Hiding in Plain Sight: Uncovering Nuclear Histories

Abstract

Nuclear histories are global yet worryingly incomplete. Linking a plutonium refinery in Washington, a uranium mine in Saskatchewan, a tsunami at Fukushima, a nuclear bomb test site in Rajasthan, a reactor ‘accident’ at Chernobyl, a shipping accident in the English Channel, and a president-to-prime-minister confrontation over the US-Canada frontier, these quasi-autobiographical essays prove the importance of public archives, personal files with fragments, oral histories, and private recollections. This is the social history, business history, environmental history, labour history, scientific and technological history, and indigenous history of the twentieth century. Hiding in Plain Sight offers everyone an entry to the irregularities of our ‘disorderly nuclear world’, and offers other researchers crucial insights to what richness lies within.