The war in Ukraine, with the exposure of nuclear power stations and the danger of atomic warfare, has made the legacy of the Soviet nuclear sector of critical importance. The two authors map the Soviet nuclear industry in a shifting historical context, making sense of a complex socio-technical and environmental history. Taking an innovative approach, this book explores the history of atomic power in the former Soviet Union using the spatial dimensions of the nuclear industry as a point of departure. The key concept is that of the archipelago – a network of nuclear facilities spread throughout the Soviet territory, but mutually reliant on each other and densely connected. The story traces the emergence of nuclear science and technology for military and civilian purposes through to the post-Soviet Russian nuclear corporations as providers of resources and technology. The book explains how nuclear developments in the Soviet Union interacted with processes of environmental and landscape change. The spatial lens offers an analytically fruitful and pedagogically stimulating way to comprehend the nuclear histories of the Soviet Union and its successor states.

Finally, the book assesses the contribution of international assistance programmes to the denuclearization process under way in the former Soviet Union.

The breakup of the Soviet Union left a cold war nuclear legacy consisting of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and a sprawling infrastructure for their production and maintenance. This book examines the fate of this vast nuclear weapon complex and the unprecedented non-proliferation challenges associated with the breakup of a nuclear weapon state. It describes the high-level diplomatic bargaining efforts to consolidate in Russia the nuclear weapons based in newly independent Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine and to strengthen central control over these weapons. It surveys the problems associated with dismantling nuclear weapons and the difficulties involved in safely storing and disposing of large stockpiles of fissile material. It reviews the key provisions of the principal nuclear arms control measures and initiatives, including the START I and START II treaties. Finally, the book assesses the contribution of international assistance programmes to the denuclearization process under way in the former Soviet Union.

"Nuclear weapons, since their conception, have been the subject of secrecy. In the months after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American scientific establishment, the American government, and the American public all wrestled with what was called the "problem of secrecy," wondering not only whether secrecy was appropriate and effective as a means of controlling this new technology but also whether it was compatible with the country's core values. Out of a messy context of propaganda, confusion, spy scares, and the grave counsel of competing groups of scientists, what historian Alex Wellerstein calls a "new regime of secrecy" was put into place. It was unlike any other previous or since. Nuclear secrets were given their own unique legal designation in American law ("restricted data"), one that operates differently than all other forms of national security classification and exists to this day. Drawing on massive amounts of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time at the author's request, Restricted Data is a narrative account of nuclear secrecy and the tensions and uncertainty that built as the Cold War continued. In the US, both science and democracy are pitted against nuclear secrecy, and this makes its history uniquely compelling and timely"--

Nuclear materials have never been more plentiful or more accessible to rogue states and terrorists. In this study, the authors analyze the consequences of such nuclear leakage for United States national security and argue that it is possibly the nation's h

A comprehensive databook of technical and institutional facts about the Soviet and Russian nuclear arsenal.

Epistemic communities represent networks of knowledge-based experts that help articulate cause-and-effect relationships of complex problems, define the self-interests of a state, or formulate specific policies for state decision makers. However, the role of these scientists and knowledgeable professionals in nuclear policy formulation is poorly understood. Thoroughly documented and making excellent use of source material, Politics and the Bomb provides refreshingly new empirical evidence and theoretical analysis of the importance of scientists and experts behind the creation of new non-proliferation agreements. Simply not another book on nuclear proliferation, Sara Z. Kutchesfahani explores the differences in the emergence, composition, and influence mechanisms of the epistemic communities behind the nuclear non-proliferation policy formulation in Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC) and the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program. In doing so she eloquently demonstrates how the role of these non-proliferation experts lead to the possibility of creating more effective non-proliferation policies in the future and hints at the need to sustain non-proliferation epistemic communities in all countries that can provide input to the global proliferation problem until it is solved.