As happened with Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the world's attention has been riveted—and prayers focused—on the post-earthquake emergency at Tokyo Electric's Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear complex. The cascade of reactor cooling failures and radiation leaks following the tsunami's inundation of the plant's backup power have reinvigorated global debates over nuclear safety and site vulnerability to natural disasters or terrorist attack. One could be forgiven for thinking that the events in Japan since March 11 have given nuclear fission-powered electricity generation a bad name for decades to come, but this may well ignore the ways nuclear reactors—as artifacts—have served as key symbols of cultural prowess and national technological strength since the beginning of the Cold War.

In The Radiance of France, first published in 1998 and reissued in 2009 with a new afterword, Gabrielle Hecht argues that in the Cold War's first decades, France (which presently sits right above Japan and just below the United States on the list of top three countries in terms of reactor numbers) saw nuclear power not only as a means of removing the stain of Vichy, but also as a way of maintaining its sense of grandeur in the new, bipolar and rapidly decolonizing world. By examining the history of France's early gas-graphite reactors and by looking at how designers, engineers, and workers in the 1950s and 1960s conceived of France as a Cold War nuclear power, Hecht sheds light on her larger theoretical quarries: technology's dialogical relationship with politics and culture, and "technopolitics," a specialized type or mode of politics derived from this relationship.

Hecht identifies two dominant "technopolitical regimes" at the center of France's nuclear program; as "linked sets of people, engineering and industrial practices, technological artifacts, political programs, and institutional ideologies," these regimes "act[ed] together to govern technological development and pursue technopolitics." The first, the nationalist regime, was given flesh through the people and practices of France's postwar Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA) and its reactor complex at Marcoule. Hecht calls the second the nationalized regime, represented by the state utility, Electricite de France (EDF), and its gas-graphite reactors at Chinon. The regimes are distinguished by virtue of their proximity to what Hecht calls the "military atom"; during the latter years of the Fourth Republic and the beginning of the Fifth Republic, the two were locked in technopolitical conflict over French nuclear policy and, consequently, over France's national identity.

If the reader will forgive a quick foray into nuclear minutiae, uranium in its natural state is an admixture of two different isotopes—mostly U-238 (99.3 percent), with a very small presence (.7 percent) of U-235. U-238 nuclei are less likely to split when they are bombarded by slower-moving neutrons, while U-235 nuclei are fissile; that is, a higher probability exists that they will break apart under similar conditions. This splitting (fission) releases kinetic energy, heat, and additional neutrons. If these released or "free" neutrons come into contact with additional U-235 nuclei, a chain reaction of fission and energy release can result. Gas-graphite nuclear reactors are so designated because a gas (like carbon dioxide) is used to pull away the intense heat generated by the splitting of U-235 nuclei within the reactor's core, while the graphite reduces, or moderates, the kinetic energy of the released neutrons, thereby making it more probable that they will escape capture by U-238 nuclei and will precipitate additional U-235 fissions. Because graphite does this so effectively, the uranium fuel does not need to be enriched (i.e., modified to better the ratio of U-235 nuclei in the fuel so as to improve the odds that a stray neutron will escape U-238 capture and cause additional U-235 fissions). In other words, a gas-graphite reactor can be fueled with naturally occurring uranium.

And, as Hecht outlines, France could obtain that natural uranium from domestic sources. Both technopolitical regimes were in firm agreement about using independent political and economic means to enhance France's prestige, increase its self-sufficiency in energy, and—though it would be their main sticking point—improve the country's national security. For reactor fuel, one could look to current and former French colonies, as well as in-country uranium deposits near Limoges; the graphite could also be purchased from a French company. Yet, despite their agreement on the importance of using domestic raw materials, the EDF and CEA were still led to create the same artifact in intentionally different ways because of their perspectives on the militarization of nuclear power. As France's handmaiden in the production of weapons-grade plutonium, the CEA planned and constructed its gas-graphite reactors for the rapid and easy removal of plutonium (which would come to be used in France's nuclear arsenal, its force de frappe). By contrast, EDF's regime was far less associated with the military, had a greater presence of unionists who were influenced by the French Communist Party, and was more focused on the expansion of civilian electrical supply, so it specifically designed its gas-graphite reactors so as to make them less optimal, but not wholly unsuited, for plutonium extraction.

In each of these examples, reactor craftsmanship was an eminently political act. And later, the finished artifacts and their operating procedures were wielded as instruments for political infighting. Upon construction, the reactors were used, as Hecht would put it, technopolitically to bring each regime's vision to fruition.

