Kenji Ito and Maria Rentetzi make a clear and ambitious claim in the introduction to their special issue of History and Technology: “Knowledge production in science and technology is fundamentally diplomatic” (4). Their call to explore how nuclear science, technology, and engineering have been enacted through negotiations among states is of a piece with longstanding inquiries into the social processes by which knowledge of the physical universe was constructed, dating back to the recently deceased Bruno Latour.[2] Where Latour turned his gaze toward the milieu of the laboratory, Ito and Rentetzi focus on transnational and international connections—the “negotiations, persuasions, compromises, alliances and confrontations” through which state and non-state actors interact (4). Ito’s contribution to the issue, a history of the origins of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) first safeguards agreement—centered on a Japanese purchase of three tons of Canadian-sourced uranium—illustrates how scientists, ministers, and bureaucrats maneuver to fashion nuclear ontologies on contested international terrain.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Article Review 168
Kenji Ito and Maria Rentetzi, “The Co-Production of Nuclear Science and Diplomacy: Towards a Transnational Understanding of Nuclear Things.” History and Technology 37, no. 1 (January 2, 2021): 4–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2021.1905462.
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Kenji Ito, “Three Tons of Uranium from the International Atomic Energy Agency: Diplomacy over Nuclear Fuel for the Japan Research Reactor-3 at the Board of Governors’ Meetings, 1958–1959.” History and Technology 37, no. 1 (January 2, 2021): 67–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2021.1897963
Reviewed by Jonathan R. Hunt, US Naval War College[1]
5 April 2024 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/RE74 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Thomas Maddux | Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Kenji Ito and Maria Rentetzi make a clear and ambitious claim in the introduction to their special issue of History and Technology: “Knowledge production in science and technology is fundamentally diplomatic” (4). Their call to explore how nuclear science, technology, and engineering have been enacted through negotiations among states is of a piece with longstanding inquiries into the social processes by which knowledge of the physical universe was constructed, dating back to the recently deceased Bruno Latour.[2] Where Latour turned his gaze toward the milieu of the laboratory, Ito and Rentetzi focus on transnational and international connections—the “negotiations, persuasions, compromises, alliances and confrontations” through which state and non-state actors interact (4). Ito’s contribution to the issue, a history of the origins of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) first safeguards agreement—centered on a Japanese purchase of three tons of Canadian-sourced uranium—illustrates how scientists, ministers, and bureaucrats maneuver to fashion nuclear ontologies on contested international terrain.
The editors highlight four dimensions of transnational nuclear science in support of their claims: 1) the growing midcentury prominence of experts with scientific or technical backgrounds in the diplomatic arena; 2) the vital presence of multinational institutions in mediating international disagreements, most notably the IAEA when it comes to “nuclear” objects; 3) the political foundation on which scientific collaboration rests; and 4) the mounting influence on global practices of science and engineering of non-scientists such as “lawyers and insurers, with a strong say in formal diplomatic practices” (5). To the editors’ credit, they do not approach the subject unidirectionally. Cold War-era diplomacy corralled the atom in a cage of rules and regulations which are known as the global nuclear regime, however often they have been massaged or circumvented. So, too, have “nuclear issues…significantly shaped diplomatic history in the post-world war period” (5). The spread of nuclear science, technology, and commodities has indelibly marked the post-1945 international system in the form of a nuclear order over which United Nations (UN) Security Council permanent members have ostensibly patrolled since the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) entered into force on 5 March 1970.
A set of interrelated questions guide Ito and Rentetzi’s intervention. They ask, “How do science and diplomacy make sense to each other? How does each seek to shape the other, how is each shaped in this process?” How has the conditioning of multilateral and multinational talks by knowledge production and vice versa been “achieved [?] How has nuclear diplomacy been performed, by whom and where? What counts as nuclear diplomacy and who counts as a nuclear diplomat (6)?” While “nuclear diplomacy” is their focus, these questions should bear equally on any arena that crisscrosses national borders while also entailing epistemic choices: inter alia, international finance, arms sales, environmental regulation, economic development, humanitarian assistance, or trans-border natural-resource management. Their insistence on the collective character of nuclear diplomacy, which they describe as a universe of “emergent processes,” holds lessons for any case in which “diplomats try to maintain a certain political order on a global level” even as “scientists aim for a universal epistemic ordering of their knowledge claims” (9, 4). The authors dub this “diplomatic studies of science” (4). What Ito and Rentetzi describe goes further, however, comprehending the many intersections and interstices where science overlaps with a world of institutions: inter alia, multinational corporations, non-profits, and international regulatory bodies. If I were to choose a phrase for this phenomenon, it would be “the international political economy of global science.”
