This article concerns the Atom Train travelling exhibition that the chief body of the British nuclear scientists' movement, the Atomic Scientists' Association (ASA), organized in collaboration with government offices and private industry in 1947–1948. It argues that the exhibition marked an important moment within post-war British nuclear culture where nuclear scientists shared aspects of their nuclear knowledge with the British public, while simultaneously clashing with the interests of the emerging British national security state in the early Cold War.

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While anti-nuclear weapons activism in Britain and other nations has received considerable historiographical attention, its transnational professional dimensions have so far been neglected. This article thus introduces the concept of "transnational professional activism" to describe the ways in which scientific and medical professionals, driven by professional ethos and etiquette, and based on their self-fashioned expert identities, organized themselves into national interest groups situated within wider transnational networks in order to act against the perceived threat that nuclear war posed to human society. Through a comparative analysis of the activism of two key groups of atomic scientists and medical professionals at two key moments of the Cold War in Britain, the first Western European nation to acquire nuclear arms, this study examines shifts in the nature of transnational professional activism. The Atomic Scientists' Association, with its promotion of the international control of nuclear energy from 1945 to 1948, and the Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons, which analyzed the anticipated medical effects of nuclear war in the years from 1980 to 1985, are at the center of this analysis.

In the extended introduction to this special issue on British nuclear culture, the guest editors outline the main historiographical and conceptual contours of British nuclear scholarship, and explore whether we can begin to define 'British nuclear culture' before introducing the contributors to this special issue, whose work we have organized into three broad areas. The first part is devoted to three articles that offer explicit and extended attempts to reconceptualize British nuclear culture, illuminating the complex links between nuclear science, the state and the individual citizen. The second part of this issue is devoted to three articles that concentrate on aspects of the history of nuclear science -focusing particularly on intellectuals, nuclear scientists and enthusiasts -alongside analysis of the popularization of nuclear science as well as the relationship between the state and nuclear science and its practitioners. In the third part, four articles examine the diverse ways in which 'official' narratives of the atomic age can be questioned, disrupted or enhanced by analysing the significance of journalistic, anti-nuclear and fictional narratives to the development of nuclear culture in Britain.In the last decade or so, humanities-based nuclear scholarship has expanded and diversified significantly, and there has been steady refinement of the conceptual and methodological frameworks used in the field. This applies to British nuclear scholarship too. To help explain this trend in the British context, we can look to the increased interest in cultural studies of the Cold War era, the continued release of official documentation under the Freedom of Information Act (2005), the emergence of new and varied source materials, the expansion of research possibilities opened up by digital archiving, and the influence of the imaginative and ambitious insights of nuclear scholars worldwide. Most recently, the aftermath of the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan in March 2011 saw the re-emergence of global nuclear 'motifs' such as that of Ulrich Beck's 'risk society'. 1 Aligned with continuing uncertainty over nuclear proliferation, this special issue on British nuclear culture seems especially timely in a period when nuclear debates are being revisited.But what precisely is 'British nuclear culture'? This question lies at the heart of this special issue, which brings together specialists from various fields, including the history of science and technology, cultural and social history, political and diplomatic history,

This article uses the debate over environmental and human health effects of nuclear testing to shed light on the ambivalent relationship between scientists, the public, and the state in Britain during the crucial, but often overlooked, period leading up to the first cycle of anti-nuclear weapons mass protests. In this, it examines how members of Britain's main organization of nuclear scientists – the Atomic Scientists’ Association (ASA) – used their expertise in their engagement with both the public and the state to assess these effects of fallout from nuclear testing. What made the ASA stand out from other groups of the atomic scientists’ movement was its ambivalent relationship with the government. This was, by and large, the result of several ASA members’ occupational backgrounds in government employment and the association's self-imposed adherence to an ambiguous principle of scientific ‘objectivity’ in political matters. The ASA's role in the debate over fallout thus exemplifies a basic dilemma that many scientists in Britain and other Western liberal democracies faced between their roles as ‘objective’ and ‘unpolitical’ scientific experts, on the one hand, and socially responsible scientists, on the other, illustrating the ambivalent position of experts and uses of their knowledge.