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Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Misszle Guadance. By Donald MacKenzie. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. Pp. xiii + 464; figures, notes, appendixes, index. $29.95.

Inventing Accuracy is an ambitious primer into the counterintuitive world of military research and development from the perspective of a sociologist looking at technological change. It traces the develop- ment of missile guidance systems in the divisively competitive postwar world in which procurement policy is dominated by many factors external to the technical capability, promise, or potential of the guidance and control systems themselves.

Written for engineers as well as for historians, sociologists, and policy analysts, Inventing Accuracy pays close attention to technical issues that really do make up much of the core of the enterprise but shows as well how the technical effort is conducted within, and determined largely by, a shifting policy climate in which decisions are made, such as the creation of ballistic missile systems with countercity or counterforce accuracy (area targeting as opposed to the ability to destroy specific military targets) or systems capable of first-strike capability in distinction to those either preemptive or defensive in nature. Choosing among these alternatives in the past was neither a wholly technical nor a wholly political decision but an amalgam of the two, which leads Donald MacKenzie to argue that the two realms of politics and technology embodied in missile accuracy are really one and the same. As he concludes: "Technology in the nuclear world is not above politics as an autonomous determining factor, nor beneath it as a dependent effect, but part of it" (p. 412).

The three major categories of guidance that competed in the postwar era were radio, inertial, and stellar inertial. The first em- ployed telemetry between ground systems and the missile, and employed, among a number of methods, radio Doppler techniques to determine velocity and position. Inertial systems, wholly self- contained "black boxes," used combinations of integrating gyroscopes and accelerometers to know cumulatively at every moment of flight the missile's location and heading. An inertial system could make corrections if it found itself off course from its preprogrammed trajectory. The third system used startrackers to establish position after launch to calibrate an otherwise preprogrammed inertial system. Each category had its promoters and detractors in a nested set of interlocking technical and political arenas, but inertial guidance quickly dominated; the real question was: What type of inertial systems should be built, and should they be purely inertial?

MacKenzie traces the development of gyroscopic control since the late 19th century to show how that technical culture played a role in the evolution of ground-based (from Minuteman to the MX) and ocean-based (Polaris, Trident, Poseidon) missile guidance systems,

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and demonstrates just how difficult it is to equate policy shifts within both services to the shaping of the technology. For instance, even though the navy suffered deep internal division over roles and missions for guided missiles, the evolution of its submarine-based systems appeared far smoother than for the air force, which was always comparatively clear about its need for delivery systems for nuclear warheads. Among many explanations, MacKenzie offers the idea that the navy operated underwater, whereas the air force systems had to operate where people live.

Highlighting the central role played by Charles Stark Draper as the entrepreneurial heterogenous engineer who created an air force "guidance mafia" out of those officers who had tours of duty in his Massachusetts Institute of Technology Instrumentation Laboratory, MacKenzie explores how the intersecting threads that made up the development process could be manipulated into such a complex and formidable tapestry. He argues that such manipulations could make guidance appear to Draper's partisan promoters (but not to the providers of the technology) as a world determined by a clearly delineated technological trajectory leading inexorably to the target of increased accuracy. MacKenzie then takes great pains to show that such a world simply does not exist and that technological trajectories do not live beyond the interests of their patrons: he argues that "for all its apparent naturalness, this [technological] trajectory is a con- struct, a contingent product" (p. 237). As a result, MacKenzie seems not to be able to accept that Draper, the ultimate technologist, was as powerful as he seems to be, on the basis of my reading of the data provided in this book alone.

Although MacKenzie's thesis may not be wholly new to readers of Technology and Culture, it is here packaged in the very provocative and appealing garb of social construction. And well it should be, for it is largely a construction itself, taking as its interpretive foundation the fertile ground laid in the past two decades, for which MacKenzie is partly responsible. Sharing the interpretive language of Thomas P. Hughes, Bruno Latour, Barry Barnes, Harry Collins, and the sociol- ogy of scientific knowledge, MacKenzie encounters the largely coun- terfactual world of the guided missile and finds it socially constructed.

The focus of this book is ultimately historiographical, but its main strength derives from the fact that MacKenzie does not try to force-fit all of his history into a neat conceptual mold. He admits and freely shares counterexamples and provides copious materials that let the reader decide the importance of the points he raises and the veracity of the conclusions he makes. Thus we find many instances where it is easy to conclude that technological change is promoted largely for technical reasons (as in the case of Stark Draper's championship of a third-generation guidance system), is promoted for mainly political reasons (the problem of establishing a basing mode for the MX and

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the ensuing creation by Congress of a "small ICBM," dubbed the Dove's missile), or may be a result of the two forces acting on each other. As a result, MacKenzie fears that he has not fully dispelled the myth of a technological trajectory, and this leads him at times down tortuous and twisted paths that reveal additional complexities in the decision trees that describe the process of promotion and selection.

