A Blast from the Past: Preserving and Interpreting the Atomic Age (original) (raw)
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If there is one uncontroversial point in nuclear weapons politics, it is that uninventing nuclear weapons is impossible. This article seeks to make this claim controversial by showing that it is premised on attenuated understandings of invention and the status of objects operative through familiar but problematic conceptual dualisms. The claimed impossibility of uninvention is an assertion that invention is irreversible. Drawing on 'new materialism', this article produces a different understanding of invention, reinvention and uninvention as ontologically similar practices of techno-political invention. On the basis of empirical material on the invention and re-invention of nuclear weapons, and an in-depth ethnography of laboratories inventing a portable radiation detector, both the process of invention and the 'objects' themselves (weapons and detectors) are shown to be fragile and not wholly irreversible processes of assembling diverse actors (human and non-human) and provisionally stabilising their relations. Nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented! Why not?
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Osiris, 2006
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Journal of International Political Theory
This Introduction presents the seven closely interlinked papers that explore the theme of this Special Issue, and one of the enduring existential questions for International Relations: the nuclear condition in the twenty-first century. The Special Issue is the second to come from two workshops sponsored by a UK Leverhulme grant, and it builds upon the first, more theoretical Special Issue, which brought Classical Realist and Critical Theory texts into dialogue. The major concern in the first Special Issue—the focus on modernity, crises, and humanity—is taken up here in more grounded practical terms, framed around the existential fears of nuclear annihilation. Each of the contributions re-assess the contemporary nuclear condition from within the theoretical frameworks provided by Classical Realism and Critical Theory. The engagement with both traditions allows the contributors to diagnose what is new, and what remains constant, in the contemporary nuclear condition.
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St Antony's International Review, 2009
The Frisch-Peierls memorandum of March 1940 must rank as one of the most significant historical documents of the twentieth century for students of international relations. Otto Frisch and Rudolph Peierls, two refugee scientists fleeing the German Nazi regime, arrived in Britain in 1940 and set about alerting the British government to the imminent danger of nuclear technology. Using their knowledge of the activities of German scientists, the memorandum warned the British government that Germany sought to construct a nuclear device -the only logical deterrence to which, they argued, would be a British nuclear weapon. The enormity of what the two scientists were proposing was not lost on them, for the brief memorandum discussed not only the scientific feasibility of the device, but also the strategic and ethical dimensions to the existence of such a weapon in the hands of governments. 1 Their prescient warning serves as a foreword to debates that continued during the cold war period and have remained relevant in our post-cold war era. The Frisch-Peierls memorandum set in motion events that would come to define the strategic balance of the contemporary era.
From Prophecies of the Future to Incarnations of the Past: Cultures of Nuclear Technology,
Nowotny, Helga (Ed.). Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation, Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books 2006, 155–166, 2006
You've never had it so good!" This was the motto used by the English conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan during his successful election campaign in 1959.' Political stability and economic growth were the characteristics ofthat time. In "Age of Extremes," Eric J. Hobsbawm describes this period as "the golden years" of the "short" twentieth century. In Hobsbawm's opinion, the 1950s and 1960s were reassuringly different compared to the preceding "age of catastrophe," but also to the time after 1973, which he labels "the crises decades." 2 "You've never had it so good!" Indeed, societies in the Western Hemisphere prospered from an unparalleled growth in affluence. One year of booming economy was followed by another and after an initial skepticism, which was nourished by memories of the recent past, people grew more and more confident. Finally, at the beginning of the 1960s perpetual economic growth was considered to be the norm.
The unsustainable legacy of the Nuclear Age
arXiv: Popular Physics, 2018
It is seldom acknowledged the tremendous burden that the Nuclear Age leaves on future generations, and the environment, for an extremely long time. Nuclear processes, and products, are activated at energies millions of times higher than the energies of chemical processes, and consequently they cannot be eliminated by the natural environment on Earth. So it turns out that hundreds of nuclear tests performed in the atmosphere left a huge radioactive contamination; Rosalie Bertell estimated 1,300 millions victims of the Nuclear Age; civil nuclear programs have produced enormous quantities of radioactive waste, whose final disposal has not been solved by any country; decommissioning of tens of shut down nuclear plants shall involve costs which were underestimated in the past; spent nuclear fuel accumulates in decontamination pools, or in dry cask storage, but no final storage has been carried out yet; radioactivity of spent fuel will last for tens of thousand years; military nuclear pro...