The Wretched Atom
America’s Global Gamble with Peaceful Nuclear Technology
Jacob Darwin Hamblin
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hamblin, Jacob Darwin, author.
Title: The wretched atom : America’s global gamble with peaceful nuclear technology / Jacob Darwin Hamblin.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020039419 (print) | LCCN 2020039420 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197526903 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197526927 (epub) | ISBN 9780197526934
Subjects: LCSH: Nuclear industry—United States—History—20th century. | Nuclear energy—Government policy—United States. | Nuclear energy— Economic aspects—United States. | Nuclear nonproliferation— International cooperation. | United States—Foreign relations— 20th century. | United States—Foreign economic relations.
Classification: LCC HD9698.U 52 H 25 2021 (print) | LCC HD9698.U 52 (ebook) | DDC 338.4/762345119097309045—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039419
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020039420
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197526903.001.0001
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Dedicated to my sister
Sara Elizabeth Hamblin
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
PART I: Atomic Promises
1. The Have-Nots 13
2. A Thousand Years into One 38
PART II: Atomic Propaganda
3. Forgetting the Bad Dreams of the Past 63
4. Colored and White Atoms 92
5. Turf Wars and Green Revolutions 123
PART III: Atomic Prohibition
6. Water, Blood, and the Nuclear Club 165
7. Nuclear Mosques and Monuments 189
8. The Era of Distrust 217
Conclusion: The Cornucopian Illusion 249
Notes 257
Index 305
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is my fourth book based on original research, and it is no easy task to identify all the people who should be thanked. I began thinking about international dimensions of science and technology as a PhD student in the 1990s, and I even considered writing a history of the International Atomic Energy Agency as a dissertation. I’m glad I didn’t. My PhD advisor, Lawrence Badash (1934–2010), didn’t like the idea, and for good reason. The available archives were thin, the topic was vast, and besides, who wants to read an institutional history? I headed to other waters, choosing to write instead about oceanographers and the Cold War. Since that time, I have been helped in my work by scholars, students, archivists, and many others, as I have published on international cooperation in science, radioactive waste in the oceans, and the connections between military research and environmental science. Although the idea for this book came while I was looking through files at the archives of the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, I owe a debt to many others as I have researched and thought about these issues over the past two decades.
Some specific thanks are in order. Oxford University Press editor Susan Ferber has been a patient listener, and I continue to be awed by her capacity to read carefully and thoughtfully on such a wide range of subjects. The faculty and students at my home institution, Oregon State University, continuously shape my views about the past. Several scholars have been generous with feedback or other assistance over the years of researching, thinking about, and writing aspects of this book. They include Lisa Brady, Kate Brown, Angela Creager, John DiMoia, Toshihiro Higuchi, Paul Josephson, David Kaiser, Stuart W. Leslie, Gisela Mateos, Patrick McCray, Erika Milam, Ingrid Ockert, Jahnavi Phalkey, Maria Rentetzi, Linda Richards, Asif Siddiqi, Edna Suárez-Díaz, Aaron T. Wolf, Masakatsu Yamazaki, and Karin Zachmann. I especially wish to acknowledge Christine Keiner, Jayita
x Sarkar, Robynne Mellor, and Jonathan Hunt for circulating drafts of their own manuscripts to me, prior to their publication.
I would like to thank the archivists and staff at all the institutions I consulted. I especially wish to thank those at the Food and Agriculture Organization (Rome) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (Vienna). At the IAEA, I was told that I was the first historian to use their archive for serious historical research. I remember my first 2008 visit to Vienna well; they did not quite know where to put me, so they cleared off someone’s desk. The amount of material they released was sparse, even for documents more than forty years old. In 2014 I wrote an essay in The Conversation that criticized the agency for finding excuses to keep embarrassing material from the public eye. When I returned in 2016, the archivists were more experienced in receiving scholars and had been working to open up more. There is a long way to go for the agency as a whole, but I appreciate individual efforts to act in good faith within the wheels of bureaucracy.