But this is just where MacKenzie succeeds: in demonstrating the richness and complexity of the technological trajectory. Far from a deterministic phenomenon, even though it is promoted as one by entrepreneurs and believers (Stark Draper's preeminence again ap- pears), it is the result of the interplay of internal and external factors: politics, prediction, design, technical style, and so forth. In fact, MacKenzie provides powerful insight into just why technological determinism appears so real, partly because arguments have to be created that predict outcomes for such costly systems. Thus, techno- logical trajectories are created, becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. MacKenzie's candor in providing all sides in the process gives a richness to his story that makes it a lasting contribution, useful for a wide range of inquiry into the nature of modern society.

As hinted earlier, however, MacKenzie has difficulty applying his own data, which come largely from secondary sources and oral history testimony (he identifies over 140 interviewees, rationalizing this mode of data gathering as essential when dealing with the unfathomably huge classified world). Sometimes he qualifies the applicability of an example to a specific point he is trying to make ("It may not even be altogether accurate, as it is not well documented, but if true, it vividly shows . . . " [p. 4041) and, in a few cases, goes beyond the pale in using oral histories to confirm a contention. The most egregious passage informs the question of a technological trajectory's reality. After expending considerable effort to show that technological systems do improve beyond earlier expectations, MacKenzie cites the testimony of seasoned retirees to support his contention that such improve- ments are not inevitable and that a real accuracy limit has been reached. He bases this on their clearly self-serving impression that accuracy levels they had reached in their careers will not be super- seded (pp. 293-94). This weakens his otherwise very reasonable contention by making it appear merely as a technical limit.

Generally, however, his oral histories are useful, in that they provide a provocative first-order impression, subject to refinement and correction using documentation from the period, when it is uncovered. Clearly, the relationships were so complex, and the views held so narrowly determined by the parochial perspectives of these partisans, whose horizons hardly approached the boundaries of the universe of classified research and development they lived in, that oral testimony alone cannot hope to satisfy the historian's goal of re-creating the past. At best, these interviews will ultimately lead to,

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and complement, original documentation delineating the networks of power, politics, and decision making that defined the relationships of science, technology, and society in postwar America.

DR DEVORKIN, curator of the history of astronomy and the space sciences at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, is currently on leave at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. His latest book, Science with a Vengeance: the Military Origzm of Upper Atmosphere Research in the V-2 Era, is published by Springer-Verlag, New York.

Instrumental Realism: The InterjGace between Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Technology. By Don Ihde. Bloomington: Indiana Uni- versity Press, 1991. Pp. xiv+ 159; notes, index. $29.95 (cloth); $12.50 (paper).

Don Ihde's latest book extends a project in the phenomenological analysis of technology that began with Technics and Praxis (1979) and has continued through Existential Technics (1983) and Technology and the Lqeworld (1990). But whereas in earlier works Ihde concentrated on exploring human-technics-world relationships with a view to elucidat- ing the variegated reality of practical engagement and the multiplicity of ways technics inform and transform human experience, here reflection turns to issues of theory, that theory known as science. The thesis, quite simply, is that science can be usefully illuminated through an analysis of its own use of and dependence on instrumental technologies.

The book is also explicitly theoretical in still another sense. Ihde's other works in the philosophy of technology concentrate on analyzing human experience with technics, but this one focuses on what writers, himself included, have had to say about technology. Ihde begins with a provocative rereading of Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientzfic Revolutions, 1962) and Michel Foucault (The Order of Things, 1970; original 1966) as promoting similar reinterpretations of the physical and the social sciences, respectively. This is followed by a study of Martin Heidegger's reinterpretation of technology.

The core of the book is, however, an extended commentary on four texts by more contemporary North American authors: Hubert Drey- fus's What Computers Can't Do (1972), Patrick Heelan's Space Perception and the Philosophy of Science (1983), Ian Hacking's Representing and Intervening (1983), and Robert Ackerman's Data, Instruments, and Theory (1985). The first two, along with Ihde himself, are termed "body-philosophers"; the second two Ihde calls "mind-philosophers." These two different traditions-Dreyfus, Heelan, and Ihde can be linked through mutual citations, as can Hacking and Ackerman, while there are virtually no citational links across these couplings-have