Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade by Gabrielle Hecht (review)

This is a pioneering study of a vital subject. Hecht's impressive research in dispersed and difficult archives has brought to light the key place of African production in the political economy of uranium and the trade in nuclear materials during the past century. The text adds to a growing number of important investigations into the making and marketing of hazardous materials, mapping the spatial distribution of uranium mining and the profound impact that such exploitation of resources has on the human and physical environment. We are given a critical exposé of the workings of international capitalism and the exploitation of vulnerable African populations by corporations such as Rio Tinto Zinc (RTZ) as they sought to extract profits from this difficult substance. Hecht argues that natural resources become and remain "nuclear" only in relation to particular fields of discourse and knowledge that locate objects as of exceptional importance and strategic value. The countervailing tendency for markets and some agents to render such materials as mundane commodities is characterized by Hecht as a process of reducing uranium to the level of banal, everyday items for sale and use. The ambiguity or tension in the life of nuclear objects, between exceptionalism and banality, has been played out across the African continent from Gabon and Niger to the Congo and Namibia, as colonial rivals and Cold Warriors sought to command the means by which to empower their states with the radiant aura of lethal weaponry and modern power technologies.

In illuminating the secretive and covert world of uranium, Hecht is sensitive to the complicated and continuous interplay of economic development and state sovereignty, as the eccentric market for uranium was controlled by contracts and fixed supply routes that had little bearing on the quality of the "yellowcake" being traded or the competitive evaluation of supply. The accounts of political and personal intrigue by postcolonial elites in former French Africa and the manipulations by South Africa to preserve Namibian supplies while secretly building its own nuclear bombs are particularly well done. There is also a frank recognition of the uncomfortable but vital role of scientific experts in the developed world, who set the terms by which hazards in African minefields should be measured. For radon gas and dust rather than gamma radiation burns and cancers were the key threat, and American as well as South African scientists were quick to challenge the limited technical understanding of concerned epidemiologists such as Holoday while emphasizing the limited risks from uranium.

Being Nuclear leaves the reader with a startling vision of the problems of mining districts such as Congo's Katanga, where rich natural resources are jostled dangerously by adventurers and pirates in a dangerously weakened political system. The central thesis of the book is not so clear or compelling. The failure of metropolitan regulators such as the Atomic Energy Commission to intervene in such industries is clear, though her argument that the moral failure of transnational authorities to equate the monetary value of African lives with their American counterparts, points to wider questions. She writes about regulation struggles that "even the best standards are not, cannot, should not be considered sufficient to regulate the movements or hazards of nuclear things" (p. 338, emphasis in original). Hecht insists that as historians we need to understand "the ordinary ordeals of existence" as well as complex technologies, and that "radiation can make the ordinary travails of existence more acute" (p. 338). As Hecht shows, these ordeals include problems of poverty, sanitation, and illness as well as exploitation and corruption, with at least some African leaders seeking to harness the strategic value and nonmilitary utility of uranium to developing postcolonial facilities for their working populations.

We might conclude from this study that the price of uranium has been consistently overdetermined by the rivalry between world powers and the concern of newer states to extract advantages from the huge impact of new global energy industries on the...