From close call to close contacts: transsystemic techno-diplomacy and cooperation in the civilian uses of nuclear power, 1963–79

ABSTRACT

The centrality of the nuclear in Cold War politics has long been undisputed. But while confrontation and competition between the blocs figure prominently in accounts of the atomic age, transsystemic cooperation is only beginning to attract scholarly attention. Based on an analysis of Soviet collaboration with the United States and France in fast breeder reactor development and nuclear-powered water desalination, this article argues that in a changing international order, the red lines of Soviet nuclear sharing stopped to coincide with the bloc divide, and started to align ever more closely with the division line between nuclear haves and nuclear have-nots.

KEYWORDS:

• Soviet Union
• United States
• France
• nuclear power
• transsystemic cooperation
• techno-diplomacy
• 1960s
• 1970s

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Michael S. Barany (Edinburgh) and the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their valuable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Glenn T. Seaborg, “Cooperation between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy,” in A Scientist Speaks Out, ed. Seaborg (Singapore: World Scientific Publishers, 1996), 417.

² In hindsight, Seaborg believed that his visit to the Kremlin prepared the ground for the Test Ban Treaty which was signed by the United States, the USSR, and the United Kingdom in Moscow in August 1963. Glenn T. Seaborg and Benjamin S. Loeb, The Atomic Energy Commission under Nixon: Adjusting to Troubled Times (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), 245.

³ David Holloway, “The Soviet Union and the Creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” Cold War History 16, no. 2 (2016): 177–194. Holloway emphasises that the USSR had embarked on a civilian atomic energy programme prior to Atoms for Peace, but shows how the latter intensified these endeavours.

⁴ Odd A. Westad, “The Cold War and the International History of the 20th Century,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, ed. Odd A. Westad, 3 vols, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 17.

⁵ Seaborg, “Cooperation,” 410–11. For a chronology of Soviet-US contacts in the field of nuclear energy, see A. M. Petros'iants, ed., Iadernaia industriia Rossii (Moscow: Energoatomizdat, 2000), 1004–11.

⁶ On the initial dynamics of these contacts, see United States Atomic Energy Commission, Office of Technical Information, Visit of U.S. Team to USSR Atomic Energy Installations, October 1959 (Washington, D.C., 1959). Symptomatic for the freeze of this exchange under the impression of the U-2 crisis in 1960, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Berlin Wall crisis in 1961 was the calling off of a high-calibre US visit to the USSR on questions of reactor development in 1962. Seaborg, “Cooperation,” 413.

⁷ Ibid., 416.

⁸ Ibid., 421.

⁹ Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia, “Between Aid and Restriction: The Soviet Union’s Changing Policies on China’s Nuclear Weapons Program, 1954–1960,” Asian Perspective 36, no. 1 (2012): 95–122. On alliance management, see Elisabeth Roehrlich, “The Cold War, the Developing World, and the Creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 1953–1957,” Cold War History 16, no. 2 (2016): 195–212 (210).

¹⁰ On the crucial importance of reciprocity for technoscientific exchange, see John Krige, “Hybrid Knowledge: the Transnational Co-Production of the Gas Centrifuge for Uranium Enrichment in the 1960s,” British Journal for the History of Science 45, no. 3 (2012): 337–57 (340).

¹¹ Leopoldo Nuti, “The Making of the Nuclear Order and the Historiography on the 1970s,” The International History Review (2017): 1–10.

¹² The Mangyshlak Atomic Energy Combine (MAEK) in Aqtau (Shevchenko in Soviet times) is an excellent object of study because many of its records have recently been declassified and made available for researchers at the State Archive of Mangistau Region. Covering the years 1963–2003, these records contain extensive materials on MAEK’s international contacts, f. 506 (MAEK, 1765 files), Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Mangistauskoi Oblasti [GAMO], Aqtau.

¹³ Cf. Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 15. The term was originally introduced by Glenn E. Schweitzer, Techno-Diplomacy: US-Soviet Confrontations in Science and Technology (New York: Plenum, 1989). Recently, it has variously been linked to Hecht’s concept. See e.g. John Krige, “Techno-Diplomacy: Knowledge, Power and US Foreign Policy,” paper given at Deutsches Museum, Munich, 26 November 2018.

