The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War by Edward Jones-Imhotep

Reviewed by: The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War by Edward Jones-Imhotep Ron Kline (bio) The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War. By Edward Jones-Imhotep. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Pp. 312. Hardcover $35. The Unreliable Nation is a well-written, well-researched, and welcome addition to the growing body of literature that brings together the history of technology and environmental history. The book stands out for its sophisticated thesis, which views historical conceptions of technology, nature, and national identity through the lens of technological failure—not the failure of technological innovations, such as AT&T's picture phone in the 1960s, but the failure of machines to function as they were intended to function. At first glance, the site for Jones-Imhotep's study—which is well-grounded in recent secondary literature in the history and sociology of science and technology—seems to be too specialized to support a broad thesis: the production of ionograms (graphs of the ionosphere's ability to reflect short-wave radio signals) by a field laboratory of the Canadian Defense Research Telecommunications Establishment (DRTE) in the Cold War. Jones-Imhotep analyzes well the difficulties encountered by the DRTE in producing ionograms over the course of twenty years, from using radar-like ionosondes and cathode-ray tube displays in a network of ground stations, to employing a satellite and a computer data-processing system they had designed. The ionograms enabled military and other defense agencies to increase the reliability of trans-oceanic and intercontinental communications and electronic espionage (signals intelligence), and allowed them the capability to detect enemy aircraft and ballistic missiles crossing over the North Pole from the Soviet Union. What enables this case study to say so much about the general theme of the nexus between technology, nature, and identity is how deftly Jones-Imhotep analyzes the changing relationships between a "machinic order" and a hostile "natural order" in regard to the national identity of the Canadian North. For the DRTE, the hostile North manifested itself in terms of sporadic magnetic storms, aurora displays, and other ionospheric disturbances, which they mapped and theorized by constantly producing and studying ionograms of a changing natural order. This multi-faceted approach allows Jones-Imhotep to conclude that: Reacting to what they saw as the multiple threats facing the [Canadian] nation after World War II, government officials and defense scientists seized on the radio failure of the North—in all its territorial, cultural, and political ambiguity—as a way of leveraging geographical vulnerability into political power, influence, and distinctive identity. While those associations drew on long-standing [End Page 921] myths about the place of the North and of communications in the nation's history, DRTE's research inverted the traditional relationship between natural order, environment, and technology in Canada, taking the age-old sympathy between technologies and natural orders, recasting them as antagonists, and locating their point of opposition in the problematic behavior of machines that threatened the nation's survival. (pp. 216–17) As good as the book is, I would have liked to have heard more about expressions of Canada's national identity in the Cold War and the machinic order of the systems that used the results of the DRTE's mapping of the ionosphere to improve their reliability. Jones-Imhotep brings to life the scientific and engineering practices of creating ionograms in the field and later in the computer center. We learn a good deal about ionosondes, the Alouette satellite, and the CDC 3200 computer. But we learn much less about the short-wave radios, electronic-espionage equipment, and radar sets that failed to function properly because of the hostile ionosphere. For example, the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, the massive Cold War radar network built by AT&T across northern Canada for the U.S. and Canadian air forces, is only mentioned in regard to its operators testing the reception of short-wave signals from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Jones-Imhotep does, however, discuss how the DRTE devised for the Royal Canadian Air Force an adaptable communication system that could work around ionospheric disturbances. I highly recommend this book...

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