Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War

4. On the Fallacies of Cold War Nostalgia: Capitalism, Colonialism, and South African Nuclear Geographies

4 On the Fallacies of Cold War Nostalgia: Capitalism, Colonialism, and South African Nuclear Geographies Gabrielle Hecht As an old Cold Warrior, one of yesterday’s speeches almost filled me with nostalgia for a less complex time. Almost. —US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, responding to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s criticism of US foreign policy, February 2007 A peculiar nostalgia for the Cold War has pervaded American public discourse since September 11, 2001. Pundits and scholars alike invoke the Cold War as a time of clear, stark choices: capitalism vs. communism, good vs. evil, us vs. them. The oddly wistful tone of this false memory flows from the fiction that the Cold War remained cold, by which people usually mean that nuclear deterrence “worked”: against all odds, the United States and the Soviet Union didn’t annihilate the human race. Such nostalgia relegates proxy wars to near-irrelevance, not only because of the subalternity of their locations and victims, but also because no atomic bombs exploded on their battlefields (despite a few close calls). The implicit contrast is with the complexity of present-day geopolitics, especially the threats posed by non-state actors and their entanglements with “rogue” nuclear states. In history and memory, the superpower arms race remains the identifying mark of Cold War technopolitics. The arms race raised the stakes of ideological struggle to the level of apocalypse, and perpetuated simplifications . Countries were either “nuclear states” or not. Bombs were either atomic or conventional, materials either radioactive or not. The ontology of the “nuclear” seemed beyond political dispute, apparently derived from the esoteric realm of physics and the technological achievements of brilliant engineers. Cold Warriors and their activist opponents might clash about the nature of the communist threat, but they agreed that nuclear systems formed the quintessential, exceptional terrain on which to wage (or oppose) the Cold War. The Cold War filter made nuclear things appear primarily an affair of the North and of nation-states. Nuclear weapons would replace colonialism as 76 Hecht a structure for situating nation-states in a global hierarchy. France and Britain saw them as technopolitical solutions to crises of national identity and security thrown up by their dwindling empires and the rising superpowers. Other nations later invoked nuclear systems (military, civilian, or mixed) as symbolic of their status as sovereign states. Nuclear systems became proof of post-colonial nationhood and offered solutions to newly configured problems of national and regional security. National nuclear expertise promised freedom from imperial dominance. International atomic organizations and treaties further codified nuclear nationalisms by differentiating “nuclear states” from all others. In the first section of this essay I argue that multiple meanings and manifestations of the “nuclear” were produced and contested in the institutional accommodations of global Cold War. Nuclear ontologies—categories of things that did or did not count as “nuclear”—were ambiguous, not fixed. These ambiguities, I suggest, emerged from a set of dialectical tensions that played out in entities such as the International Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT): tensions between the geopolitics of colonialism and decolonization and those of Cold War East–West struggles, between managing the spread of nuclear weapons and encouraging the flow of other nuclear things, and between the moral high ground claimed by the prevention of planetary annihilation and the more mundane commercialization of nuclear power. In its dual position as the West’s most notorious colonial power (after 1960) and one of its primary uranium suppliers (and the two were linked), apartheid South Africa played a pivotal role in these tensions, and in managing the resulting ontological ambiguities. In the second section, I explore how South African uranium enacted the neocolonial accommodations and nuclear ambiguities embodied in the IAEA and the NPT. Producing and selling South African uranium involved continually negotiating relationships among colonialism (especially its manifestation as apartheid), nuclearity, Cold War, and markets. These negotiations played out in—and between— global, national, and transnational spaces. The resulting technopolitics shaped global nuclear (dis)order in ways that have lasted well beyond the Cold War. My conclusion takes up some of these legacies. Colonialism and Capitalism in the Making of Global Nuclearity In 1951, atomic bombs and colonial power induced twin anxieties in leaders of the dwindling empires of Britain and France. That year, Churchill’s chief scientific advisor, Lord Cherwell, remarked: “If we have to rely entirely On the Fallacies of...