The mission of United States ballistic missile defense (BMD) testing in the 1980's was a technological and strategic response to Cold War geopolitics and Soviet nuclear threat that enjoyed considerable popularity during the Reagan Presidency. Yet by 1990 the Cold War's end and the waning of the perceived threat had significantly transformed the research context; the mission of Star Wars, as this big science project became popularly known, was suddenly uncertain. This Science and Technology Studies Dissertation Research Improvement Grant examines the process by which a new mission for United States missile defense testing emerged at this historical juncture and how it was understood via distinctive cultural lenses within its testing network. The project will to this end examine American national discourse on this transformation and the new technological and strategic aims it entailed, as well as the perspectives of network participants who encountered the changing form and fortunes of Star Wars at the Cold War's end. The heterogenous network required for BMD testing links the U.S. and the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the principal overseas test site for this technology. The islands are also a former U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands that served as a nuclear and atomic weapons proving ground in the 1950's. This network, whose participants hold very different stakes in American weapons testing and the heterogeneous engineering it requires in social, cultural, political, and economic domains, is a promising setting for a comparative, anthropological study of interactions between technology and society. Discourse analysis, interviewing, participant observation, and archival research in the United States and the Republic of the Marshall Islands will elucidate perspectives of American governmental, engineering, and corporate actors as well as Marshall Islander landowners and governmental actors who have facilitated use of the islands as a BMD test site. This research builds upon the Ph.D. student's exploratory research in the United States and the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and coursework including fieldwork methods, the anthropology of science, the United States, and the Pacific. Her research will extend studies of the construction of risk, big science and its intersection with national security and historical change, and technological networks. Through its focus upon linkages between big science and its test site, the research will also extend the study of interactions between the Western and non-Western worlds mediated by science and technology. Broader impacts include doctoral training in anthropology at the City University of New York. Findings will be communicated in academic conference papers and journal articles, and to participating institutions and communities. The project will contribute a cultural historical understanding of one of the most enduring big science projects in existence, a matter of potential relevance to science policy in light of the significant expansion of missile defense activities in the past decade. U.S. missile defense technology has thus far existed solely in the test phase, with a single and circumscribed exception, yet this will soon change with deployment scheduled for 2004, a development likely to intensify the not well understood interactions between this foremost example of big science, society, and culture.
