Introduction 3
conducted the first nuclear detonation in the Alamogordo desert in New
Mexico on July 16, 1945, later known as the “Trinity test.” 7 Trinity was
followed by the two disastrous nuclear bomb attacks on the Japanese cities
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, at the end of the war, already
after Nazi Germany was defeated. After World War II, nuclear weapons programs and civil nuclear technologies were pursued on both sides of the iron
curtain, with large-scale testing projects occurring in the global south. In
the decades that followed, the United States and Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR) established and ran large-scale nuclear programs with
both civic and military components. While these programs included nuclear
weapons development and testing, civil use of nuclear energy was pushed
despite public controversies. This also increased the demand for uranium ore
globally, with the United States, Canada, Congo, and East Germany as the
main mining sites. But in addition, there has been smaller-scale mining in
Central Asia since the 1940s, including Kazakhstan (which, since the massive development of uranium mining, has been the world leader in uranium
exports since 2009), Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan (Roche). 8 In Japan, however, there has been a strict separation of the promoted nuclear energy usage
and anti-nuclear weapons stances by its government, which only after the
2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster had become connected in the public discourse and this connection became one of the key arguments of the protesters
against nuclear energy in the wake of the Fukushima triple disaster.
During the Cold War, the extended production and supply chains have
irreversibly transformed large areas, not least for their enduring material
legacies, given the long half-lives of the radionuclides of technologies that
cannot be contained in time. These massive infrastructures have operated
within a deferred temporality – the handling of nuclear waste was optimistically deferred to technoscientific futures that were expected to solve the
issue. Along the entire nuclear supply chains, radiation expertise was needed
and developed. At the beginning of the nuclear fuel cycle is uranium mining, which provides the materials that are needed for nuclear fission: Roche
gives an ethnographic account of an understudied site of nuclear mining in
Leninabad/Khujand (Tajikistan), which was one of the first smaller scale uranium mining sites in the USSR from the early 1940s. 9 Particularly, the largest
site of nuclear processing, the plutonium production facility at Mayak (the
Hanford, United States and Sellafield, United Kingdom counterpart) figures
prominently in the nuclear infrastructure. The nuclear programs extended to
entire professions during the Soviet time, ranging from expert scientists and
bureaucrats dealing with everyday radiation risks and radiation protection
issues (Nikonova, Sembritzki) to policies of compensation (Penter). Several
contributions focus on the development of nuclear expertise, involving various professional groups in physics but also in medicine and the life sciences
more broadly. Just like in the western biomedical sciences, the nuclear programs transformed and shaped the formation of fields from radiation biology,
health physics to medical radiologists and ecologists in the USSR. These
conducted the first nuclear detonation in the Alamogordo desert in New
Mexico on July 16, 1945, later known as the “Trinity test.” 7 Trinity was
followed by the two disastrous nuclear bomb attacks on the Japanese cities
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, at the end of the war, already
after Nazi Germany was defeated. After World War II, nuclear weapons programs and civil nuclear technologies were pursued on both sides of the iron
curtain, with large-scale testing projects occurring in the global south. In
the decades that followed, the United States and Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (USSR) established and ran large-scale nuclear programs with
both civic and military components. While these programs included nuclear
weapons development and testing, civil use of nuclear energy was pushed
despite public controversies. This also increased the demand for uranium ore
globally, with the United States, Canada, Congo, and East Germany as the
main mining sites. But in addition, there has been smaller-scale mining in
Central Asia since the 1940s, including Kazakhstan (which, since the massive development of uranium mining, has been the world leader in uranium
exports since 2009), Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan (Roche). 8 In Japan, however, there has been a strict separation of the promoted nuclear energy usage
and anti-nuclear weapons stances by its government, which only after the
2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster had become connected in the public discourse and this connection became one of the key arguments of the protesters
against nuclear energy in the wake of the Fukushima triple disaster.
During the Cold War, the extended production and supply chains have
irreversibly transformed large areas, not least for their enduring material
legacies, given the long half-lives of the radionuclides of technologies that
cannot be contained in time. These massive infrastructures have operated
within a deferred temporality – the handling of nuclear waste was optimistically deferred to technoscientific futures that were expected to solve the
issue. Along the entire nuclear supply chains, radiation expertise was needed
and developed. At the beginning of the nuclear fuel cycle is uranium mining, which provides the materials that are needed for nuclear fission: Roche
gives an ethnographic account of an understudied site of nuclear mining in
Leninabad/Khujand (Tajikistan), which was one of the first smaller scale uranium mining sites in the USSR from the early 1940s. 9 Particularly, the largest
site of nuclear processing, the plutonium production facility at Mayak (the
Hanford, United States and Sellafield, United Kingdom counterpart) figures
prominently in the nuclear infrastructure. The nuclear programs extended to
entire professions during the Soviet time, ranging from expert scientists and
bureaucrats dealing with everyday radiation risks and radiation protection
issues (Nikonova, Sembritzki) to policies of compensation (Penter). Several
contributions focus on the development of nuclear expertise, involving various professional groups in physics but also in medicine and the life sciences
more broadly. Just like in the western biomedical sciences, the nuclear programs transformed and shaped the formation of fields from radiation biology,
health physics to medical radiologists and ecologists in the USSR. These