cover image Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade

Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade

Gabrielle Hecht. MIT, $29.95 (440p) ISBN 978-0-262-01726-8

Racism, deceit, and fraught politics taint one corner of the nuclear industry in this tendentious study. University of Michigan history professor Hecht (The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity After World War II) examines postwar uranium mining in Madagascar, Gabon, Niger, and apartheid-ruled South Africa and Namibia—an enterprise she finds steeped in power plays and exploitation. Western countries, especially France and Britain, sought to monopolize Africa’s uranium reserves for their own weapons and energy programs; mining companies skimped on radiation-protection measures for black workers and tried to build an unrestricted international trade in yellowcake; antiapartheid movements made common cause with Western antinuclear campaigners in denouncing uranium mines, then embraced them after coming to power. The author interprets all this by invoking the fickle concept of “nuclearity,” by which she fuzzily means a rhetorical strategy that veers between “nuclear exceptionalism” and “banalization” depending on whether interested parties wanted to play up uranium’s importance to assert control or downplay its risks to avoid regulation. Her approach is heavy on Foucauldian cultural theorizing, but sketchy and occasionally misleading on the factual basics of crucial things like the health risks of radiation, a topic that pervades the second half of the book. Hecht’s palpable scorn for all things nuclear colors—and clouds—her assessment of her subject. Photos. (Mar.)