Nuclear Technopolitics in the Soviet Union and Beyond – An Introduction

Abstract

Nuclear energy epitomises the ambiguity of high modernity like no other technology. In the history of the Soviet Union, it played an exceptionally prominent role, initially accelerating its ascent to superpower status and bolstering its visions of the future, but eventually hastening its demise in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. There can be little doubt that without nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union would not have been able to consolidate its hard-won victory in World War II and to achieve superpower status. In a massive effort that combined domestic research in nuclear physics with the knowledge of captive German scientists and intelligence about the American Manhattan project and drew on the resources of the country’s military-industrial complex and the Gulag system, the Soviet Union developed its own atomic bomb in record time and tested its first nuclear device in 1949. By 1953, it was also in possession of the hydrogen bomb and had thus achieved technological parity with the United States.1 In fact, with the successful test of the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile in 1957, the Soviet Union had taken the lead in developing a powerful launch vehicle to deliver thermonuclear warheads across the globe. No less important – in ideological terms even more so than in economic ones – was the Soviet Union’s civilian nuclear programme. Soviet atomic scientists advocated harnessing the atom’s power for electricity generation as early as the late 1940s,2 and the CPSU was quick to realise the economic and propagandistic potential of nuclear power.3 Only one year after the detonation of their first H-bomb, and in response to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech, Soviet nuclear scientists connected the world’s first nuclear power plant to the grid in Obninsk near Moscow. While the quantity of energy produced was negligible, the amount of publicity it generated for the Soviet state was enormous.4 Soviet propaganda could now juxtapose the belligerent capitalist atom of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with its seemingly peaceful socialist twin, eager to serve the