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Life Exposed
On April 26, 1986, Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in then Soviet Ukraine. More than 3.5 million people in Ukraine alone, not to mention many citizens of surrounding countries, are still suffering the effects.Life Exposedis the first book to comprehensively examine the vexed political, scientific, and social circumstances that followed the disaster. Tracing the story from an initial lack of disclosure to post-Soviet democratizing attempts to compensate sufferers, Adriana Petryna uses anthropological tools to take us into a world whose social realities are far more immediate and stark than those described by policymakers and scientists. She asks: What happens to politics when state officials fail to inform their fellow citizens of real threats to life? What are the moral and political consequences of remedies available in the wake of technological disasters?
Through extensive research in state institutions, clinics, laboratories, and with affected families and workers of the so-called Zone, Petryna illustrates how the event and its aftermath have not only shaped the course of an independent nation but have made health a negotiated realm of entitlement. She tracks the emergence of a \"biological citizenship\" in which assaults on health become the coinage through which sufferers stake claims for biomedical resources, social equity, and human rights.Life Exposedprovides an anthropological framework for understanding the politics of emergent democracies, the nature of citizenship claims, and everyday forms of survival as they are interwoven with the profound changes that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.
eBook
Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the Politics of Safety Governance
In Japan's Nuclear Disaster and the
Politics of Safety Governance , Florentine
Koppenborg argues that the regulatory reforms taken up in the wake
of the Fukushima disaster on March 11, 2011, directly and
indirectly raised the costs of nuclear power in Japan. The
Nuclear Regulation Authority resisted capture by the nuclear
industry and fundamentally altered the environment for nuclear
policy implementation. Independent safety regulation changed
state-business relations in the nuclear power domain from
regulatory capture to top-down safety regulation, which raised
technical safety costs for electric utilities. Furthermore, the
safety agency's extended emergency preparedness regulations
expanded the allegorical backyard of NIMBY demonstrations.
Antinuclear protests, mainly lawsuits challenging restarts,
incurred additional social acceptance costs. Increasing costs
undermined pronuclear actors' ability to implement nuclear power
policy and caused a rift inside the \"nuclear village.\" Small
nuclear safety administration reforms were, in fact, game changers
for nuclear power politics in Japan.
Koppenborg's findings contribute to the vibrant conversations
about the rise of independent regulatory agencies, crisis as a
mechanism for change, and the role of nuclear power amid global
interest in decarbonizing our energy supply.
eBook
Nuclear weapons
Discusses the issue of nuclear proliferation and warfare and presents the history of the development of nuclear weapons.
Book
Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era
The world is in a second nuclear age in which regional powers play an increasingly prominent role. These states have small nuclear arsenals, often face multiple active conflicts, and sometimes have weak institutions. How do these nuclear states-and potential future ones-manage their nuclear forces and influence international conflict? Examining the reasoning and deterrence consequences of regional power nuclear strategies, this book demonstrates that these strategies matter greatly to international stability and it provides new insights into conflict dynamics across important areas of the world such as the Middle East, East Asia, and South Asia.
Vipin Narang identifies the diversity of regional power nuclear strategies and describes in detail the posture each regional power has adopted over time. Developing a theory for the sources of regional power nuclear strategies, he offers the first systematic explanation of why states choose the postures they do and under what conditions they might shift strategies. Narang then analyzes the effects of these choices on a state's ability to deter conflict. Using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, he shows that, contrary to a bedrock article of faith in the canon of nuclear deterrence, the acquisition of nuclear weapons does not produce a uniform deterrent effect against opponents. Rather, some postures deter conflict more successfully than others.
Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Eraconsiders the range of nuclear choices made by regional powers and the critical challenges they pose to modern international security.
eBook
Producing Power
The Chernobyl disaster has been variously ascribed to human error, reactor design flaws, and industry mismanagement. Six former Chernobyl employees were convicted of criminal negligence; they defended themselves by pointing to reactor design issues. Other observers blamed the Soviet style of ideologically driven economic and industrial management. InProducing Power,Sonja Schmid draws on interviews with veterans of the Soviet nuclear industry and extensive research in Russian archives as she examines these alternate accounts. Rather than pursue one \"definitive\" explanation, she investigates how each of these narratives makes sense in its own way and demonstrates that each implies adherence to a particular set of ideas -- about high-risk technologies, human-machine interactions, organizational methods for ensuring safety and productivity, and even about the legitimacy of the Soviet state. She also shows how these attitudes shaped, and were shaped by, the Soviet nuclear industry from its very beginnings.Schmid explains that Soviet experts established nuclear power as a driving force of social, not just technical, progress. She examines the Soviet nuclear industry's dual origins in weapons and electrification programs, and she traces the emergence of nuclear power experts as a professional community. Schmid also fundamentally reassesses the design choices for nuclear power reactors in the shadow of the Cold War's arms race. Schmid's account helps us understand how and why a complex sociotechnical system broke down. Chernobyl, while unique and specific to the Soviet experience, can also provide valuable lessons for contemporary nuclear projects.
eBook
The twilight of the bombs : recent challenges, new dangers, and the prospects for a world without nuclear weapons
This culminating volume in Richard Rhodes's monumental and prizewinning history of nuclear weapons offers the first comprehensive narrative of the challenges faced in a post-Cold War age from the second war in Iraq to the emerging threat of nuclear terrorism, from the changing roles of the five original nuclear powers to our complicated relationships with North Korea and South Asia. Finally, Rhodes imagines what a post-nuclear world might look like, suggesting what might make it possible.
Book
Nuclear Logics
Nuclear Logics examines why some states seek nuclear weapons while others renounce them. Looking closely at nine cases in East Asia and the Middle East, Etel Solingen finds two distinct regional patterns. In East Asia, the norm since the late 1960s has been to forswear nuclear weapons, and North Korea, which makes no secret of its nuclear ambitions, is the anomaly. In the Middle East the opposite is the case, with Iran, Iraq, Israel, and Libya suspected of pursuing nuclear-weapons capabilities, with Egypt as the anomaly in recent decades. Identifying the domestic conditions underlying these divergent paths, Solingen argues that there are clear differences between states whose leaders advocate integration in the global economy and those that reject it. Among the former are countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, whose leaders have had stronger incentives to avoid the political, economic, and other costs of acquiring nuclear weapons. The latter, as in most cases in the Middle East, have had stronger incentives to exploit nuclear weapons as tools in nationalist platforms geared to helping their leaders survive in power. Solingen complements her bold argument with other logics explaining nuclear behavior, including security dilemmas, international norms and institutions, and the role of democracy and authoritarianism. Her account charts the most important frontier in understanding nuclear proliferation: grasping the relationship between internal and external political survival. Nuclear Logics is a pioneering book that is certain to provide an invaluable resource for researchers, teachers, and practitioners while reframing the policy debate surrounding nonproliferation.
eBook