The role of target vulnerabilities in high-technology protest movements: The nuclear establishment at Three Mile Island

Contemporary perspectives on social movements focus primarily upon challenging groups and political authorities, frequently ignoring the importance of vulnerabilities of the target of protest in shaping the outcomes of protracted struggles. The target's own human and technological weaknesses which emerge in the course of the conflict, however, are sometimes critical, as shown in this analysis of citizens' six-year endeavor to prevent the restart of Three Mile Island's Unit 1 reactor after the Unit 2 accident. If, as has been suggested (Perrow, 1984), modern industrial nations can expect an increase in such system accidents, they are likely to precipitate a new genre of social movements pitting local residents against high technology industries. Emergent target vulnerabilities are likely to figure prominently in some of these processes, and social movement analysts' explanatory models should allow for them.