¹⁴ ‘Hybrid domains’ is the term introduced in Simone Turchetti, Néstor Herran and Soraya Boudia, “Introduction: Have We Ever Been ‘Transnational’? Towards a History of Science Across and Beyond Borders,” British Journal for the History of Science 45, no. 3 (2012): 319–36 (330).

¹⁵ ibid. Similarly, Barany and Krige state: ‘Knowledgeable individuals navigate “hybrid” identities that combine a sense of self as a knowledge producer with a sense of national and political allegiance, with different contexts calling for the performative of different selves.’ Michael J. Barany and John Krige, “Afterword: Reflections on Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology,” in How Knowledge Moves. Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology, ed. John Krige (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 411–418 (416).

¹⁶ For some conceptual thoughts on ‘flexible’ technological artefacts in the Cold War era, see Gabrielle Hecht, “Introduction,” in Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, ed. Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 1–12 (3).

¹⁷ Michael David-Fox, “The Iron Curtain as Semipermeable Membrane: Origins and Demise of the Stalinist Superiority Complex,” in Cold War Crossings, ed. Patryk Babiracki and Kenyon Zimmer (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2014), 14–39.

¹⁸ On sociotechnical imaginaries, see Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, eds., Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

¹⁹ For the ‘radiance’ metaphor, see Hecht, Radiance.

²⁰ Alvin Weinberg, The First Nuclear Era: The Life and Times of a Technological Fixer (New York: AIP Press, 1994), 173; Proceedings of the Third International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, held in Geneva 31 August–9 September 1964, 16 vols., vol. 6: Fast Reactors and Advanced Concepts (New York: United Nations, 1965).

²¹ This notorious expression was coined by AEC chairman Lewis Strauss in 1954, but the alleged ‘cheapness’ of nuclear energy was just as important to Soviet proponents of nuclear energy. See Sonja D. Schmid, Producing Power: the Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 22, 28, 36–7.

²² Weinberg, Era, 173.

²³ “Address by Mr. V. S. Emelyanov, President of the Conference,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference, vol. 1, 30.

²⁴ The term ‘technological fixer’ was coined by Alvin Weinberg. See Weinberg, Era. For a recollection of the initial enthusiasm surrounding nuclear-powered desalination, see ibid., 142–52.

²⁵ V. A. Kuvshinnikov and V. V. Frolov, “Science and Engineering Exhibits at the Third Geneva Conference,” Soviet Atomic Energy[henceforth: SAE] 18, no. 1 (1965): 656–59; and A. I. Leipunskii et al., “Reaktory na bystrykh neitronakh s natrievym okhlazhdeniem,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference, vol. 6, 45–50.

²⁶ Mikhail F. Troianov, Moei sud’boi stal Fiziko-energeticheskii institut (Obninsk: FGUP ‘GNC RF – FEI’, 2007), 161.

²⁷ U.S. Department of the Interior, ed., Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Water Desalination, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966).

²⁸ Ibid., vol. 1, 28.

²⁹ Weinberg, Era, 173.

³⁰ The project received initial political backing when a feasibility study commissioned by the US Senate concluded it merited US government funding. Ibid., 144–7. On the ORNL study and other research into nuclear-powered agro-industrial complexes, see International Atomic Energy Agency, ed., Nuclear Energy Centres and Agro-Industrial Complexes. IAEA Technical Report Series no. 140 (Vienna: IAEA, 1972).

³¹ V. Mikhailin, “Atoms for Peace at Expo 67,” SAE 23, no. 1 (1967): 1125–6.

³² Paul R. Josephson, “Atomic-Powered Communism. Nuclear Culture in the Postwar USSR,” Slavic Review 55, no. 2 (1996): 297–324.

³³ Between 1954 and 1964 alone, the USSR State Committee on the Use of Atomic Energy organised exhibitions in 39 countries that were allegedly visited by 22 million people. But only a small fraction of these exhibitions took place in Africa and Asia. I. D. Morokhov, “International Cooperation and the Development of Nuclear Reactor Projects,” SAE 17, no. 1 (1964): 982–88 (983).

