Gabrielle Hecht

Rupture-talk in the nuclear age: Conjugating colonial power in Africa

This paper explores two places usually left off nuclear maps: Madagascar and Gabon, where the French mined and processed uranium ore, starting in the 1950s. It analyses how the ‘rupture-talks’ of nuclearity and decolonization became intertwined, first by examining the production of these rupture-talks by French expatriates, then by exploring how sociotechnical practices at each site both belied and performed claims to rupture for Malagasy and Gabonese mineworkers. Rupturetalk had material effects: it was inscribed in sociotechnical practice, it involved staking claims to power, and it created expectations among both ¥elites and non¥ elites. Sociotechnical practices ‘conjugated’ colonial power relations, creating real and imagined technological futures in which nuclearity and decolonization confronted and shaped one another. Drawing on the insights and methods of postcolonial studies, this paper argues that focusing on uranium mining in Africa reveals the power effects of creating and maintaining the ontological categories of the nuclear age.

Africa and the nuclear world: Labor, occupational health, and the transnational production of uranium

What is Africas place in the nuclear world? In 1995, a U.S. government report on nuclear proliferation did not mark Gabon, Niger, or Namibia as having any “nuclear activities.” Yet these same nations accounted for over 25 percent of world uranium production that year, and helped fuel nuclear power plants in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Experts had long noted that workers in uranium mines were “exposed to higher amounts of internal radiation than … workers in any other segment of the nuclear energy industry.” What, then, does it mean for a workplace, a technology, or a nation to be “nuclear?” What is at stake in that label, and how do such stakes vary by time and place?

History and the Technopolitics of Identity: The Case of Apartheid South Africa

This article explores the history of nuclear systems and computers in apartheid South Africa, considering these systems – and apartheid more generally – as forms of ‘technopolitics’, hybrids of technical systems and political practices that produced new forms of power and agency. Both systems were exceptionally important to the apartheid state, not only as tools but also as symbols. Equally significant, both came to serve as focal points for Western governments and international anti-apartheid activists, who fought to limit South Africas access to these systems. We argue that nuclear systems enacted the technopolitics of national identity, while computers expressed a technopolitics of social identity.

Negotiating global nuclearities: Apartheid, decolonization, and the cold war in the making of the IAEA

Throughout most of its history, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been portrayed as a technical agency in which geopolitics are either extraneous or inappropriate. This chapter argues that this separation of technology and politics was discursive and never enacted in practice. Looking at the role of South Africa in the early history of the agency, this chapter shows that the IAEA’s technopolitical regime was the continually contested outcome of negotiations between visions of a hierarchical, bipolar global order structured by cold war tensions and visions of a decentralized global order inspired by decolonization. This chapter also explores how dynamics between the apartheid state, decolonizing nations, and the United States inflected the meanings and implications of the “nuclear” in IAEA technopolitics. “Nuclearity”—that is, the degree to which a nation, a program, a policy, a technology, or even a material counted as “nuclear”—was a spectrum, not an on‐off condition. Both nuclearity and its implications emerged in substantive ways from the dynamics between cold war and postcolonial visions of the world.

A cosmogram for nuclear things

What things make a state “nuclear,” what makes things “nuclear,” and how do we know? The degree to which—and purpose for which—a nation, a program, a technology, or a material counts as “nuclear” is not always a matter of consensus. Nuclearity depends on history and geography, science and technology, bodies and politics, radiation and race, states and capitalism. It is not so much an essential property of things, as it is distributed in things. Settlements about degrees of nuclearity structure global control over the flow of radioactive materials; they constitute the conceptual bedrock of antinuclear movements and nuclear power industries; they affect regulatory frameworks for occupational health and compensation for work‐related illnesses. This essay explores these themes by contemplating the Nuclear Non‐Proliferation Treaty, the implementation of safeguards, and a few other nuclear things.

