Security and the shaping of identity for nuclear specialists

Abstract

Atomic energy developed from 1940 as a subject shrouded in secrecy. Identified successively as a crucial element in military strategy, national status and export aspirations, the research and development of atomic piles (nuclear chain-reactors) were nurtured at isolated installations. Like monastic orders, new national laboratories managed their specialist workers in occupational environments that were simultaneously cosseted and constrained, defining regional variants of a new state-managed discipline: reactor technology. This paper discusses the significance of security in defining the new subject in the USA, UK and Canadawartime allies with similar political traditions but distinct trajectories in this field during the Cold War. The intellectual borders and content of the subject developed differently in each country, shaped under the umbrella of secrecy by disparate clusters of expertise, industrial traditions, and national goals. The nascent cadre was contained until the mid 1950s by classified publications and state-sponsored specialist courses. The early context of high security filtered its members and capped enduringly both their professional aspirations and public engagement.

Science Spaces as ‘Ethnoscapes’: Identity, Perception and the Production of Locality

“…Harwell, a former RAF base, was imagined in the immediate post-war years as a site of special importance both for the development of British science and for the future of the nation. As a leading-edge establishment in atomic science its work was shrouded in secrecy, its specialist staff secluded in the cloistered, almost monastic surroundings of an isolated national laboratory [25], and its physical form a peculiar mix of war-time military legacy, nascent industrial-scale 'big science', and the cossetted academic setting of the established (British) university. Culham, as an off-shoot of Harwell and also located on a former military site, had similar characteristics, though it was custom-built as a laboratory and more obviously modelled on a university environment, while Milton Park's evolution as an industrial trading estate and then mixed-use business and science park was clearly distinct from the other 'big science' sites.…”