Special thanks go to my family: my wife Sara and my children Sophia and Harper. I write these words several months into the COVID-19 pandemic, when we are confined together in strange circumstances. It is a reminder of how much patience and support are required from loved ones when a writer is trying to finish a book about one thing while worrying about so much else. My network of support includes my in-laws Paul and Cathy Goldberg, who amaze me in their capacity to provide encouragement. I especially want to thank my “first” family—my parents Les and Sharon Hamblin and my sister Sara. My father’s long career in the Air Force working in strategic analysis and nuclear missiles shaped all our lives as we moved constantly from one place to another, and clearly influenced my own interests. I have admired my father’s willingness to think critically and historically, just as I have appreciated my mother’s wit, tenacity, and humility. As I have aged and seen my own children grow, I am reminded of how important those first relationships were to me. I also see how formative our own siblings are in the ways we see the world. Surely my life, my ideas, and my writing would be dramatically different without my sister, my first companion and friend. This book is dedicated to her.
The Wretched Atom
Introduction
WhenIran’s economic minister Hushang Ansari entered the Oval Office on March 4, 1975, he had ambitious dreams of a nuclear Iran. Though rich in oil, Iran planned to invest heavily in nuclear power, collaborating with Americans and Europeans on reactors, training, scientific surveys, and fuel production. It was part of a strategy to pump $180 billion of Iran’s oil wealth into the country’s economy, in the hope of improving the lives of every Iranian. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had been to Tehran just months before, encouraged these ambitions and noted to Ansari and President Gerald Ford that by 1983 Iranians could reach the European standard of living. Iran would focus not only on conventional economic measures, such as gross national product and per capita income, but on other markers of civilization, such as ownership of television sets, telephones, refrigerators, and cars. Iran would step up trade with the United States, invest in industries at home, and embark on massive infrastructure projects.1 In return for oil, the United States promised billions of dollars in military equipment and a $12.5 billion civilian trade deal over five years, about half of which was for the development of Iran’s civil nuclear program. The world seemed to be running out of oil, and even oil-rich nations would need to have a long- term energy plan. To escape the shortfalls looming on the horizon and to provide a future of abundance, Iran’s future would be nuclear.2
Ansari was mildly apprehensive that Iran would not be able to acquire the technical know-how to build facilities to fabricate fuel for the reactors.
During the previous summer, India had detonated a fission device, sparking worldwide outcry that nuclear weapons capability had spread to yet another
country. Ansari wondered, should Iran be worried? If it invested in a nuclear power grid, would it one day be unable to acquire the technology to produce fuel for it? “There are technical obstacles,” Kissinger acknowledged affably, “but we hope they can be worked out.”3
Earlier that morning, Kissinger had a different sort of meeting with the president. “I don’t think they realize what they are doing,” Kissinger crowed, referring to “the Iranian stuff.” The most important issue was not proliferation, but petroleum. Soon the Iranians would have so many financial commitments that they would lose their ability to cut oil production. “We may have broken OPEC, or will have if we can make one more deal like this.”4 In 1975, civilian nuclear technology was part of a worldwide strategy to bring the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) to heel. That body’s power seemed unprecedented, given that most of its countries were historically impoverished or “backward” peoples. Working with other big oil consumers in Europe, the United States secretly was “pushing the producers into big development programs, for which they will need the additional oil production.” It would convince countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia to invest in expensive projects, like nuclear technology, so they would have so many bills to pay that they would have to sell their oil.5
By the time of the 1975 discussions with Iran, the United States had three decades of experience incorporating civilian nuclear technology into its relations with other countries. Atomic energy— to use the phrase most widely used at the time—had powerful appeal and seemed destined to lift up the poorest people on earth and deliver a future of abundance. Electricity generation was supposed to become “too cheap to meter,” as one American political operator, Lewis Strauss, predicted in the 1950s.6 Though civilian nuclear technology is most commonly associated with electricity, the promises extended beyond that. By exposing plants to the ionizing radiation from fission byproducts, it seemed possible to produce high-protein mutant strains of wheat and rice, staving off the kinds of cruel population corrections famously predicted by Thomas Malthus in 1798. As geneticist Diter von Wettstein imagined in the 1950s, “By radiation we can get almost anything out of a plant we really want. . . . We now have an instrument with which we can rebuild all the food plants in the world.”7 In addition, the irradiation of grain silos and packaged food could kill insects and bacteria, extending the shelf lives of the world’s staple commodities. Exposing male flies to radioactive sources made them sterile, and females mating with them produced no offspring, thus reducing the population of major vectors of disease. Radioisotope tracers could be used to study ecosystems, fertilizers, or human metabolism. New sources of electrical power could be paired with desalination plants in coastal areas, and the water could be
pumped into new irrigation systems—allowing deserts to bloom. Even nuclear detonations could be put to use, enabling enormous feats of engineering to rearrange natural landscapes. Atomic energy seemed to put the world on fast- forward: as American scientist Lloyd Berkner once remarked about mutation plant breeding, “It is as though, for evolutionary purposes, we had collapsed a thousand years into one.”8