³⁴ On the Algiers fair, see f. 506, op. 1, d. 362, l. 112, GAMO; on invitations, see ibid., d. 715, l. 220–22.

³⁵ Ibid., istoricheskaia spravka, vol. 2.

³⁶ Ibid., op. 1, d. 750.

³⁷ For an instructive example (Libya), see below, p. 16. [This is the current page number, please update page number if the article is reformatted. The lines I refer to are (currently) 527–540].

³⁸ Michael C. Low, “Desert Dreams of Drinking the Sea, Consumed by the Cold War: Transnational Flows of Desalination and Energy from the Pacific to the Persian Gulf,” Environment and History 26, no. 2 (2020), 145–174. For a recent multi-national history of water desalination which, however, excludes the Soviet case, see Joe Williams and Erik Swyngedouw, Tapping the Oceans: Seawater Desalination and the Political Ecology of Water (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018).

³⁹ Kuvshinnikov and Frolov, “Exhibits,” 656. On FBR development in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France (but not the USSR) and the associated proliferation considerations, see Nuno LuÍs Madureira, “Reckless Proliferation and Guardianship Proliferation: The Fast Breeder Nuclear Reactor and the Plutonium Economy,” Technology and Culture 60, no. 3 (2019): 833–65.

⁴⁰ V. G. Kiselev and E. P. Karelin, “International Conference on Fast Reactor Safety,” SAE 24, no. 1 (1968): 611–12 (611); and f. 506, op. 1, f. 715, l. 101, GAMO.

⁴¹ “American Water Desalination Specialists View Soviet Work,” SAE 18, no. 1 (1965): 400.

⁴² Fermi I reached criticality on 23 August 1963. Thomas B. Cochran, Harold A. Feiveson, Walt Patterson et al., eds., Fast Breeder Reactor Programs: History and Status (Princeton: International Panel on Fissile Materials, 2010), 95.

⁴³ Ibid. A US-USSR agreement on cooperation in desalination, including the use of nuclear energy, was signed in Moscow on 18 November 1964, but exchange remained anaemic. United States Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Hearings and Reports on Atomic Energy, vol. 128 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), 186.

⁴⁴ A. I. Leipunsky, “The BN-350 Atomic Station. Paper at the Meeting on Fast Reactor Technology, Detroit, April 26–28, 1965,” in Fast Reactor Technology, National Topical Meeting, Detroit, Michigan, April 26–28, 1965, ed. American Nuclear Society (1965): 15–26. See also Troianov, Sud’boi, 18.

⁴⁵ Cochran, Fast Breeder, 95.

⁴⁶ Seaborg, “Cooperation,” 425–6, 428–30.

⁴⁷ For a reprint of the two accords, see James Mayall and Cornelia Navari, The End of the Post-War Era: Documents on Great-Power Relations 1968–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 179–82.

⁴⁸ U.S.–U.S.S.R. Cooperative Agreements in Science and Technology. Hearings before the Subcommittee on Domestic and International Scientific Planning and Analysis of the Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives, Ninety-Fourth Congress, First Session, November 18, 19, 20, 1975 (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1976), 43.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 54.

⁵⁰ In 1971, Nixon established breeder technology as the nation’s highest priority research and development effort. Jay Bouderau, “The American Breeder Reactor Program Gets a Second Chance,” Los Alamos Science 2, no. 2 (1981): 118–19 (118). See also Michael Camp, “‘Wandering in the Desert’: The Clinch River Breeder Reactor Debate in the U.S. Congress, 1972–1983,” Technology and Culture 59, no. 1 (2018): 26–47.

⁵¹ Josephson, Red Atom, 46.

⁵² Troianov, Sud’boi, 16.

⁵³ As Zubok notes, ‘[o]vercoming Khrushchev’s legacy of brinkmanship […] would become the mainspring of Brezhnev’s foreign policy activism in the early 1970s.’ Vladislav M. Zubok, Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 203.

