It argues that, by appropriating this discourse, nuclear officials have rhetorically cast themselves as guardians of nuclear resources for the benefit of current and future generations, and have successfully defended themselves against undesirable change arising from public reconsideration of nuclear deterrence. This essay critiques "stewardship" as a contested historical and cultural discourse. This program has subsequently been challenged for its vast scale and expense, for its actual utility, and for its potential to facilitate the development of "new" nuclear weapons. Department of Energy developed a "Stockpile Stewardship Program" to certify the safety and reliability of that arsenal in the absence of explosive testing. This essay critiques official rhetoric surrounding post–Cold War–era management of the U.S. In particular, weapons scientists maintained credibility with key constituencies by treating tacit knowledge as a flexible resource that can be successfully integrated into new sociotechnical arrangements. These repair efforts show that weapons scientists' views of their own knowledge continued to evolve after the end of the Cold War. The Reliable Replacement Warhead concept emphasizes the close relationship between weapons knowledge and the design features of stockpile warheads, and seeks to repair credibility by introducing weapons designs optimized for long-term stockpile storage. The Stockpile Stewardship Program positions weapons expertise as an abstract body of knowledge, and seeks to repair the credibility of weapons scientists by embedding their knowledge in a new sociotechnical context of computer simulation and experimental science. We examine two post-Cold War repair efforts that demonstrate how actors carefully balance discursive, institutional, and material change in the repair of complex sociotechnical systems. Our analysis turns on the concept of sociotechnical repair – the processes communities and institutions engage in to sustain their existence, identity, and boundaries, particularly when faced with disruptive change. In this paper, we examine how the weapons community has avoided such a crisis of credibility. Sociologists Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi used this as evidence for the role of tacit knowledge in weapons design, suggesting that a halt to weapons design and testing could bring on a crisis of credibility, and possibly the 'uninvention' of nuclear weapons. As the Cold War drew to a close in the 1990s, weapons scientists warned that their knowledge was so deeply embedded in the design and testing of nuclear weapons that it might not survive if this system were disrupted.
Although RRW has been less successful politically than Stockpile Stewardship, its emergence as a credible repair strategy within the nuclear weapons community is indicative of significant changes in the knowledge and culture of that community during the era of Stockpile Stewardship.ĭuring the Cold War, the credibility of US nuclear weapons scientists was backed up by an integrated system for designing, testing, and manufacturing nuclear weapons. A more recent approach, built around the proposed Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), places less emphasis on the development of new knowledge, but seeks to transform the stockpile by redesigning weapon components with long-term stockpile storage in mind. An initial repair strategy, the Stockpile Stewardship Program, sought to transform weapons knowledge with a focus on modeling and simulation, but took a conservative approach to maintaining weapons in the stockpile.
The metaphor of socio-technical "repair" can be used to describe how institutions alter technologies and social practices in order to adapt to change. But the laboratories emerged from this crisis with new work to do and budgets largely intact.
The end of the Cold War created great uncertainty about the future of U.S.