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I am very grateful to Jon Hogg, Christoph Laucht, Jon Agar and participants at the conference on British Nuclear Culture: Themes, Approaches, Perspectives (University of Liverpool, 17-18 June 2010) for constructive discussion of the issues raised in this paper.
Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.
Raymond Williams, Keywords.
Nuclear history is proliferating. Underpinned by ongoing releases of primary sources from the Cold War and after, the last few years have seen a torrent of new studies of various national nuclear programmes; of nuclear strategy, intelligence and politics; of nuclear command and control and defensive infrastructures; of the legacies of high nuclearism; and of broad social and cultural responses to the nuclear condition. As this diversity suggests, nuclear history cuts across disciplinary and subdisciplinary demarcations. From a wide range of perspectives and with a variety of methodological approaches - official, scientific, political, military and diplomatic histories; social, environmental, moral, literary and institutional histories; as well as sociological and anthropological studies - all attempt to describe, explore and explain the development and impacts of nuclear science and technology in diverse contexts over the last century.
Prominent among the slew of recent nuclear histories have been cultural histories of the nuclear. Often taken to refer to responses to the nuclear condition in the cultural modes of literature, art, music, theatre, film and other media, as well as accounts of nuclear imagery more generally, 'nuclear culture' has become an established and fast-growing genre in nuclear history. Like other approaches to nuclear history, accounts of nuclear culture are often situated within national contexts. Nuclear technology has, for the most part, been a state technology - only nation states have had the financial and infrastructural resources and the long-term capacity to develop the complex systems of nuclear material processing necessary to sustain nuclear weapons and nuclear energy programmes. For many historians, therefore, the national has become the natural unit of analysis in nuclear history.
In this paper, however, I want to problematize national frameworks as a basis for understanding social and cultural histories of the nuclear. While the national may be an appropriate level of analysis for political, diplomatic, strategic and even technical histories of...