Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade

by Gabrielle Hecht

Uranium from Africa has long been a major source of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, including the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In 2003, after the infamous "yellow cake from Niger," Africa suddenly became notorious as a source of uranium, a component of nuclear weapons. But did that admit Niger, or any of Africa's other uranium-producing countries, to the select society of nuclear states? Does uranium itself count as a nuclear thing? In this book, Gabrielle Hecht lucidly probes the question of what it means for something--a state, an object, an industry, a workplace--to be "nuclear."

Hecht shows that questions about being nuclear--a state that she calls "nuclearity"--lie at the heart of today's global nuclear order and the relationships between "developing nations" (often former colonies) and "nuclear powers" (often former colonizers). Hecht enters African nuclear worlds, focusing on miners and the occupational hazard of radiation exposure. Could a mine be a nuclear workplace if (as in some South African mines) its radiation levels went undetected and unmeasured? With this book, Hecht is the first to put Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa. By doing so, she remakes our understanding of the nuclear age.

Genres: Nonfiction, Africa, History, Anthropology, Economics, Environment

451 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Gabrielle Hecht is Stanton Foundation Professor of Nuclear Security and Professor of History at Stanford University. She earned her bachelor's degree in Physics from MIT in 1986, and her Ph.D. in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992.

Reviews

[Jack Burnett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fire

[Kate Kuisel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Banger.

[TimEs · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel as though this book would have benefited from a discussion of what nuclearity may have meant right before and after Hiroshima. Rotter in "The World's Bomb" and his "republic of science" would probably challenge the Hecht's claim that Uranium was not nuclear at all before Hiroshima. Her focus on the state in terms of defining nuclearity was also questionable.

[Jeffrey Hart · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very well written book about the sourcing of Uranium from African countries for use in both nuclear weapons and power plants. The author does this by telling the story of the Uranium mines in Gabon, Congo (Zaire), Niger, and South Africa. The second half of the book focuses on describing the bad labor conditions in the mines; the first establishes a line of argumentation about “nuclearity” – which is an historically contingent concept that relates developments in the Cold War and later the post September 11 world to the way people think about the uranium deposits in Africa. The author provides particularly interesting insights about how the “market” for uranium developed. She highlights the importance of the dual-use nature of uranium and the limited visibility of the trade in uranium for weapons use. The book provides useful background for understanding the defense of the apartheid regime in South Africa by Britain and the United States and attempts by the administration of George W. Bush to justify the war in Iraq in 1993 by citing transfers of “yellow cake” from Niger as evidence of the resumption of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

[Jason S · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting account of the development of the uranium market and the impact of uranium mining on the health and envronment in Africa. Questions the development of the "nucreality" of uranium in the mining process. A good work of economic and social history if a bit dense in spots.