Politics and Space

392 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE the press, the public, and lower-level officials expected a Soviet bomb to explode imminently, the authors show that the most power­ ful and knowledgeable officials in the nuclear establishment—Gen­ eral Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and later James B. Conant and Vannevar Bush—were quite certain that the United States could enjoy its nuclear monopoly for a decade or longer. They based their rosy assessment on the conviction that atomic bombs could only be made out of the high-grade uranium found in a single mine in the Belgian Congo, a rare substance for which the United States had cornered the market. They also believed that the Russians were technologically and culturally too backward to catch up with the United States or to develop methods to use low-grade uranium ores. As a result, they allowed the armed services to develop their detection methods at a leisurely pace without guidance from above or a sense of urgency. When the Soviets exploded Joe-1 barely four years after Hiroshima, “Top Washington officials . . . wire shocked and surprised” (p. 212). This is a fine, well-researched book that will delight historians of American bureaucracy and the military. Historians of technology will find several interesting sections in it, but they will wish for more. Daniel R. Headrick Dr. Headrick, professor of history and social science at Roosevelt University, is the author of The Tools of Empire (1981), The Tentacles of Progress (1988), and The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics, 1851-1945 (1991). He is currently working on the data revolution of the 18th century. Politics and Space: Image Making by NASA. By Mark E. Brynes. Westport , Conn., and London: Praeger, 1994. Pp. 212; tables, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $55.00. Politics and Space is a study in political science. It asks at the outset, “How and why do bureaucratic agencies change over time the im­ ages they project in trying to build political support?” (p. 2). To help answer that question, Mark Byrnes proposes image making at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as an important case study. Because NASA is a key institutional player in many recent key technological developments, historians of technol­ ogy might be tempted to look to this book for analyses and insights, all the more because of the academic credentials and perspective of the author. I think, however, that they will be disappointed; not so much because there is anything wrong with the book on its own terms (it has a useful bibliography citing relevant works in political science), but because its historical discussions are by now thoroughly familiar and its primary theoretical conclusion is, at least to me, com­ pletely unsurprising. “Based on a case study of NASA,” writes Byrnes in his introduc­ TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 393 tion, “this book suggests that agencies carefully adjust their images in response to changes in their political environments.” It is a con­ clusion that, as Byrnes states himself in his next paragraph, “falls within an established body of scholarly work.” Ifit had not, then I’d say that as historians we would have an important set of issues to confront. Because it does, I suspect there is little here historians will find compelling. The body of the study presents three major themes or images con­ sistently used by NASA to build political support: nationalism, ro­ manticism, and pragmatism. While all three have been present throughout NASA’s thirty-five-year history, the relative weight and emphasis given these themes has changed markedly over time, ac­ cording to Byrnes. To make this point, the author identifies three separate periods of NASA history—Mercury, Apollo, and Shuttle— in which first one and then another of these images have predomi­ nated. Chapters devoted to one of the three images alternate with chapters devoted to the periods in which that image dominated, all building a case to demonstrate how the focus of the image projected was largely an adaptation to changing political circumstances. The penultimate chapter provides a more general discussion ofthe meth­ ods used by NASA to transmit its preferred images to the public. There are occasional minor problems with the

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