ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Curating the Atom: Transnational Exhibits, National Aspirations, and the Cold War Physics Laboratory

• In Event: Laboratories of Concealment: New Perspectives on Postwar Science, Secrecy and the State

English Abstract

In 1955, the Geneva Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy and subsequent pavilions sought to downplay the military nature of nuclear weapons and to promote the U.S. Atoms for Peace campaign to export nuclear infrastructure to non-aligned states. Across South Asia and throughout Latin America, exhibitions on high-energy physics designed and curated by the United States Information Agency, used a series of tactical curatorial techniques to separate the political fear of atomic weapons from the pure, immersive allure of high-energy physics. At the same time, a new class of elite state scientists and politicians established nuclear physics laboratories and reactor campuses in India, Pakistan, and Mexico.

For many scholars of Cold War science, the artistic propagandistic side of Atoms for Peace appears distinct from the simultaneous creation of the first high-energy physics laboratories and nuclear reactor campuses in Latin America and South Asia. Both architectural typologies, the exhibition pavilion and the physics laboratory, sought sterility and purity from environmental input. Laboratories employed many of the same formal design elements to seclude the state physicist committed to military research and development from the social and political conditions of their work. These same practices had also allowed the exhibition visitor to imagine the peaceful nationalist atom. Through case studies from India, Pakistan, and Mexico, this paper argues that the curatorial practices of the Atoms for Peace program, combined with local architectural movements, influenced how states approached the sites, landscapes, and architecture of mid-twentieth-century laboratories for their nascent nuclear establishment.

Author

• Hannah Ahlblad, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University