Being nuclear : Africans and the global uranium trade / Gabrielle Hecht.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 407-451) and index.

Introduction : the power of nuclear things. Proliferating markets -- Imperial projections and market devices -- Colonial enrichment -- The price of sovereignty -- In the shadows of the market -- Nuclear work. A history of invisibility -- Nuclearity at work -- Invisible exposures -- Hopes for the irradiated body -- Conclusion : uranium in Africa.

Remaking our understanding of the nuclear age, the author is the first to put Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa. Africa has long been a major source of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, but does that admit Niger, or any of Africa's other uranium-producing countries, to the select society of nuclear states? Does uranium itself count as a nuclear thing? She lucidly probes the question of what it means for something--a state, an object, an industry, a workplace--to be "nuclear." She then enters African nuclear worlds, focusing on miners and the occupational hazard of radiation exposure and asks, could a mine be a nuclear workplace if (as in some South African mines) its radiation levels went undetected and unmeasured? These questions about being nuclear--"nuclearity"--Lie at the heart of today's global nuclear order and the relationships between "developing nations" (often former colonies) and "nuclear powers" (often former colonizers). Nuclearity is not a straightforward scientific classification but a contested technopolitical one. The author follows uranium's path out of Africa and describes the invention of the global uranium market.