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Written by a prize-winning historian, The Wretched Atom is an authoritative history and a sweeping indictment of so-called peaceful nuclear technologies in the countries of the developing world.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter One: The Have-Nots
- Chapter Two: A Thousand Years into One
- Chapter Three: Forgetting the Bad Dreams of the Past
- Chapter Four: Colored and White Atoms
- Chapter Five: Turf Wars and Green Revolutions
- Chapter Six: Water, Blood, and the Nuclear Club
- Chapter Seven: Nuclear Mosques and Monuments
- Chapter Eight: The Era of Distrust
- Conclusion: The Cornucopian Illusion
- Notes
- Index
About the author
Jacob Darwin Hamblin is Professor of History at Oregon State University. His books include Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age; Oceanographers and the Cold War; and Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (OUP, 2013), which won the Paul Birdsall Prize of the American Historical Association and the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize of the History of Science Society.
Summary
A groundbreaking narrative of how the United States offered the promise of nuclear technology to the developing world and its gamble that other nations would use it for peaceful purposes.
After the Second World War, the United States offered a new kind of atom that differed from the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This atom would cure diseases, produce new foods, make deserts bloom, and provide abundant energy for all. It was an atom destined for the formerly colonized, recently occupied, and mostly non-white parts of the world that were dubbed the "wretched of the earth" by Frantz Fanon.
The "peaceful atom" had so much propaganda potential that President Dwight Eisenhower used it to distract the world from his plan to test even bigger thermonuclear weapons. His scientists said the peaceful atom would quicken the pulse of nature, speeding nations along the path of economic development and helping them to escape the clutches of disease, famine, and energy shortfalls. That promise became one of the most misunderstood political weapons of the twentieth century. It was adopted by every subsequent US president to exert leverage over other nations' weapons programs, to corner world markets of uranium and thorium, and to secure petroleum supplies. Other countries embraced it, building reactors and training experts. Atomic promises were embedded in Japan's postwar recovery, Ghana's pan-Africanism, Israel's quest for survival, Pakistan's brinksmanship with India, and Iran's pursuit of nuclear independence.
As The Wretched Atom shows, promoting civilian atomic energy was an immense gamble, and it was never truly peaceful. American promises ended up exporting violence and peace in equal measure. While the United States promised peace and plenty, it planted the seeds of dependency and set in motion the creation of today's expanded nuclear club.
Additional text
The Wretched Atom offers a telling, and very rich, insight into the history of Western, mainly United States, policies regarding peaceful atomic energy. The book offers both a great overview of the develop-ment of Western atomic energy policies since the Second World War, and successfully contests the notion of 'peaceful' atomic energy. The main contribution of the book, however, is to show how the history of nuclear energy from Western perspective is inextricably linked to the history of postcolonialism, the concept of race, and the division between 'the West' and 'the rest.; In this way, The Wretched Atom will be of interest to everyone willing to learn more about the history of atomic energy, decolonization, and United States' geopolitical strategies during the Cold War.
