Bringing the British Back In: Anglo-Chilean Relations in the 1960s

• In Event: Mixing Exiles, Counter-Revolutionaries, Social Scientists, and Some Nukes: New Perspectives on Latin American International Relations

Abstract

This paper extracts Chile's Cold War experience from its traditional US-centered, north-south context and reintegrates it into a larger, transatlantic framework. It evaluates British interests in Chile, while reconstructing Chile's early nuclear history. The Frei administration (1964-1970) supported an ambitious, interdisciplinary group of Chilean nuclear scientists centered in the Comisión Chilena de Energía Nuclear (CChEN), who intended to use peaceful nuclear technology to help develop and modernize their country. This attracted British attention, and the Wilson government (1964-1970), committed to expanding British exports, particularly in advanced technology, offered Chileans favorable aid, credit, and training to construct a national nuclear center, complete with a British-made research reactor and British-trained operators. The British believed they were cultivating a relationship that would lead to lucrative contracts in the 1970s, as southern South Americans embraced nuclear energy, and purchased large-scale nuclear power plants. They thus believed they were establishing a nuclear foothold in the region.

Although these larger projects did not occur, this history highlights alert and imaginative British engagement in Latin America during the Cold War, an era when British political, commercial, and cultural influence was supposedly not only declining in the region, but Britons were also supposedly little interested in it. It also illuminates Chile's British-supported nuclear history's beginnings, further mapping the global nuclear landscape and nuclear-science community. This paper's sources include the Foreign Office's papers and CChEN's internal histories and annual reports.

Author

• James D Lockhart, University of Arizona