Pierre-Louis Six, historian and CIENS associate researcher, will be giving a lecture on the occasion of the Nuit de l’ENS, an exceptional event held every two years to give the general public an opportunity to discover the many facets of knowledge at the ENS. This year’s theme is energy. In this context, Pierre-Louis Six has chosen to address the issue of uranium. He answers our questions.
From what angle did you choose to approach the mineral?
I’m going to look at how uranium influenced the way we were governed from the Second World War onwards, focusing on what a materials-based approach to history can reveal about energy in our societies. The history of uranium began at the end of the 19th century with the discovery of the natural radioactivity of the ore by Pierre and Marie Curie, followed by successive scientific discoveries at the beginning of the 20th century on the structure of the atom, the neutron, the proton and the electron.
Uranium was first developed by physicists before being used in military and civilian applications. What interests me here is how we can trace the development of this mineral over a fairly long period (from 1945 to the present day). The aim is to take into account the variety of players involved (geologists, physicists, political leaders, military officers and diplomats) in the history of its use in an attempt to reconstruct the power plays and understand how they call into question the relationship between science and politics.
Why did you become interested in uranium and how did you go about your research?
I am a specialist in Russian foreign policy and its diplomatic elites. Because of the current war in Ukraine, I am no longer able to consult the archives in Moscow. I have had to shift my focus and find another point of view in order to continue working on Russian foreign policy from a socio-historical perspective. Uranium enabled me to look at the way in which this resource was dealt with in Eastern and Western Europe after the Second World War.
I was able to consult the Euratom archives at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. I also consulted the American federal military and diplomatic archives, which provide a great deal of information on this period.
In the West, the free movement of people, services, products and capital was promoted. This idea was also at the heart of European integration. But uranium, by its very nature, does not sit well with this idea. At the time, there were many concerns about the movements of scientists and physicists, some of whom were seen as likely to help other nations produce the bomb. The purpose of ore from a military or civilian perspective also raises questions, and I was interested in documenting the ways in which these paradoxes were managed in the West. In the East, the Sovietisation of Europe posed a central question for the USSR: secure access to uranium in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. My approach is to analyse how, in very different regimes, this issue is dealt with and what influence it has had and continues to have on relations between states and modes of government within them.
How do you relate the concept of ‘contingent nuclearity’ to your research?
Gabrielle Hecht’s concept, derived from her study of uranium in Africa, showed just how interesting it was to start from the ore to highlight the relative nature of nuclearity. She focused on the African continent to emphasise the fact that the countries where the deposits are located were effectively excluded from the nuclear world after 1945. In other words, it is not the ore itself that is nuclear, but the way in which it is approached. This concept helps me in my research, where I note the frequent versatility of uranium, which is considered alternately from an economic point of view and, in other contexts, from a political and military point of view.
Let me give you an example to illustrate my point. During the preliminary discussions on the Euratom Treaty signed in 1957 as part of the Treaties of Rome establishing the European Communities, the creation of a uranium enrichment plant shared by West Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands was discussed. The aim is to avoid dependence on other countries for the supply of uranium. But the project failed. The United States offered to sell the ore at an unbeatable price in the late 1950s. The economic interest in a joint enrichment plant therefore disappeared. The ore was first seen from a political point of view, then from the point of view of its economic profitability.
Pierre-Louis Six teaches a course in Semester 1 entitled: Theories and political sociology of international relations.
