on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF). A flat brain cannot tolerate complexity. It turns things--such as globalization and laser facilities--into cartoon versions of themselves.

The Washington Post's distorted take on Yucca Mountain

Hugh Gusterson — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 06:02:12 -0700

Newspapers maintain a distinction between news stories, which are supposed to be balanced and factually accurate, and editorial pages, which afford more license for point of view and factual cherry-picking. But there is still a line between responsible and irresponsible editorials. Wherever that line is, a recent Washington Post editorial on Yucca Mountain in Nevada is on the wrong side of it.

Empire of bases

Hugh Gusterson — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:38:30 -0700

Before reading this article, try to answer this question: How many military bases does the United States have in other countries: a) 100; b) 300; c) 700; or d) 1,000.

The legacy of Ed Grothus and the Black Hole

Hugh Gusterson — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 10:52:15 -0800

--"Jesters do oft prove prophets," William Shakespeare, King Lear
--"When one is legendary, one must do legendary things," Ed Grothus

The bursting global security bubble

Hugh Gusterson — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:49:56 -0700

In the 1930s and 1940s, the West's financial and security structures collapsed. In the grip of a speculative bubble, and in the absence of proper oversight, banks had been allowed to lend more money than they responsibly could. (Sound familiar?) When queasy depositors sought to withdraw their money en masse, the result was a massive collapse of banks and the stock market, followed by the Great Depression.

Project Minerva revisited

Hugh Gusterson — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 07:58:09 -0700

In my last column, as well as in a column for Foreign Policy, I expressed reservations about Project Minerva--a $50 million Pentagon initiative to mobilize anthropologists and other social scientists to do research in aid of the "war on terror." I argued that such research should be sponsored by a civilian agency such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) rather than by the Pentagon

The U.S. military's quest to weaponize culture

Hugh Gusterson — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:06:00 -0700

The Pentagon seems to have decided that anthropology is to the war on terror what physics was to the Cold War. As an anthropologist, this makes me very nervous.

Where former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld believed that the United States would vanquish its enemies through technological superiority, his replacement Robert Gates has said that cultural expertise in counterinsurgency operations will be crucial in the future wars he anticipates.

The new nuclear abolitionists

Hugh Gusterson — Tue, 13 May 2008 08:50:00 -0700

Twenty-five years ago, the Nuclear Freeze campaign mobilized hundreds of thousands of Americans to demand an end to the testing, production, and deployment of new nuclear weapons. At that time, advocating the complete abolition of nuclear weapons was a fringe position confined to a few utopians on the left. Even most antinuclear activists struggled getting past the "you can't put the genie back in the bottle" common sense of pundits and arms control experts.

The "public" discussion about the Energy Department's Complex Transformation

Hugh Gusterson — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:00:00 -0700

On Tuesday, the Energy Department held public hearings in Washington on its plans to "transform" the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Last time I went to Energy headquarters I was turned away because I wasn't a U.S. citizen. (See "Misadventures at the U.S. Energy Department.") This time they let me in without inquiring about my citizenship; they even let me roam the halls unescorted to look for a bathroom. Go figure.

U.S. nuclear double standards

Hugh Gusterson — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:00:00 -0800

As seen from Pakistan, U.S. nuclear weapons policies present troubling trends; an exclusive interview with the irreverent Brig. Gen. Atta M. Iqhman.