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ABSTRACT
Nuclear technologies and skills were not easily sold as tools for development for the less developed countries. Beginning in 1958, the International Atomic Energy Agency, as part of the United Nations Expanded Program of Technical Assistance, looked to create the need for nuclear technical assistance around the world, with the expectation that countries would climb a supposed developmental ladder that went from radioisotope applications in medicine, agriculture and industry among others, and up to the construction of nuclear power reactors. The case of Mexico reveals the heterogenous levels of professionalization of the different nuclear disciplines existing in the country, and the lack of meaningful connections between technical assistance requests and the developmental model favored by the Mexican government during the 1960s. We oppose the historicity of nuclear physics, radiochemistry, and nuclear engineering in this country, to the telos of development.
Acknowledgements
We want to thank Jacob, D. Hamblin, Suzanne Moon, Jahnavi Phalkey, Asif Siddiqi, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, and Jessica Wang for the lively discussions during a workshop on Technical Assistance, held in Mexico City in May 2017. We are also grateful to the reviewers for their insightful suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Throughout this essay we make ample use of the actors’ terminology, including such charged terms as under- and less-developed countries, and backward- and Third World countries. The Third World terminology, though vague and based on what these countries were not, had possessed an active political underlining, appropriated by the countries from its original definition by Alfred Sauvy, in 1952. Its academic use has declined abruptly, and be substituted by other terms, like the Global South, with its own problems. Later on, the term was stripped of those political uses and expropriated in its purely economic meaning, denoting a pejorative appreciation.
2. Phalkey, “Atomic State”; Wang, “The Chinese”; Leslie and Kargon, “Exporting MIT.” For the case of Pakistan, see Jacob Hamblin’s essay in this volume.
3. The agreement to train Mexican nuclear engineers at the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Project at the University of Michigan took place in 1955; it involved a variety of private and governmental agencies in the two countries. It is worth noticing that Mexico was the sole Latin American country -besides Cuba- not signing a bilateral agreement with the United States on nuclear matters. Mateos and Suárez-Díaz, “The Door.”
4. On the role of training in radioisotope applications see Mateos and Suárez-Díaz, “Clouds, Airplanes and Trucks”; Mateos and Suárez-Díaz, “Technical Assistance.”
5. We have done this in Mateos and Suárez-Díaz, “We Are not a Rich Country”, and “Clouds, Trucks, and Airplanes.”
6. Mateos and Suárez- Díaz, “Atomic Ambassadors.”
7. The EPTA was created after Resolution 222 (Economic Development of Under-Developed Countries) of the Economic and Social Council (Chapter IX), in August 1949. Its main consideration was “the significant contribution to economic development that can be made by an expansion of the international interchange of technical knowledge through international cooperation among countries.” For a contemporary analysis see also Owen, “The United Nations.”
8. IAEA Budget 1964.
9. Mateos and Suárez-Díaz, “Technical Assistance”; Mateos and Suárez-Díaz “Radioisótopos itinerantes.”
10. Hamblin, “Let There be Light.”
11. Paul R. Jolles. “Policy paper on administration of technical assistance projects.” July 16th, 1959. File SC/250P Temp. Box 189. IAEA Archives. At the time Jolles was IAEA’s Board of Governors Executive Secretary.
12. TA Expert Report 232, “Group Theory and Nuclear Structure, Theoretical Physics” (1965) by Alan J. MacFarlane, 1.
13. TA Expert Report 82 “Dosimetría de la Radiación” (1962) by G. Ferlazzo, 3.
14. This list may not be exhaustive, but we did not find the corresponding Expert Report at the IAEA archives in Vienna.
15. J. Halberstadt to Goswami, 5 January 1961. SC/250. IAEA Archives.
16. Oxford Dictionaries online http://www.oxforddictionaries.com.
17. Creager, “Tracing the Politics”; Creager and Santesmases, “Radiobiology”; Krige, “Atoms for Peace”; “The politics of Phosphorous-32”; Herrán and Roqué “Introduction”; and Mateos and Suárez-Díaz “Clouds, Airplanes and Trucks.”
18. Medina to Torres Torrija, 7 March 1967. File “Liquid Structure by Neutron Spectroscopy” (TA/Mexico/2/003), Box TA/191.
19. Aliber Guajardo C., Chief, Experts Section, Department of Technical Assistance, to Miguel Albornoz, 26 September 1967. (TA/Mexico/2/003), Box TA/191.c.
20. A. W. McReynolds to Mr. Aliber Guajardo C. 20 April 1968. (TA/Mexico/2/003), Box TA/191.
21. P. Schultze-Kraft to A. W. McReynolds, 2 November 1970. (TA/Mexico/2/003), Box TA/191.
22. Mateos and Suárez-Díaz, “We Are not a Rich Country.”
23. Martin, “The Peaceful Atom”; Mateos and Suárez-Díaz “The Door.”
24. Mateos and Suárez- Díaz “We are not a Rich Country.”
25. Mateos and Suárez-Díaz “Clouds, Airplanes and Trucks.”
26. Owen, “The United Nations Expanded Program.”
27. Rodríguez-Kuri, “Los años maravillosos,” 282–283. As the fiscal year progressed, the amount of extra income with respect to the planned budget would go from 32% (1953) up to an amazing 64% above the approved budget. This increase had an impact on Mexico’s per capita income, but not on the ‘social’ fraction of the budget. So, while economic promotion expenses (‘foment’) grew from 46% to 52% of the total budget, social spending diminished from a projected 20% to a 15.5%. In the middle of the Cold War, Ruiz Cortines’ regime had chosen sides with the United States, though without a strident anticommunism.
28. Argentinian economist Raúl Prebisch, executive director of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA or CELAC), a center for Third World activism, was very critical of import substitution industrialization favored protectionism. His structuralist economics, instead, advocated for industrialization and economic cooperation through trade among developing countries. Prebisch, “The Economic Development.”
29. Márquez, “VIII. Estabilidad y Crecimiento.”
30. Keller, “Mexico’s Cold War.”
31. Reactor Programming, TA Report No. 96. Marvin E. Wyman. 1963. IAEA Archives.
32. Cytogenetics. TA Report 176. W. Gottschalk. 1964. IAEA Archives.
33. All descriptions come from the collection of Technical Assistance Reports to the IAEA, as requested by the government of Mexico between 1960 and 1968. IAEA Archives.
34. IAEA Maize Advisor for Latin America. TA Report 313. Eugene C. Doll. December 1965-November 1966, 5.
35. Radioisotopes in Agriculture. TA Report 384. C. Lakhsmann, March-Aug. 1967, 1.
36. Bhabha, “Science,” 542. Bhabha used the case studies of Atomic Energy and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in India.
37. Ibid., 543.
38. Ibid., 543.
39. Ibid., 544.
40. Esteva, “Development”; Escobar, Encountering Development.
41. Cullather, “Damming Afghanistan,” 513.
42. From Machado, Proverbios y Cantares (XXIX): “Traveler, your footprints are the path, and nothing else/Traveler, there is no path. A path is made by walking.”