Enacting Cultural Identity: Risk and Ritual in the French Nuclear Workplace

On 16 October 1969, Marcel Boiteux, the president of Electricite de France (EDF), visited his companys Saint-Laurent nuclear site. He announced that the national electric utility would stop building the gas-graphite reactors which had until then constituted the core of Frances nuclear programme and served as one of the most prominent technological embodiments of French national grandeur. The very next day, in a dramatic coincidence of time and place, one of the most serious accidents the nuclear industry had seen so far caused a partial meltdown of Saint-Laurent 1, the newest and most powerful of these reactors. This double blow threatened not only the ideological underpinnings of the French nuclear programme, but also the cultural identities of those who worked in its power plants. Workers spent a full year cleaning and repairing the reactor, often working in a highly radioactive environment. This clean-up operation became a pivotal moment in their working lives. Even though the announcement and the accident together signalled the end of their gas-graphite programme as a statesanctioned symbol of French technological grandeur, cleaning Saint-Laurent 1 made the men who engaged in this process see themselves as heroes. This article argues that the technological and cultural aspects of the operation were inseparable: in cleaning and repairing the reactor, nuclear workers healed the harm that the events of October 1969 had inflicted upon their self-image, cemented their loyalty toward each other and toward the gas-graphite programme, and affirmed and redefined their role in the story of French technological grandeur. This analysis provides an insight into how the language, artifacts, gestures and practices that together form workplace experience constitute a mechanism by which workers both shape and enact one aspect of their cultural identity. It also sheds light on a sorely neglected aspect of postsecond world war history: namely, how the ideologies of high technology come to have meaning for those who work in large-scale technological systems. Part of this argument rests upon a theoretical framework that meshes historiographical insights from two domains of scholarship: the cultural history of labour and the history and sociology of technology. Although these two bodies of scholarship almost never cite one another, they make similar types of arguments about the cultural construction of the material world. Recently, for example, cultural historians of labour have argued that scholars

Hopes for the radiated body: Uranium miners and transnational technopolitics in Namibia

This article explores the transnational politics of technology and science at the Rossing uranium mine in Namibia. During the 1980s, Rossing workers refashioned surveillance technologies into methods for trade union action. When national independence in 1900 failed to produce radical ruptures in the workplace, union leaders engaged in technopolitical strategies of extraversion, and became knowledge producers about their own exposure to workplace contaminants. Appeals to outside scientific authority carried the political promise of international accountability. But engaging in science meant accepting its boundaries, and workers ultimately discovered that technopolitical power could be limiting as well as liberating.

The work of invisibility: Radiation hazards and occupational health in South African uranium production

This article explores the technopolitical mechanisms by which radiation hazards in South African uranium production were rendered invisible. The occupational health effects of underground uranium mining were deeply contested for decades, all over the world. From the 1950s to the 1990s, the volatile nature of labor relations under apartheid shaped how the South African mining industry responded to the presence of radon gas. With occasional help from state scientists, the industry muffled the political menace of radon gas by making its physical presence difficult to see. Sometimes this invisibility resulted from deliberate decisions, sometimes from structural suppression, sometimes from the tangle of both. This article argues that maintaining radons invisibility took work.

An elemental force: Uranium production in Africa, and what it means to be nuclear

Uranium from Africa was, and remains, a major source of fuel for atomic weapons and power plants throughout the world. Uranium for the Hiroshima bomb, for example, came from the Belgian Congo. During any given year of the Cold War, between 20 percent and 50 percent of the Western world’s uranium came from African places: Congo, Niger, South Africa, Gabon, Madagascar, and Namibia. Today, there is a renewed uranium boom throughout the continent. The author writes on the ambiguities of the nuclear state, and the state of being nuclear, and why the nuclear designation matters. She looks at two countries to uncover different dimensions of nuclearity: Niger, which has long struggled with France over the price of its uranium; and Gabon, where cancer and other illnesses related to four decades of uranium production remain invisible.