On the strength of such promises, atomic energy spread throughout the globe in the second half of the twentieth century, not only to the Soviet Union and to Europeans but also to the countries of the so- called developing world, with more fragile economies and often with newly independent governments grasping for stability. The United States’ “Atoms for Peace” initiative was among the most famous of the Cold War era, launched by President Dwight Eisenhower in late 1953. It led to revisions of US legislation to allow more sharing of atomic technology, and it encouraged the notion that superpowers would disarm while the rest of the world would benefit from the civilian dimensions of the atom. The president offered to put sizable amounts of uranium fuel into the custody of a new international organization, to be used for the benefit of all. Dozens of nations joined the new International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), headquartered in Vienna. Atomic energy had a lot going for it: state sponsorship, diplomatic backing, and no shortage of scientists trying to imagine its bountiful future. Half a century after the historic speech, one could still visit the IAEA’s Vienna headquarters and see images of a smiling Dwight Eisenhower and his “Atoms for Peace” slogan.9
By the century’s end, the atom’s utopian path had taken a decidedly dystopian turn. Atomic energy was as much a story of disenchantment and political opposition as it was of technological marvels. The nuclear sector suffered from high profile reactor accidents, waste disposal controversies, radiation exposure to people, the rise of anti-nuclear activist groups, and a decline in public trust in government institutions.10 Many developing countries did adopt nuclear technologies, often with crucial parts of their national infrastructures relying on American and European expertise, equipment, and fuel. Rather than seeing liberation from nature, such countries faced renewed forms of dependence. Iran certainly never gained reliable access to uranium and did not become the economic miracle envisioned by Ansari back in 1975. Instead of lifting up the poorer nations of the world, the global nuclear order seemed structured in ways reminiscent of the colonial era. The most heated debates within the IAEA pitted the nuclear weapons states against the so- called LDCs—less developed countries. The agency never became a storehouse for fission products. Instead, one of its primary functions was to monitor an arms control treaty— the Treaty
on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. By the end of the century, the IAEA was referred to as a “watchdog,” known for its cadre of inspectors. In 2003, IAEA inspections were crucial talking points in public debates about the invasion of Iraq by the United States. What an extraordinary irony: exactly fifty years after Eisenhower’s speech, evidence gathered over the years by the agency created for the peaceful atom was being interpreted by the United States government as justification for military intervention. Moreover, it was a war that pitted a technologically advanced superpower, fighting a limited war in a faraway land, against a formerly colonized, nonwhite, non-industrialized nation known for an important natural resource, battling to the death in its own total war.
What accounts for such a dystopian turn in the global nuclear order? One culprit typically springs to mind, namely, the steady rise of nuclear weapons programs from an original group comprised of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain. Nuclear states struck a “grand bargain” with the rest of the world, promising to share civilian nuclear technology with others in return for their oath to forgo nuclear weapons, and the promise that the nuclear states would reduce their own arms. Voluminous scholarship exists on the history and politics of proliferation, often framed as a story of arms control, with the United States and other nuclear states trying to meet their commitments while also attempting to prevent new bomb programs. Some countries, like India, balked at the notion of haves and have-nots in nuclear programs and refused to sign non-proliferation agreements. New countries joined the nuclear club in the 1960s and 1970s: first came France in 1960, China in 1964, India in 1974, and then others attempted to follow—Israel, South Africa, Pakistan, North Korea, Iraq, and Iran. Worries about proliferation dramatically altered the nuclear trade in the 1970s and 1980s and dampened the utopian prospects of the atom. The promise remained, but countries that once thought they would have access to commercial technologies came to face strict inspections and “safeguards” rules about how to use their equipment and fuel. Those countries in breach of such agreements faced the prospect of crippling economic sanctions or even war.11
While an arms control perspective is valuable in understanding the politics of weapons proliferation, it tells us little about the historical motivations for encouraging civilian nuclear programs in the first place. Focusing only on arms control glosses over the domestic politics of nuclear programs, particularly the role of high technology as symbols of state power and legitimacy.12 But it also does not square with what scholars of the Cold War have been pointing out for decades— that governments, especially the United States, deployed science and technology as diplomatic
tools, to achieve feats of prestige, to shape business arrangements, to conduct clandestine surveillance, or to bind countries together with technical assistance programs. Poorer countries’ dreams of modernization, of using advanced technology to escape hunger, poverty, and the constraints of nature— these were the stock-in- trade of US diplomacy.13 Why, then, should we imagine that the promises connected to peaceful uses of atomic energy were any less saturated with geopolitical maneuvers and manipulation? Indeed some historians have implicated the peaceful atom as one of the most important and overlooked political tools of the United States from the 1950s onward.14 After all, it seemed to be the epitome of power and modernity at a crucial epoch of history: when the post–World War II political order was built; when dozens of countries around the world, especially in Asia and Africa, freed themselves from colonial masters; and when the balance of global natural resource wealth—especially petroleum— seemed to tilt away from the United States and Europe for the first time. Rather than ask what stopped the utopia from happening, we should be scrutinizing the promise of the atom, to understand how the United States and other governments used it as a tool to maneuver in such a world.
