Without Anger and Partiality”

Abstract

This article explores atomic agriculture through the lens of political shelter, focusing on examples from the United States, the Soviet Union, and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Enthusiasm for atomic energy techniques, especially in the 1950s and early 1960s, was an abnormality in the sense that their perceived value—to society possibly, to governments certainly—overruled conventional arguments. Though later debates about atomic energy often revolved around safety and health effects, most of the early criticisms were more mundane, typically turning on whether they ever would be economically viable. Occasionally the criticism was more severe, as when discussing mutation plant breeding in the Soviet Union. What we find in exploring agricultural techniques in atomic energy, in national contexts as well as at international agencies, is how routinely experts pointed out that these approaches were promising but ultimately inferior. Yet they were pursued anyway, boosted by the priorities of governments and government-funded international agencies. The political and military value of atomic energy sheltered individual scientists, laboratories, and entire research programs from skepticism and outright criticism.