ambix, Vol. 61 No. 4, November, 2014, 407–410
ESSAY REVIEW
Nuclear Markets, Nuclear Bodies Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. By GABRIELLE HECHT. Pp. xx+451, illus., bibl., index. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA and London. 2012. ISBN: 978-0-26201726-8. Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine. By ANGELA CREAGER. Pp. xvi+489, illus., bibl., index. University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London. 2013. ISBN: 978-0-226-01780-8.
These recent books by Gabrielle Hecht and Angela Creager are welcome additions to the history of nuclear technology. At first glance, the topics they address seem the most disparate. Creager traces the spread of radioisotopes in American Cold War life sciences and medicine. Hecht, on the other hand, offers a post-colonial analysis of uranium production in Africa. There is also a divergent selection of sources and approaches. Hecht’s book is primarily built on more than one hundred oral interviews with mine managers, engineers, doctors and workers, and uses the analytical concept of techno-politics—that is, the idea that technological choices are made in order to attain political goals—that she developed in The Radiance of France (MIT Press, 1998). Conversely, Creager’s provides an American-centred history, which draws extensively on Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) archives declassified by the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. Her approach is conceptually lighter, but no less consistent, as evidenced by her insights into the hidden motivations behind the promotion of radioisotopes in industry or into the changing regulations regarding human exposure to ionising radiation. Despite these apparently distinct outlooks, the main themes of both books are strikingly coincident. First, they share a common interest in the creation of markets around technological and scientific materials—uranium in Being Nuclear and radioisotopes in Life Atomic. Second, an important part of both books is devoted to the difficult implementation of regulations regarding human exposure to ionising radiation, as exemplified by Hecht’s study of occupational health regulations in uranium mines and Creager’s focus on workers, patients and populations affected by the proliferation of radioisotopes in clinics, laboratories and the environment. In both cases, the resulting analyses are particularly suggestive and refreshing, and raise new questions about the specificity of nuclear technologies in relation to broader historical developments, such as the transformations of European imperialism or the reconfiguration of capitalism in the “long 1960s.” Hecht’s tackling of uranium markets seeks to untangle uranium’s political economy and to challenge “conventional narratives of the ‘nuclear age’ as a technological and geopolitical rupture” (p. ix) by inscribing the history of uranium mining © Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry 2014
DOI 10.1179/0002698014Z.00000000066
408
ESSAY REVIEW
within a post-colonial framework. In her account, uranium emerged from World War Two as a material strategy for national security. Cold War dynamics crystallised in international non-proliferation agreements to secure the monopoly of nuclear armaments for a restricted set of nations, articulated through strict regulation of the international circulation of uranium. In the 1960s, however, the emergence of the nuclear industry and its promise of electricity “too cheap to meter” led miners, economists and international institutions to transform uranium into a commodity governed by economic rather than political mechanisms. The regime of nonproliferation was not directly challenged by this transformation, but it was used as a resource for the strategies developed by industrialised countries to ensure the supply of strategic natural resources in the new, post-colonial order. This was accomplished through the subtle and continuous manipulation of the “nuclearity” of uranium mining. In Hecht’s terms, nuclearity could be understood as a property distributed among places, objects, people and activities that indicates to what extent these ‘things’ can be counted as ‘nuclear,’ so that the varying degree of nuclearity serves as a measure of how these things can be perceived as exceptional or banal. By using this concept, Hecht shows how leaders of new African states were unable to assert real control over uranium resources; not least because their idea of forming cartels—such as those established by oil producers—collided with international regulations governing the non-proliferation of nuclear armaments. Creager’s historical analysis offers another interesting case study of the artificial creation of a market around nuclear objects. Exhaustively documented and sharply written, with no place for anecdote, Life Atomic provides a coherent narrative about the industrialisation, regulation, and scientific and medical impact of radioisotopes in the United States during the Cold War. Although the first conceptualisation and use of radioisotopes as tracers is found in Europe, Life Atomic starts in Berkeley, home of Ernest Lawrence’s first cyclotrons. By looking in detail at the uses and circulation of radioisotopes, Creager shows the existence of informal distribution networks between scientists. These exchanges took the form of a ‘gift economy’ in which the currency, more than money, was status and the control of research lines. World War Two and the subsequent Cold War not only interrupted these exchanges but, by placing the nuclear at the centre of an increasingly militarised and secretive state, also gave rise to new bureaucratic forms of distribution. Parallel to this transformation was the scaling up of production associated with the rise of the nuclear reactor as a radioisotope-producing technology. Creager follows this crucial shift by focusing on Oak Ridge reactor, which produced most of the materials distributed by the Isotope Distribution Program, launched in August 1946, one year after the bombing of Hiroshima. The distribution of radioisotopes allowed the AEC to create a market for radioisotopes so as to provide actual examples of non-military benefits brought about by nuclear science. Prices were fixed artificially, since the cost of reactors was never accounted, and government agencies, such as the AEC Industrial Advisory