The Wretched Atom is the first historical study of efforts to promote nuclear technologies globally from the Second World War to the close of the twentieth century. It focuses on countries that seemed to live at the knife’s edge of human existence— those with subsistence economies or resource shortfalls, or where peoples routinely were threatened by famine, drought, and disease. Such countries were comprised largely of non- white peoples, many of them former colonies or recently under military occupation. In the past, these would have been classed as belonging to the Third World, developing world, less developed countries—or even less charitably, as “backward” countries. Included are countries that today might seem out of place in such categories, such as Israel or Japan. The book explores the experiences of large and populous former colonies, such as India and Brazil, but also smaller ones, such as Ghana and other African states that gained independence in the 1960s. The term “wretched” is inspired by Frantz Fanon’s 1961 book, Les Damnés de la Terre, published in English as The Wretched of the Earth. Written amid the war in Algeria by a black man attuned to colonial conflict, Fanon’s book reflected on the bitter ironies of formerly brutalized and marginalized people being offered technological solutions. “They are wooed,” he wrote. “They are given bouquets of flowers. Invitations. To be frank, everyone wants a piece of them.”15 To Fanon, the shortcut offered by technology was little more than a sales pitch, at best playing on naïve dreams that hundreds of years of economic evolution could be skipped and at worst providing an in-road to other forms of paternalistic influence,
leaving such countries forever “wretched” or “damned” to continue the structures of colonialism.
To understand the origins of the global nuclear dystopia at the dawn of the twenty- first century requires paying attention to those who tried to convince the world—and especially those in the poorer regions of the world— that they should commit to atomic energy. By necessity that begins with the United States government, the promiser-in- chief, but it also extends to other nuclear states and to international organizations where bitter disputes arose. It includes those trying to build up nuclear infrastructure in countries such as Japan, Ghana, South Africa, India, Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran. By focusing on these historical actors, a past emerges in which the socalled peaceful atom is implicated in the exercise of state power, the attainment of personal ambitions, the cynical wielding of technological promises for political or diplomatic purposes, the manipulation of global trade, and even the reinforcement of racism and colonialism. The promise of civilian atomic energy was a formidable tool of state power in the late twentieth century because it took advantage of social aspirations, anxieties, and environmental vulnerabilities, especially in the developing world. Ironically, atomic energy rarely had to deliver on its promise to be effective. Further, the deployment of rhetoric to promote atomic energy was inseparable from geopolitics writ large and has rarely been entirely peaceful. Instead it has been embedded in stories of conventional warfare, racial and neocolonial divisiveness, struggles to assert control over the earth’s natural resources, and the abetting of nuclear weapons programs both old and new.
