PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Jacob Darwin Hamblin is Professor of History at Oregon State University. His books include Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age; Oceanographers and the Cold War; and Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (OUP, 2013), which won the Paul Birdsall Prize of the American Historical Association and the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize of the History of Science Society.
The Wretched Atom is institutional history that reads like an adventure story. Rather than focusing on the notable failures of Atoms for Peace, Jake Hamblin asks how it was deployed. He finds that the implementation of peaceful energy has rarely been peaceful. Embedding this history in the context of the nuclear arms race, colonialism and decolonization, and geo-political struggles to take control over natural resources such as uranium and oil, Hamblin's study offers a rewarding re-examination of the long game behind the promotion of aspirational nuclear technology. * Kate Brown, author of Manual for Survival * Jacob Darwin Hamblin's The Wretched Atom provocatively tells the story of global Realpolitik and unintended consequences in the pursuit and promotion of peaceful uses of nuclear technology, adding a fresh perspective to thinking about the role of science in the modern Game of Nations. * Timothy Naftali, co-author of Khrushchev's Cold War * Arising from the ashes of World War II, the peaceful atom has been evergreen: bountiful energy, water, crops, and medicines to lift the world to an environmentally sustainable future. Hamblin's The Wretched Atom deftly shows how those perpetual promises were sustained by exploitative geopolitics and oftentimes outright cynicism. A sobering and engaging counternarrative of the dream of a utopian nuclear future. * Michael D. Gordin, Princeton University *