ESSAY REVIEW
409
Group, fostered the growth of the radioisotope business into a free enterprise as a move to improve the governance of nuclear matters and, by extension, to enrich contractors well connected to the spheres of decision-making. Promotion of radioisotopes was not an easy business, though, as the AEC had to resolve many puzzles: the issue of how to distribute radioisotopes to foreign countries without harming national security; how to promote the use of radioisotopes while regulating radiation hazards; and how to balance keeping the market alive by means of government subsidies while promoting its commercialisation in a free-market context. The second major narrative in both books is the management of radiation hazards. Hecht devotes the second part of Being Nuclear to this topic, as she studies radiological protection in uranium mining in Madagascar, Gabon, South Africa and Namibia. Thematic unity with the previous discussion of the uranium market is maintained by the use of a similar analytical apparatus and the notion of nuclearity. Hecht shows that the changing nature of the quality of “being nuclear” was also in play in the ‘invisibility’ of uranium mining in relation to occupational exposure and environmental pollution. By studying how uranium mining was actually practised in these African states, she identifies an important disparity between the standards of radon exposure set by the International Commission for Radiological Protection and the levels of exposure affecting African miners. Questions of race, wealth and local empowerment determined the capacity of miners to implement regulation of radiation hazards, and confirm the socio-technical nature of these standards. Compliance with radiation safety regulations was loose not only in Africa. As Angela Creager shows in Life Atomic, the proliferation of radioisotope uses after World War Two is also a fertile terrain in which to examine ethical dilemmas related to experimentation on human subjects. Creager not only finds that concerns about patient safety eventually shaped the emergence of diagnostic tools, but also that the AEC’s guidelines enforcing consent to AEC human experimentation were not always applied. The legacy of radioisotopes for contemporary life sciences and medicine is portrayed in all its complexity and ambiguity, underlining Creager’s point that “earlier regulation of radioisotope users illustrates the gradual, hesitant emergence of governmental oversight of scientific research” (p. 406). Life Atomic provides a fascinating collection of case studies, showing how the development of the non-invasive technique of immunoassay coexisted with ethically dubious studies in which human patients were used as guinea pigs; and how experimental grounds for the concept of ‘ecosystem’ developed side-by-side with the tracing of radioactive pollution produced by nuclear reactors though the food chain. Creager considers that the source of the many contradictory discourses and practices around radioactivity is the conflict of interests arising from the AEC’s dual role as promoter and regulator of atomic energy. This conflict allowed for loose inspection of uses and procedures involving radioisotopes, and stricter safeguards were only enforced thanks to public outcry in the wake of the fallout controversy. Creager highlights the importance of this controversy for the regulation of
410
ESSAY REVIEW
radiation hazards in many passages, as it led to a re-conceptualisation of the concept of maximum permissible dose, the accounting of cumulative genetic damage, and the tarnishing of a positive association between isotopes and health presented in the AEC’s propaganda. In brief, Hecht and Creager books are excellent contributions to the historiography of nuclear science, which position the nuclear within a larger turn towards studies of globalisation and the transformation of modes of production which, as recently expressed by Donald McKenzie, saw the artificial construction of markets increasingly used as a way to govern and regulate human societies and to establish power relations. In passing, they provide captivating human stories: of miners’ struggles for a safer working environment; of African leaders caught in neocolonial arrangements; and, in Creager’s book, with inspiring examples of how isotopes contributed to the understanding of many scientific problems—from photosynthesis, gene transfer and metabolic pathways, to the concept of ecosystem and the emergence of radioisotopes as “model pollutants.” Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris
NÉSTOR HERRAN
ESSAY REVIEW
Nuclear Markets, Nuclear Bodies Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. By GABRIELLE HECHT. Pp. xx+451, illus., bibl., index. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA and London. 2012. ISBN: 978-0-26201726-8. Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine. By ANGELA CREAGER. Pp. xvi+489, illus., bibl., index. University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London. 2013. ISBN: 978-0-226-01780-8.