⁵⁴ According to Zubok, facilitating technology imports was among the primary goals of Brezhnev’s attempt to normalise relations with the West. Ibid., 220.

⁵⁵ U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration, Soviet Power Reactors 1974 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), 140; Troianov, Sud’boi, 52.

⁵⁶ United States Atomic Energy Commission, Soviet Power Reactors – 1970 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970); Soviet Power Reactors 1974.

⁵⁷ Soviet Power Reactors – 1970, 5.

⁵⁸ Soviet Power Reactors 1974, 3–4.

⁵⁹ Cooperative Agreements, 548.

⁶⁰ Unless otherwise stated, the account of the visit is based on f. 506, op. 3, d. 362, l. 205–13, GAMO.

⁶¹ f. 506, op. 3, d. 362, l. 201–203, GAMO; f. 506, op. 3, d. 755, l. 85–6, GAMO. On the importance of stage-managing transsystemic technoscientific contacts, see Ksenia Tatarchenko, “Calculating a Showcase: Mikhail Lavrentiev, the Politics of Expertise, and the International Life of the Siberian Science-City,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 46, no. 5 (2016): 592–632.

⁶² f. 506, op. 1, d. 715, l. 25–7, GAMO.

⁶³ For an example of these Q&A volumes, see ibid., l. 92–115.

⁶⁴ US-USSR Atomic Energy Agreement: Fourth Session of Joint Committee, 16 December 1976, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1976MOSCOW19620_b.html accessed 19 July 2019.

⁶⁵ See f. 506, op. 1, d. 362, l. 213, GAMO; Cooperative Agreements, 548.

⁶⁶ From this point onward, much to the frustration of the Soviets, the United Stats lobbied against breeder reactors within the IAEA framework. Troianov, Sud’boi, 93.

⁶⁷ On collaboration in high-energy physics, which also culminated in the first half of the 1970s, see Khandozhko, “Quantum Tunnelling through the Iron Curtain: The Soviet Nuclear City of Dubna as a Cold War Crossing Point,” Cahiers du Monde russe 60, no. 2–3 (2019): 369–396.

⁶⁸ For a nuanced account, see Nuti, “Making of the Nuclear Order.”

⁶⁹ For a similar argument, based on research into joint Soviet-US efforts at system analysis and cybernetics undertaken at the International Institute for Applied System Analysis at Laxenburg in Austria, see Rindzeviciute, The Power of Systems. How Policy Sciences Opened up the Cold War World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), 53.

⁷⁰ Gloria Duffy, Soviet Nuclear Energy: Domestic and International Policies (Santa Monica: Rand, 1979), 29.

⁷¹ f. 506, op. 1, d. 362, l. 12–3, GAMO.

⁷² f. 506, op. 1, d. 715, l. 92–115, GAMO.

⁷³ On the Soviet appraisal of France becoming a nuclear power, see Robbin F. Laird, France, the Soviet Union and the Nuclear Weapons Issue (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985).

⁷⁴ B. A. Semenov, “Soviet–French Collaboration in the Field of the Peaceful Utilization of Atomic Energy,” SAE 46, no. 3 (1979): 236–38.

⁷⁵ Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, ed., Documents Diplomatiques Français 1966, vol. 1 (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2006), 909–10, and Ibid., vol. 2, 689–91.

⁷⁶ Petros’iants, Industriia, 1011.

⁷⁷ Troianov, Sud’boi, 104–6.

⁷⁸ E. P. Karelin, “Soviet-French Seminar on Technology of Fast Neutron Reactors,” SAE 27, no. 1 (1969): 895.

⁷⁹ See f. 506, GAMO, various signatures, and also the photographic evidence of these visits in the private archive of Nikolai V. Skorikov (copies in author’s possession).

⁸⁰ Matteo Gerlini, “Energy Independence vs. Nuclear Safeguards: The US Attitude toward the European Fast Breeder Reactors Program,” in Nuclear Italy. An International History of Italian Nuclear Policies during the Cold War, ed. Elisabetta Bini and Igor Londero (Trieste: Edizioni Università di Trieste, 2017), 141–50; and Henry Nau, “The Practice of Interdependence in the Research and Development Sector: Fast Reactor Cooperation in Western Europe,” International Organisation 26, no. 3 (1972): 499–526.

