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This paper concerns the technologies used in radioisotope production in the French Atomic Energy Commission (the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique) between 1946 and 1958. Particular attention is given to the various instruments used for the bombardment of isotopes, including accelerators and reactors, and their relationship with the CEA's radioisotope preparation laboratories. Ultimately, the vast majority of bombardments took place in research reactors. These versatile machines, and the isotopes and other materials that passed through them, act as historical tracers: they shed light on the orientation of the entire atomic system in which radioisotope production is found. PALABRAS CLAVE: Radioisótopos, investigación de reactors, Comisariado para la Energía Atómica, sistemas tecnológicos, programas atómicos.
This introduction examines the growing interest in science diplomacy and the parallel lack of in-depth historical studies on this new concept. In particular, we first show how the recent attention toward science diplomacy has led to a proliferation of hagiographic accounts reflecting the urgency to support its growth rather than truly investigate its ancestry. We then turn to consider how our historical understanding of science diplomacy could be improved, and how this knowledge could equally be of significance to science diplomacy practitioners today.
This essay is part of a special issue entitled Science Diplomacy, edited by Giulia Rispoli and Simone Turchetti.
This article considers a relatively unknown episode in the early Cold War that involved the US and Brazil, as well as a number of other countries. From 1950, the leading figure in Brazil's nuclear effort, Admiral Álvaro Alberto, established amicable connections with the representatives of other nations in order to make it possible for Brazil to develop an atomic energy complex. The U.S. reaction to the Brazilian initiative was sharp and restrictive, involving a combination of coercion and persuasion, and it reverberated in a larger matrix of hemispheric and global economic and security concerns. In this case, science diplomacy did not actually have the benign character often ascribed to it. We argue that it was instead an integral part of a set of diplomatic practices aimed at strengthening U.S. global hegemony rather than a means of addressing global concerns.
This study explores the origins and consequences of a unique, secret, French-American collaboration to prospect for uranium in 1950s Morocco. This collaboration permitted mediation between the United States and France. The appearance of France in an American-supported project for raw nuclear materials signalled American willingness to accept a new nuclear global order in which the French assumed a new, higher position as regional nuclear ally as opposed to suspicious rival. This collaboration also permitted France and the United States to agree tacitly to the same geopolitical status for the French Moroccan Protectorate, a status under dispute both in Morocco and outside it. The secret scientific effort reassured the French that, whatever the Americans might say publicly, they stood behind the maintenance of French hegemony in the centuries-old kingdom. But Moroccan independence proved impossible to deny. With its foreseeable arrival, the collaboration went from seductive to dangerous, and the priority of American and French geologists shifted from finding a major uranium lode to making sure that nothing was readily available to whatever post-independence interests might prove most powerful. Ultimately, the Kingdom of Morocco took a page out of the French book, using uranium exploration to assert sovereignty over a different disputed territory, its de facto colony of the Western Sahara.
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