These recent books by Gabrielle Hecht and Angela Creager are welcome additions to the history of nuclear technology. At first glance, the topics they address seem the most disparate. Creager traces the spread of radioisotopes in American Cold War life sciences and medicine. Hecht, on the other hand, offers a post-colonial analysis of uranium production in Africa. There is also a divergent selection of sources and approaches. Hecht’s book is primarily built on more than one hundred oral interviews with mine managers, engineers, doctors and workers, and uses the analytical concept of techno-politics—that is, the idea that technological choices are made in order to attain political goals—that she developed in The Radiance of France (MIT Press, 1998). Conversely, Creager’s provides an American-centred history, which draws extensively on Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) archives declassified by the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. Her approach is conceptually lighter, but no less consistent, as evidenced by her insights into the hidden motivations behind the promotion of radioisotopes in industry or into the changing regulations regarding human exposure to ionising radiation. Despite these apparently distinct outlooks, the main themes of both books are strikingly coincident. First, they share a common interest in the creation of markets around technological and scientific materials—uranium in Being Nuclear and radioisotopes in Life Atomic. Second, an important part of both books is devoted to the difficult implementation of regulations regarding human exposure to ionising radiation, as exemplified by Hecht’s study of occupational health regulations in uranium mines and Creager’s focus on workers, patients and populations affected by the proliferation of radioisotopes in clinics, laboratories and the environment. In both cases, the resulting analyses are particularly suggestive and refreshing, and raise new questions about the specificity of nuclear technologies in relation to broader historical developments, such as the transformations of European imperialism or the reconfiguration of capitalism in the “long 1960s.” Hecht’s tackling of uranium markets seeks to untangle uranium’s political economy and to challenge “conventional narratives of the ‘nuclear age’ as a technological and geopolitical rupture” (p. ix) by inscribing the history of uranium mining © Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry 2014
DOI 10.1179/0002698014Z.00000000066
408
ESSAY REVIEW
within a post-colonial framework. In her account, uranium emerged from World War Two as a material strategy for national security. Cold War dynamics crystallised in international non-proliferation agreements to secure the monopoly of nuclear armaments for a restricted set of nations, articulated through strict regulation of the international circulation of uranium. In the 1960s, however, the emergence of the nuclear industry and its promise of electricity “too cheap to meter” led miners, economists and international institutions to transform uranium into a commodity governed by economic rather than political mechanisms. The regime of nonproliferation was not directly challenged by this transformation, but it was used as a resource for the strategies developed by industrialised countries to ensure the supply of strategic natural resources in the new, post-colonial order. This was accomplished through the subtle and continuous manipulation of the “nuclearity” of uranium mining. In Hecht’s terms, nuclearity could be understood as a property distributed among places, objects, people and activities that indicates to what extent these ‘things’ can be counted as ‘nuclear,’ so that the varying degree of nuclearity serves as a measure of how these things can be perceived as exceptional or banal. By using this concept, Hecht shows how leaders of new African states were unable to assert real control over uranium resources; not least because their idea of forming cartels—such as those established by oil producers—collided with international regulations governing the non-proliferation of nuclear armaments. Creager’s historical analysis offers another interesting case study of the artificial creation of a market around nuclear objects. Exhaustively documented and sharply written, with no place for anecdote, Life Atomic provides a coherent narrative about the industrialisation, regulation, and scientific and medical impact of radioisotopes in the United States during the Cold War. Although the first conceptualisation and use of radioisotopes as tracers is found in Europe, Life Atomic starts in Berkeley, home of Ernest Lawrence’s first cyclotrons. By looking in detail at the uses and circulation of radioisotopes, Creager shows the existence of informal distribution networks between scientists. These exchanges took the form of a ‘gift economy’ in which the currency, more than money, was status and the control of research lines. World War Two and the subsequent Cold War not only interrupted these exchanges but, by placing the nuclear at the centre of an increasingly militarised and secretive state, also gave rise to new bureaucratic forms of distribution. Parallel to this transformation was the scaling up of production associated with the rise of the nuclear reactor as a radioisotope-producing technology. Creager follows this crucial shift by focusing on Oak Ridge reactor, which produced most of the materials distributed by the Isotope Distribution Program, launched in August 1946, one year after the bombing of Hiroshima. The distribution of radioisotopes allowed the AEC to create a market for radioisotopes so as to provide actual examples of non-military benefits brought about by nuclear science. Prices were fixed artificially, since the cost of reactors was never accounted, and government agencies, such as the AEC Industrial Advisory