Ito’s own chapter is an excellent representation of the strengths of this approach and, more narrowly, a memorable snapshot in the development of global nuclear governance. The nuclear regime has long been a subject of inquiry by international historians as well as historians of science, technology, society, and the environment, notably, among others, Gabriel Hecht, Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Toshihiro Higuchi, John Krige, Grégoire Mallard and Elisabeth Roehrlich, whose recent history of the IAEA, Inspectors for Peace, also covers this episode.[3] Ito’s contribution is to propose an intriguing and, to me at least, fruitful distinction between the “materiality” of the three tons of uranium requested by the Japanese government in the summer of 1958, and the contested meanings of the request in international spaces, as it implicated numerous issues related to the uranium market, the risks of plutonium production for regional and international security, and the elaboration and execution of IAEA safeguards for countries which were interested in procuring fissile materials for civilian or military purposes (68). Ito owes a debt to Hecht (as do all those who study the interaction of politics and technology), especially her work on the techno-politics of nuclear engineering and the “ontologies” of nuclear things, specifically extractive mines in sub-Saharan Africa.[4]
The article might have benefited from greater context. The summer of 1958 was eventful. The United States and the United Kingdom intervened militarily in Lebanon and Jordan, respectively. In August, the People’s Liberation Army of the People’s Republic of China shelled the islands of Quemoy and Matsu, which were occupied by the Republic of China on Taiwan, triggering the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis. The speed with which nuclear arms appeared to be spreading to new countries epitomized how nuclear science, technology, and diplomacy were “co-produced” (69). In New York, Irish Foreign Minister Frank Aiken proposed what is known as the Irish Resolution, the NPT’s first draft. In Tokyo, as Ito relates, the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party faced opposition from parties that were skeptical of the Eisenhower administration’s efforts to revise the 1952 Treaty of San Francisco that had formalized the US-Japan alliance, an argument that had taken on considerable potency after the Lucky Dragon incident in 1954, when the US thermonuclear test, Castle Bravo, irradiated Japanese mariners. In the realm of international nuclear development, the object of these objections were bilateral U.S. safeguards on Japan’s nuclear program. As such, in order to preempt domestic accusations of allied dependence, Japanese diplomats worked to re-frame the uranium they wanted to buy for an indigenous research reactor as primarily intended to stimulate a new system of multilateral safeguards under the auspices of the IAEA.
The concept of “two-level games” might have been useful to analyze these complex dynamics. Negotiators have two kinds of audiences they need to conciliate when pursuing international agreements: representatives of one or more foreign states and domestic interest groups in their home country.[5] The IAEA Board of Governors debated the terms of uranium transfers even as parliamentary imperatives drove the Japanese delegate to prioritize IAEA involvement over competing considerations, such as the price of the uranium shipment or the restrictiveness of the potential safeguards. This in turn led nonaligned and Communist diplomats to scrutinize their Japanese counterparts, suspecting their ulterior motives. Three offers were tendered, two from private companies in the United States and the United Kingdom at $34 and $54.34 per kilogram, respectively, and one from Canada, whose sale of uranium ore to the IAEA Ottawa pledged to subsidize entirely. Ottawa reckoned that IAEA safeguards would speed the advent of a global market for its uranium. As such, one condition of the donation was that the ore’s resell price approximate market price.