Consider again the plutonium issue and French national security. The production, removal, and processing of weapons-grade plutonium had to be done under specific reactor conditions, involving, to use two examples, how long the plutonium had to "cook" in the reactor and how much time (and money) would be lost when the reactor was powered down for collection. When EDF's reactors went online in the early-to-mid 1960s, the force de frappe had created enough of a demand that even though the EDF had purposely not optimized its reactors for plutonium extraction, the CEA nonetheless eyed EDF-cooked plutonium as a way of augmenting what it produced and processed at Marcoule. This bred resentment among EDF's engineers and provoked broader accusations of CEA interference in EDF's affairs. EDF officials in response used econometric analysis and cost-effectiveness calculations to combat the CEA's move into EDF turf and, at the same time, buttress its own vision of France's nuclear identity.

The technopolitical conflict had an international context as well, but Hecht says far too little about the impact of American and alliance nuclear strategy and politics. The CEA-EDF conflict was tied to the broader questions of nuclear strategy and deterrence in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. There was an autarkic angle to the gas-graphite system; however, it may also be viewed in light of how the U.S. Atomic Energy Act of 1946 restricted the sharing of uranium enrichment technology. One should consult Marc Trachtenberg's magisterial A Constructed Peace in tandem with Hecht to gain a richer sense of the alliance story in the 1950s.

Hecht relates how, between late 1954 and early 1958, Marcoule's dual-use nature made it easy to postpone a firm decision to pursue the bomb while continuing to produce the plutonium that would be required should that day come. In this way, she concludes, Marcoule substituted for a lack of a "traditional political formulation of nuclear military policy." Trachtenberg would agree that France was hedging, but would not attribute this to an absence of military planning. At the end of 1954, NATO approved a strategy that involved more rapid escalation to nuclear use, which, Trachtenberg argues, implied a need for enhanced U.S. nuclear sharing with European allies. The hedging Hecht describes ran parallel to the Eisenhower administration's post-1954 openness to such sharing, and ended right about the time that Washington began to sour on the idea of independent European nuclear forces (because of what American support for European-controlled forces could mean for German nuclear possession and, consequently, superpower relations). France hedged while there were sharing possibilities, but switched gears as it became clear that support for nationally controlled arsenals was waning.

For those thinking about the near-to-medium-term political, social, and cultural ramifications of the current Japanese crisis, Hecht's final chapters look at how technological artifacts impact and transform local communities, evaluating the two technopolitical regimes in postwar France's nuclear program not merely as state entities and employers but as civic actors. EDF comes out looking the more responsible and far-sighted. Unlike Marcoule, which was pitched to locals as a solution to regional decline yet exempted from local taxes because of its military and national security orientation, Chinon generated tax income that transformed the surrounding countryside into a "little Kuwait." Taking a page from local history and tourism, EDF carefully cast the reactor complex as just another of the great chateau attractions.

The book concludes with an examination of the "war of the systems" and the final move, late in 1969, away from French-constructed gas-graphite reactors to Westinghouse-licensed, American-designed light water reactors (which required France to purchase enriched fuel from outside sources, most cheaply from the United States). While the decision led to union anger and strikes, a partial meltdown at one of the new EDF reactors and its cleanup in early 1970 took attention away from reactor choice and cast nuclear workers as national (male) heroes, akin to astronauts or mountain climbers. One gathers that Hecht would find the current samurai imagery of the "Fukushima 50" altogether unsurprising.

In a natural extension to these last chapters (and to the book as a whole), Hecht's current research expands her analysis of what might be called the ethics of technopolitics to focus on the rival regimes' political and economic impact in the developing world. In particular, she looks at what France's quest for grandeur—and the consequent mining of uranium—wrought in ethnic and tribal communities in its former colonies. In the end, whether she is addressing the domestic or colonial battle over France's postwar "radiance," Hecht's overall insight is a brilliant and fresh one: national identity is contestable, and the conflict over how being French has been related to militarized and non-militarized nuclear power can be effectively studied as one would any other type of historical process.

Brian J. Auten currently serves as an intelligence analyst with the U.S. government and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Government at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia. His most recent publication is Carter's Conversion: The Hardening of American Defense Policy (Univ. of Missouri Press. All non-attributed views, opinions, and conclusions in the review are those of the author and not the U.S. government.

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