ESSAY REVIEW
409
Group, fostered the growth of the radioisotope business into a free enterprise as a move to improve the governance of nuclear matters and, by extension, to enrich contractors well connected to the spheres of decision-making. Promotion of radioisotopes was not an easy business, though, as the AEC had to resolve many puzzles: the issue of how to distribute radioisotopes to foreign countries without harming national security; how to promote the use of radioisotopes while regulating radiation hazards; and how to balance keeping the market alive by means of government subsidies while promoting its commercialisation in a free-market context. The second major narrative in both books is the management of radiation hazards. Hecht devotes the second part of Being Nuclear to this topic, as she studies radiological protection in uranium mining in Madagascar, Gabon, South Africa and Namibia. Thematic unity with the previous discussion of the uranium market is maintained by the use of a similar analytical apparatus and the notion of nuclearity. Hecht shows that the changing nature of the quality of “being nuclear” was also in play in the ‘invisibility’ of uranium mining in relation to occupational exposure and environmental pollution. By studying how uranium mining was actually practised in these African states, she identifies an important disparity between the standards of radon exposure set by the International Commission for Radiological Protection and the levels of exposure affecting African miners. Questions of race, wealth and local empowerment determined the capacity of miners to implement regulation of radiation hazards, and confirm the socio-technical nature of these standards. Compliance with radiation safety regulations was loose not only in Africa. As Angela Creager shows in Life Atomic, the proliferation of radioisotope uses after World War Two is also a fertile terrain in which to examine ethical dilemmas related to experimentation on human subjects. Creager not only finds that concerns about patient safety eventually shaped the emergence of diagnostic tools, but also that the AEC’s guidelines enforcing consent to AEC human experimentation were not always applied. The legacy of radioisotopes for contemporary life sciences and medicine is portrayed in all its complexity and ambiguity, underlining Creager’s point that “earlier regulation of radioisotope users illustrates the gradual, hesitant emergence of governmental oversight of scientific research” (p. 406). Life Atomic provides a fascinating collection of case studies, showing how the development of the non-invasive technique of immunoassay coexisted with ethically dubious studies in which human patients were used as guinea pigs; and how experimental grounds for the concept of ‘ecosystem’ developed side-by-side with the tracing of radioactive pollution produced by nuclear reactors though the food chain. Creager considers that the source of the many contradictory discourses and practices around radioactivity is the conflict of interests arising from the AEC’s dual role as promoter and regulator of atomic energy. This conflict allowed for loose inspection of uses and procedures involving radioisotopes, and stricter safeguards were only enforced thanks to public outcry in the wake of the fallout controversy. Creager highlights the importance of this controversy for the regulation of
410
ESSAY REVIEW
radiation hazards in many passages, as it led to a re-conceptualisation of the concept of maximum permissible dose, the accounting of cumulative genetic damage, and the tarnishing of a positive association between isotopes and health presented in the AEC’s propaganda. In brief, Hecht and Creager books are excellent contributions to the historiography of nuclear science, which position the nuclear within a larger turn towards studies of globalisation and the transformation of modes of production which, as recently expressed by Donald McKenzie, saw the artificial construction of markets increasingly used as a way to govern and regulate human societies and to establish power relations. In passing, they provide captivating human stories: of miners’ struggles for a safer working environment; of African leaders caught in neocolonial arrangements; and, in Creager’s book, with inspiring examples of how isotopes contributed to the understanding of many scientific problems—from photosynthesis, gene transfer and metabolic pathways, to the concept of ecosystem and the emergence of radioisotopes as “model pollutants.” Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris
NÉSTOR HERRAN
