Dissertation Research: The Post-Cold War Mission of U.S. Missile Defense Testing: American and Marshall Islander Perspectives

20世纪80年代，美国弹道导弹防御系统（BMD）试验的任务是对冷战地缘政治和苏联核威胁的技术和战略回应，在里根总统任期内享有相当大的声望。然而，到1990年，冷战的结束和感知到的威胁的减弱显著地改变了研究背景；星球大战的任务，这个广为人知的大型科学项目，突然变得不确定了。本科学与技术研究论文研究改进基金考察了美国导弹防御测试的新任务在这一历史关头出现的过程，以及如何通过其测试网络中独特的文化镜头来理解它。为此，该项目将审视美国关于这种转变的国家话语，以及它所带来的新技术和战略目标，以及在冷战结束时遇到星球大战变化的形式和命运的网络参与者的观点。BMD测试所需的异构网络将美国和马绍尔群岛共和国连接起来，马绍尔群岛共和国是该技术的主要海外试验场。这些岛屿也是前太平洋岛屿的美国托管领土，在20世纪50年代曾作为核武器和原子武器的试验场。这个网络的参与者在美国武器测试及其在社会、文化、政治和经济领域所需要的异质工程方面有着非常不同的利害关系，这是一个很有希望的环境，可以对技术与社会之间的相互作用进行比较和人类学研究。在美国和马绍尔群岛共和国的话语分析、访谈、参与者观察和档案研究将阐明美国政府、工程和公司行为者以及马绍尔群岛土地所有者和政府行为者的观点，这些行为者促进了将这些岛屿用作弹道导弹防御试验场。本研究以博士生在美国和马绍尔群岛共和国的探索性研究为基础，课程包括实地考察方法、科学人类学、美国和太平洋。她的研究将扩展对风险构建、大科学及其与国家安全和历史变迁的交叉以及技术网络的研究。通过关注大科学与试验场之间的联系，该研究还将扩展以科学技术为媒介的西方与非西方世界之间相互作用的研究。更广泛的影响包括在纽约城市大学进行人类学博士培训。研究结果将在学术会议论文和期刊文章中传达，并传达给参与的机构和社区。该项目将有助于对现存最持久的大型科学项目之一的文化历史理解，鉴于过去十年导弹防御活动的显著扩张，这一问题可能与科学政策相关。到目前为止，美国的导弹防御技术只存在于测试阶段，只有一个有限的例外，但随着计划于2004年部署，这种情况很快就会改变，这一发展可能会加剧这个大科学、社会和文化的最重要例子之间尚未被很好理解的相互作用。

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.