Colored and White Atoms

As with its overall foreign policy, the United States framed its atomic energy offerings as part of the global struggle between the “free world” and the communists, a division that masked the firm US military alignment with colonial powers. The United States continued that framing even as nations such as India and Ghana tried to forge a different path that associated atomic energy with the struggle for national or even racial liberation. The specter haunting Eisenhower and his successors was the emergence of a bloc of countries whose concerns were primarily racial and anti-colonial. Given the reality of racial segregation at home and the government’s close alliance with colonial powers of Europe, such a framing would put the United States on the side of the old colonial masters. American politicians utilized the promise of atomic energy to dim such perceptions amid numerous racially charged challenges in the 1950s and ’60s.

The Era of Distrust

By the mid-1980s, the state-sponsored positive framing of the peaceful atom served a range of government interests. It enabled the United States and European states to use nuclear power as leverage against developing countries in a time when petroleum seemed to swing the pendulum of global resource dominance toward several so-called backward countries. It was useful to countries trying to prop up the legitimacy of their nuclear weapons programs, while secretly working on bombs, and it provided environmental arguments to those whose priority was actually energy security. The peaceful atom’s promise of plenty helped to maintain a veneer of credibility for the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, at a time when the IAEA seemed to have become the treaty’s policing instrument. The more the United States relied on the IAEA, the more it recommitted to making promises of peaceful nuclear technology, especially to the developing world.

Nuclear Mosques and Monuments

After the Indian nuclear test and the oil crisis of the mid-1970s, North Americans and Europeans exerted leverage through the very technologies that represented power, might, and independence—not the vague promises of technical assistance programs but direct aid in advanced equipment such as fighter planes, tanks, and missiles. Still, nuclear reactors had become symbols of power in South Asia and the Middle East, and numerous governments financed ambitious nuclear programs—many of them with clandestine bomb programs. Despite the risks of weapons proliferation, it seemed clear to US and European governments that encouraging nuclear infrastructure, by promising a cornucopian future, was a clear path forward in regaining control of the world’s natural resources and reasserting leverage in a changing geopolitical landscape.

Water, Blood, and the Nuclear Club

China’s Bomb set into a motion a series of events that resulted in the late 1960s in the signing of a non-proliferation treaty—an agreement that, by century’s end, would bind together nearly 200 participating governments. In their zeal to attract other countries into agreements about non-proliferation and safeguards, nuclear states—led by the United States—recommitted to the multiple promises of the peaceful atom. Two of the most politically volatile regions on earth, the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, would see bloody conflict in the 1960s and beyond, at the same time that politicians promoted nuclear programs there under the banner of the peaceful atom. If non-nuclear nations agreed to forgo weapons development in exchange for access to the atom’s civilian applications, those applications needed to be perceived as valuable, even if based on a mirage.

Conclusion

By reframing our understanding of nuclear issues, we can see more clearly the intersection of the so-called peaceful atom with seemingly disconnected topics, including racism, colonialism and neocolonialism, propaganda, surveillance and control, weapons programs, and war. When we acknowledge these connections, the centrality of a cornucopian narrative emerges—one that counts on remaking nature, quickening its pulse, or avoiding environmental dangers—as an unmistakable feature of atomic energy when pursued by governments. If that is the case, we must begin to acknowledge that these particular ideas are deeply embedded in the same range of difficult and ugly global questions. The cornucopian promise of the atom has been an extraordinary useful instrument of power. It was not a marginal issue in the global nuclear order. Instead, it has been the one indispensable piece of it.

Turf Wars and Green Revolutions

Behind the fiction of the IAEA’s non-political status was a tremendous amount of political maneuvering. The agency embarked on numerous programs in the developing world, backed by substantial financial commitments from the United States and other governments with robust weapons programs. The agency’s apparent status as a non-political technical agency obscured its role in propaganda, while its wide membership provided an illusion of global norms and consensus. The agency provided an authoritative international voice for a cornucopian vision of the atom that exaggerated the problem-solving aspects of atomic energy and constantly tried to identify success stories in health, agriculture, and other domains. In the early 1960s, the IAEA engaged in a turf war against two of these agencies, the World Health Organization and the Food and Agricultural Organization, and tried to claim a role in the so-called Green Revolution.

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.

The Have-Nots

The Americans—and like them, the Soviets, British, and French—were not “haves” but “have-nots,” exerting their considerable diplomatic, trade, and military power to find and extract strategic materials. One strategy was to encourage the notion that peaceful applications of the atom in such countries should focus on subsistence, raw materials commodities, and basic sanitation and medicine. Such attitudes were deeply resented, and resisted, by independent former colonial states such as India, Argentina, and Brazil. In the late 1940s, when uranium seemed scarce, the US government made it policy to cast doubt on commercial uses of atomic energy and instead to trumpet the use of radioisotopes, which had potential applications in agricultural and medical research. In their quest for strategic resources to secure the weapons arsenal, US officials deemphasized industrial power and played up the ability of the atom to provide plentiful food and to improve human health.

A Thousand Years into One

Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech is often seen as the founding story of atomic energy’s peaceful side. In fact, it was not such a dramatic break from the past. The Democrats had begun to use the atom in this way, first with radioisotopes and then with other intriguing ideas, such as irradiating seeds in the hope of generating wondrous mutations. The Democrats hatched the germ of the idea of “Atoms for Peace,” calling for a global atomic Marshall Plan, shortly after President Truman announced in 1949 his decision to pursue development of the hydrogen bomb. The idea of the peaceful atom was deployed rhetorically to mitigate the political consequences of significant escalations in weapons development. Eisenhower’s pledge delivered not a new program but American political consensus about how the atom should be discussed as a matter of state.

Forgetting the Bad Dreams of the Past

Eisenhower’s initiative provided rhetorical tools to others who pursued political or even personal goals in their own countries. The first major efforts to take “Atoms for Peace” seriously were in East Asia, particularly post-occupation Japan and also South Korea, freshly emerging from the Korean War. In both cases the United States would be confronted with its own empty promises, because these countries explicitly asked for American help to build nuclear reactors to power their economic resurgence. Instead, US officials stalled for time and wavered, unsure how—or if—they should genuinely encourage a peaceful nuclear industry outside the United States and Europe.