Being Nuclear

by Hecht, Gabrielle

• ISBN13: 9780262017268
• ISBN10: 0262017261
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-03-02
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

Uranium from Africa has long been a major source of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, including the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In 2002, George W. Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had "sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" (later specified as the infamous "yellowcake from Niger"). Africa suddenly became notorious as a source of uranium, a component of nuclear weapons. But did that admit Niger, or any of Africa's other uranium-producing countries, to the select society of nuclear states? Does uranium itself count as a nuclear thing? In this book, Gabrielle Hecht lucidly probes the question of what it means for something--a state, an object, an industry, a workplace--to be "nuclear." Hecht shows that questions about being nuclear--a state that she calls "nuclearity"--lie at the heart of today's global nuclear order and the relationships between "developing nations" (often former colonies) and "nuclear powers" (often former colonizers). Nuclearity, she says, is not a straightforward scientific classification but a contested technopolitical one. Hecht follows uranium's path out of Africa and describes the invention of the global uranium market. She then enters African nuclear worlds, focusing on miners and the occupational hazard of radiation exposure. Could a mine be a nuclear workplace if (as in some South African mines) its radiation levels went undetected and unmeasured? With this book, Hecht is the first to put Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa. Doing so, she remakes our understanding of the nuclear age.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Acronyms and Abbreviations	p. xv
Introduction: The Power of Nuclear Things	p. 1
Proliferating Markets
Market Aversions	p. 49
Imperial Projections and Market Devices	p. 55
Resource Sovereignty	p. 79
Colonial Enrichment	p. 85
La Françafrique	p. 107
The Price of Sovereignty	p. 115
Nuclear Frankenstein	p. 141
In the Shadows of the Market	p. 147
Borderlands	p. 171
Nuclear Work
Nuclear Desertions	p. 177
A History of Invisibility	p. 183
Expatriates, Ethnology, and Ethnicity	p. 213
Nuclearity at Work	p. 219
Migrant Miners	p. 251
Invisible Exposures	p. 259
Against Uranium	p. 287
Hopes for the Irradiated Body	p. 293
Conclusion: Uranium in Africa	p. 319
Appendix: Primary Sources and the (In)Visibilities of History	p. 341
Publication History	p. 351
Notes	p. 353
Bibliography	p. 407
Index	p. 443
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