It was mainly in relation to future IAEA safeguards that the three tons of uranium was most contested. Ito’s attention to the uranium’s polysemy clarifies the dispute’s contours and content. The desire of the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party for multilateral safeguards to appease domestic actors overrode qualms about their stringency. Future Board of Governors meetings could, if desired, enact safeguards whose scope only a future majority vote could limit. Representatives from India, Egypt, and South Africa, among others, recoiled at the prospect of unbounded international supervision, leading them to cite the small size or the unexceptional nature of the requested uranium in their opposition to mandatory—let alone strict—multilateral controls. Soviet representative Leonid Zamyatin supportively cited the small size and, contradictorily, Japan’s trustworthiness in light of the existence of plutonium sources elsewhere in the country. This informal coalition operated under the misapprehension that Tokyo was seeking the best dollars-and-cents deal. On the contrary, Japanese elites intended the purchase to avert domestic opposition. Ultimately, three basic facts marginalized the opposition. First, Japan was volunteering for open-ended, multilateral safeguards. Second, any prospective regime would also be voluntary. Last, the matter would have to be revisited anyway, as IAEA safeguards on far larger power reactors would necessarily require more expansive controls.
Ito and Rentetzi highlight how sociopolitical processes render nuclear materiality legible and tractable. Even so, there are missed opportunities to connect this episode to larger debates about nuclear order and hierarchy. How should historians weave Japan’s promotion of multilateralism amid the Cold War in Asia to the significance of nuclear-ordering efforts in the 1960s? As noted above, the period during and after the summer of 1958 was by any measure of critical juncture for the global nuclear regime, as the international community moved (haltingly) to impose a measure of control and predictability over a status quo that was defined by nationalized anarchy as the Cold War rent the interwar republic of science. Even as the Board of Governors contested the three tons of uranium, the UN General Assembly debated the viability and justness of a nuclear nonproliferation pact. These debates featured the Argentine delegate expressing concerns that an exclusive nuclear club would set a “judicial stamp of approval to this situation of inequality.” His Spanish counterpart, José Félix de Lequerica, invoked the French ancien régime, warning that such an accord would place “an official seal to the clique of atomic aristocrats.”[6]
Ito’s article and the special issue in which it features show how rigorous work in primary sources can coexist with innovative theory, reframing how historians view and interpret material objects. The study of global science and technology’s sociopolitical co-production can also help scholars make sense of how knowledge production through global governance interacted with hegemonic competition during the Cold War, a subject that a wave of historical works has recently explored with reference to the interwar period.[7] As this dispute over “three tons of uranium” demonstrates, the nonproliferation regime originated as much in consensus-building under conditions of US hegemony in Tokyo as in the proceduralism of the UN building in Vienna where the IAEA Board of Governors met. Put simply, internationalism and hegemony were not necessarily competitors. At critical junctures, they were self-reinforcing.
Jonathan R. Hunt is an Assistant Professor in the Strategic and Operational Research Department at the US Naval War College. He is the author of The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam (Stanford University Press, 2022) and with Simon Miles co-edited The Reagan Moment: America and the World in the 1980s (Cornell University Press, 2021).
[1] The views herein are solely those of the author and do not reflect those of the US Navy, the US Department of Defense, or the US government.
[2] Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1986).
[3] Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2012); Jacob Darwin Hamblin, The Wretched Atom: America’s Global Gamble with Peaceful Nuclear Technology (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021); Toshihiro Higuchi, Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020); Mario Daniels and John Krige, Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022); Grégoire Mallard, Fallout: Nuclear Diplomacy in an Age of Global Fracture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Elisabeth Roehrlich, Inspectors for Peace: A History of the International Atomic Energy Agency (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022).
[4] Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II, Inside Technology (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998); Hecht, “The Power of Nuclear Things,” Technology and Culture 51, no. 1 (2009): 1-30.
[5] Robert D. Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games,” International Organization 42 (Summer 1988): 427-60; Richard C. Eichenberg, “Dual Track and Double Trouble: The Two-Level Politics of INF,” in Evans, Peter B., Jacobson, Harold K., and Putnam, Robert D., eds., Double-edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993): 45-76.
[6] Jonathan R. Hunt, The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2022), 53-54.
[7] Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); David Ekbladh, Plowshares into Swords: Weaponized Knowledge, Liberal Order, and the League of Nations (Chicago London: The University of Chicago Press, 2022); Jamie Martin, The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance (Harvard University Press, 2022); Nicholas Mulder, The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War (New Haven London: Yale University Press, 2022) Stephen Wertheim, “Instrumental Internationalism: The American Origins of the United Nations, 1940–3,” Journal of Contemporary History 54, no. 2 (April 2019): 265-83.