Resumen de Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade by Gabrielle Hecht (review)
What makes something nuclear? What marks the boundaries of the nuclear world? These foundational questions are rarely, if ever, asked by nuclear scholars. In her response, Gabrielle Hecht, a prizewinning historian of the French nuclear program, offers a sweeping view of an interconnected world that joins mines, workers, and radiation with colonialism, transnational agencies, and geopolitics. Taken by themselves, few of these categories are particularly novel; by taking them together, this book helps change permanently how we think of nuclear topics.
Hecht�s vision of the nuclear world stands in sharp opposition to nuclear studies as conventionally understood. This is not the overdetermined space of covert proliferators, power �too cheap to meter,� and mystical pronouncements that have helped make nuclear objects and people among the most exceptional objects of the twentieth century. By exposing the disciplining effects of what she calls �nuclearity,� this book is able to unsettle well-worn cultures of nuclear behavior and scholarship. Nuclearity is an unstable and contested category that sanctions (in both senses) some �nation(s), program(s), technolog(ies), material(s), and workplace(s)� as properly nuclear while preventing others from being included in the same field. Nuclearity is not an attribute uniquely aligned with a fixed set of nuclear things as much as �a property distributed among things� that changes with time and place (p. 14; emphasis in original).
