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Title: Citizens Against the Mx: Public Languages in the Nuclear Age by Matthew Glass ISBN: 0-252-01928-8 Publisher: University of Illinois Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 1993 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $34.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (1 review)

Rating: 3
Summary: A Beginning, but far from the Last Word
Comment: "Citizens Against the MX" is a sometimes exciting, sometimes unnerving, and sometimes infuriating but often provocative book. The author uses some of the tools of the "new historicism" and the deconstruction of texts to analyze the efforts of several citizens' groups in the Great Basin in the late 1970s and early 1980s to defeat the proposal of the U.S. Air Force to base a new ICBM in the region. The Air Force said the new ICBM, called the MX for a time but later named by Ronald Reagan in 1981 the "peacekeeper" to emphasize its deterrent capability, would ensure the safety of the United States from the Soviet threat. Deploying it in the Great Basin made sense, said the Air Force, because of its vast expanse of under-populated and under-used federal lands. The MX project also offered jobs to the region, something that was attractive to many politicians and business leaders. In spite of this, a coalition of divergent interests--principally ranchers, environmentalists, Western Shoshones, and Mormons--organized to oppose the deployment and persuaded the Reagan administration to site the MX elsewhere.

Glass's effort to analyze this important episode in western and U.S. history is only partly successful. His first three chapters describe reasonably well the opposition to the MX in the region. In them he makes good use of interviews with key opponents of the MX and of records from groups organized to battle the Air Force. These are the most useful portions of the book. His last three chapters seek to deconstruct the public discourse and analyze the successful opposition of citizens to government initiatives. Using especially the theories of Jurgen Habermas, Glass finds that there is a way for citizens to affect the debate over public policy.

At the same time, however, Glass never makes any serious attempt to present either the Air Force perspective on the effort or the positions of other federal agencies, none of which was monolithic and sometimes stood in opposition one to another. Glass tried to explain away this fact in his introduction by commenting that he was unable to contact any Air Force personnel because "if still in service, [they] had taken up subsequent assignments in other parts of the country" (p. xxii) .This is an unsatisfactory answer, for virtually all of them could have been reached by telephone simply by obtaining their assignment numbers from Headquarters USAF's personnel office. In addition, the author could have benefited substantially from documentary research at the Air Force Historical Research Center in the Air University in Montgomery, Alabama, where official records are maintained. As a result, this is a highly one-sided and far from definitive discussion of the episode.

Indeed, the author even seems to offer conclusions that are not sup- ported by the evidence when dealing with the government's attitude about MX basing. One example from p. 102 should suffice for what seems to be a pattern that arises every few pages. In 1980 Undersecretary of the Air Force Antonia Chayes replied to an anti-MX editorial written by University of Utah law professor Edwin B. Firmage in the Salt Lake Tribune with a handwritten note to the paper. Glass uses that note to support something that at least the portions he quoted did not demonstrate. In it Chayes applauded the "positive and stimulating" dialogue the Air Force was engaged in with the citizens of the region. She added, "We are making every effort to consult with the leaders and citizens of the potentially affected areas so as to devise approaches to this vital national undertaking which are compatible with local concerns and values. After all, the Air Force's mission in strategic defense, as in all other areas, is to protect our way of life." In the next paragraph Glass concludes on the basis of the discussion of Chayes's note that she attempted "to disqualify Firmage as an authoritative source on the real meaning of U .S. strategic policy" and that it "sounded persuasive because it posited a gap between the knowledge available to citizens and that available to the genuine experts." I do not see how the quoted portions of Chayes's note provide evidence for Glass's conclusion.

The full story of the MX basing controversy has yet to be written. When it is, Glass's work will be an important reference point for his analysis of the opposition groups and how they planned and accomplished their task. It will also include a reasoned analysis of the position and perspective of the Air Force and other governmental, business, and political interests who played in the controversy. Most important, it will explore the question of technocracy and its place in modern American society, a fascinating question that Glass did not consider despite its centrality to the MX fight in the Great Basin.