⁸¹ f. 506, op. 1, d. 362, l. 18, GAMO.

⁸² Troianov, Sud’boi, 18–19.

⁸³ Ibid., 106.

⁸⁴ Semenov, “Collaboration,” 237.

⁸⁵ On portable knowledge and immutable mobiles, see Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 19–68. On the idea of transnational science being based on epistemic universalism, see Turchetti, “Introduction,” 323.

⁸⁶ Semenov, “Collaboration,” 238.

⁸⁷ See Isabelle Anstey, “Negotiating Nuclear Control: The Zangger Committee and the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group in the 1970s,” The International History Review 40, no. 5 (2018): 975–95; William C. Potter, “The Soviet Union and Nuclear Proliferation,” Slavic Review 44, no. 3 (1985): 468–88.

⁸⁸ Potter, “Soviet Union.”

⁸⁹ Duffy, Energy, iii; 19.

⁹⁰ Ibid., 14–21.

⁹¹ On Loviisa, see Karl-Erich Michelsen and Aisulu Harjula, “Finland. Short Country Report,” in HoNest, November 2017, http://www.honest2020.eu/sites/default/files/deliverables_24/FI.pdf accessed 6 August 2019, 41–51; Petros’iants, Industriia, 1016–17.

⁹² See Carla Konta, “Yugoslav Nuclear Diplomacy between the Soviet Union and the United States in the Early and Mid-Cold War,” Cahiers du Monde russe 60, no. 2–3 (2019): 417–40; and Eliza Gheorghe, “Atomic Maverick: Romania’s Negotiations for Nuclear Technology, 1964–1970,” Cold War History 13, no. 3 (2013): 373–92.

⁹³ See Sonja D. Schmid, “Of Plans and Plants: How Nuclear Power Gained a Foothold in Soviet Energy Policy,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 66, no. 1 (2018): 124–41 (137–8).

⁹⁴ Sonja D. Schmid, “Nuclear Colonization? Soviet Technopolitics in the Second World,” in Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies, 125–54 (133).

⁹⁵ ”Collaboration of the Socialist Countries in Nuclear Power Development,” SAE 19, no. 1 (1965): 974; A. F. Panasenkov, “The Peaceful Atom in the Socialist Countries,” SAE 46, no. 1 (1979): 351–60; and Schmid, “Colonization,” 134–6.

⁹⁶ Ibid., 142–4.

⁹⁷ Duffy, Energy, 83.

⁹⁸ f. 506, op. 1, d. 715, l. 212, GAMO.

⁹⁹ Key actors in the Soviet FBR programme, such as Lev. A. Kochetkov and Viktor V. Orlov, kept citing the unresolved proliferation risks of breeder technology as a main impediment to broadly deploying the technology throughout the bloc. See Viktor V. Orlov, “Za bystrymi reaktorami – budushchee!,” in NIKIET, 14 January 2005, http://web.archive.org/web/20050209011528/http://www.nikiet.ru/rus/news/2005/orlov75.html accessed 8 July 2019; and Lev A. Kochetkov to Dmitrii S. Iurchenko, 24 August 1984, f. 506, op. 1, d. 821, l. 1–7, GAMO.

¹⁰⁰ f. 506, op. 1, d. 215, l. 249, GAMO.

¹⁰¹ Matthew Fuhrmann, Atomic Assistance: How ‘Atoms for Peace’ Programs Cause Nuclear Insecurity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 89–94.

¹⁰² f. 506, op. 1, d. 715, l. 40–2, 116–25, GAMO.

¹⁰³ Potter, “Soviet Union.”

¹⁰⁴ Gerlini, “Energy Independence”; and Nau, “Practice of Interdependence.”

¹⁰⁵ Nuti, “Making of the Nuclear Order.”

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [327790375].

Notes on contributors

Stefan Guth

Stefan Guth is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tuebingen, Institute of Eastern European History and Area Studies. He specialises in Soviet and Polish history, nuclear technopolitics, and transsystemic relations in the Cold War era.