ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The global nuclear order as imperial formation

• In Event: Nuclear History as Global History: Current Debates and New Perspectives 1

English Abstract

The global nuclear order is here treated as a network of national nuclear programs interlinked by regulated transnational flows of knowledge and technology that reproduce the intrinsic inequalities of power eventually sanctioned by the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. How are we to think about the sharing and denial of nuclear knowledge and knowhow when it crosses national borders between western industrialized powers and the global south? This paper discusses the limits of the concept of coproduction for capturing the transnational engagement in highly asymmetric contexts of knowledge and power, and explores the questions posed when thinking instead in terms of imperial formations to grasp the effects of US nuclear diplomacy in the early cold war. Imperial presences in two very different contexts, the installation of nuclear related facilities in Greenland, and the promotion of atoms for peace in Mexico, provide the empirical backbone needed to refine the argument.

Author

• John Krige, Georgia Institute of Technology