In making this argument, The Wretched Atom highlights several themes that recurred from the dawn of the nuclear age to the close of the twentieth century—and even beyond. One was the manipulation of perceptions about atomic energy’s technological potential, in order to achieve or maintain control of the world’s natural resources. For example, American officials in the late 1940s and early 1950s were very worried that commercial nuclear power would siphon off supplies of uranium and monazite needed for the weapons arsenal. So they explicitly played down the possibility of electricity generation from atomic energy and instead played up the importance of radioisotopes for medicine and agriculture—because such radioisotopes were byproducts of the US weapons arsenal and did not compete with it. The kinds of technologies promoted in the developing world by the United States, the USSR, and Europeans thus seemed neocolonial, keeping the former colonies as sites of resource extraction—a fact noticed, and resented, by government officials in India, Brazil, and elsewhere. Mutation plant breeding, irradiation for insect control or food sterilization, and radioisotope studies in fertilizer— these were oriented
toward food and export commodities and public health, problems indistinguishable from those of the colonial era. These were not the same kinds of technologies embraced by the global North, which focused on electricity generation through nuclear reactors, often as a hedge against the rising political power of petroleum-producing states in the Middle East. By the mid1960s and 1970s, the United States and Europe did offer nuclear reactors even to some of the most politically volatile nations, as part of an effort to ensure access to oil. Convincing petroleum suppliers of their dire future need for nuclear reactors was part of a strategy to regain geopolitical leverage. Despite the moniker “peaceful atom,” these technologies were often bundled in trade deals with fighter jets, tanks, and other military hardware.
Another key theme was the reliance by governments on a cornucopian vision that presented atomic energy as a savior to those peoples of the earth constantly threatened by disease, drought, famine, and poverty. Just as the fabled horn of plenty (cornucopia) in classical antiquity overflowed with fruits and grains, so too would atomic energy provide a future of abundance. Advocates of atomic energy spoke of “quickening the pulse” of nature, a nod to the conceit of modernization and its notion of quickly putting nations on an equal footing with the global North. With the atom, nature’s constraints could be overcome; nature’s pulse could be quickened; nature’s scourges could be outrun. This discourse of overabundance did not belong solely to the United States and other industrialized countries. It also was adopted by governments attempting to build, justify, and protect their own nuclear energy programs— whether they were genuinely bent toward peaceful uses or not. Because of these rhetorical connections to nature, atomic energy’s relationship to environmental issues was complicated and paradoxical. On the one hand, atomic energy advocates in the postwar decades were alive to environmental challenges, invoking threats such as Malthusian population pressure, water security, Rachel Carson’s warning about indiscriminate use of insecticides, and even the relationship between carbon emissions and global climate change. And yet these same historical actors—backed by government agencies—often dismissed concerns of ecologists and environmental activists as irrational and emotional when they questioned atomic energy. By the close of the century, two competing environmental narratives were plainly in use. One was critical of atomic energy, drawing on scientific disputes about the public health effects of radiation, the experience of nuclear accidents such as Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986), or the egregious stories of public health injustice— including negligence in protecting uranium miners or the wanton destruction and contamination of indigenous peoples’ homelands. In contrast was the narrative favored by most governments, depicting nuclear technology
in a messianic role, promising not only abundant food, water, and electricity, but also an end to atmospheric pollution and climate change.
A third theme is that government promotion of atomic energy to solve social and environmental problems frequently was insincere, overstated, or speculative. Certainly there were historical actors who genuinely believed in the power of atomic energy to uplift the peoples of the world. But it should be stated at the outset that many of the technologies were promoted cynically—defended by government boosters for reasons having little to do with solving genuine problems. Many were designed instead to bolster the credibility of programs oriented toward nuclear weapons or to offer plausible peaceful applications to countries in return for forswearing weapons programs. Time and again, what mattered was not the problem to be solved but the solution to be offered. For example, when President Lyndon Johnson offered desalination plants to Israel in the 1960s as part of his “Water for Peace” plan, neither he nor his Israeli counterparts were interested in providing water in the most economical or technically feasible way; they wanted nuclear plants or nothing at all. Similarly, the IAEA’s forays into solving problems of food security and public health, which put it into direct conflict with other international agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization, were designed to secure credible achievements in the nuclear realm. The agency was like a hammer in search of nails. It did not matter what the problem was as long as the solution was nuclear.
