Introduction
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. 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. 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.