A final theme is the political use of international forums for the peaceful atom, especially the IAEA. As other scholars have noted, the IAEA tried to maintain a reputation of being primarily a technical body, devoid of politics. But it had numerous political uses. For example, it was a forum for intelligence gathering, as routinely noted by American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents. It also outmaneuvered the World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization in the early 1960s and was able to assert an authoritative voice playing down public health dangers from atomic energy. Further, it provided a vehicle for countries to stay engaged in atomic energy affairs even if they did not sign on to the non-proliferation treaty—India, Pakistan, and Israel most notably. It provided apartheid-era South Africa with a means of participating in international affairs when other bodies ousted it because of its blatantly racist policies.16 By the same token, it gave the Americans and Europeans political cover for continuing to engage with South Africa, an important uranium supplier. The IAEA provided a public face to several countries’ clandestine bomb programs, even as it purported to act as an instrument of non-proliferation. The United States and Europeans tried to defend the
agency as purely technical, offering economic and social uplift to the formerly colonized world, a powerful rhetorical move that enabled turning the agency into a monitoring and surveillance organization.
This book is structured in three parts, reflecting historical shifts in the use of atomic energy as a tool of state power by the United States and other governments. The first part, Atomic Promises, focuses on the immediate postwar decade, in which atomic bombs were new and ideas for civilian applications were abundant— some based on science and others on science fiction. The chapters emphasize how the global search for uranium and monazite shaped the US government’s changing position on sharing technology in the years before Eisenhower’s iconic 1953 speech, and they highlight the powerful attraction of promising the atom to “backward” countries. What we find in these chapters are myriad attempts to imagine what could be promised to other nations in return for loyalty, minerals, or political acquiescence in American nuclear weapons tests. The second part, Atomic Propaganda, explores the consequences of such promises in the 1950s and 1960s, as the United States confronted the limits of its own rhetoric, particularly in Asia and Africa. These chapters focus on the heyday of “Atoms for Peace” when American presidents feared the language of race, colonialism, and neocolonialism, and hoped to supplant it with hopes of technological marvels or rapid economic development. India, Japan, Ghana, and South Africa all launched efforts to adopt atomic energy as symbols of modernity and prosperity, and the new International Atomic Energy Agency cast itself as a partner in domains ranging from electricity to agriculture, disease control, and medicine. Finally, Part III, Atomic Prohibition, underscores how the peaceful atom changed after the first “colored” Bombs appeared—in China in 1964 and India in 1974—and after control of a key energy resource, petroleum, shifted away from the United States and Europe and toward less industrialized countries, especially in the Middle East. The politics of non-proliferation and peaceful atomic energy went hand in hand, and nuclear technologies became embedded more than ever in strategies to achieve political and economic leverage. These chapters stress how indispensable the cornucopian promise of the atom was to the American exercise of global power by the end of the century.
Despite The Wretched Atom being framed as a story of manipulation and control, the United States, European nations, and the Soviet Union clearly did not always succeed in their efforts. Even in the late 1940s, many Americans feared that encouraging the worldwide adoption of atomic technologies was an immense gamble with unpredictable consequences. Much of what transpired in subsequent decades can be interpreted as struggles for agency in deciding the future of one’s own country or in
leveraging opportunities amid swiftly changing geopolitical circumstances. Many of the most surprising and interesting stories are of individuals within developing countries trying to make the promise of atomic energy serve national ambitions. For example, Japanese newspapers attempted to turn the atom into a friend, collaborating with American intelligence agents, less than a decade after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Atomic energy was used as a tool of pan- Africanism in newly independent sub- Saharan states in the 1960s and of pan- Arabism during the oil crisis of the 1970s. The nuclear sector became a national point of pride in India, Pakistan, and Iran. Many of these impulses are in the distant past but others are still with us, including the use of peaceful programs to hide or distract from bomb programs, the continued downplaying of environmental harm by the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the role of nuclear power’s vision of plenty in propping up the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
A careful reader may wonder at the outset whether the perspectives in The Wretched Atom are pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear. They are neither. The perspectives here are historical. What should be clear by the end of this book is that the promise of the peaceful atom has been used, abused, and exploited for decades, certainly by industry boosters but most powerfully by governments—led by the United States and including many others— often leveraging the greatest fears and highest ambitions of peoples around the world. It has been in the national interest of certain states to protect the integrity of their nuclear weapons programs and their energy strategies from critics. The peaceful atom has been an instrument to do so, just as it has been an instrument for shaping the control of natural resources and global energy supplies. Adopting nuclear power has never been a mere technical choice. It may be natural to imagine a nuclear solution to present and future crises, as we do when considering how to mitigate threats from a changing planetary climate. Nevertheless, it would be folly to imagine that this promise—a future of abundance and avoiding environmental disaster—is new or that it is not an irrevocable part of the global nuclear order.
