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Check out the Nuclear Politix Blog which is part of the study programme about the politics of nuclear energy, weapons, security and disarmament in the 21st century (Vienna May 12-16).

http://nuclearpolitix.wordpress.com/

The conference also seeks to analyze media actors and networks, evolving theories about the social responsibility of media, as well as narrative and visual frames on a local and (trans-) national level. The purpose is to illuminate the complex interrelations between the media—both as a dependent and independent variable—and competing political, economic and cultural elites, as well as explain the role of grassroots politics in the formation of public opinion.

Topics include, but are not limited to the following:

• print media and literary representations of the Cold War and international relations
• audio-visual depictions (e.g., television, movies, documentaries, animated films, cartoons)
• Cold War imagery, iconography, and symbolism
• (pop-)cultural and artistic manifestations
• narrative frames, discourses, and language
• political communication
• journalism, media structures, and organizations
• foreign news coverage and framing
• alternative media and popular culture
• official and grassroots media strategies
• public/cultural diplomacy
• freedom of speech

The conference will feature workshops with leading media scholars and historians as well as panel discussions comprising trans-/interdisciplinary approaches, with the goal of generating fresh perspectives that will promote future scholarly teamwork across national, cultural, and regional borders.

Applications are especially encouraged from postgraduate students, early-stage researchers (Ph.D.-students), postdocs, and young scholars from all disciplinary and national backgrounds.

Conference website: http://www.hivolda.no/mcw

Conveners:
Rolf Werenskjold, Volda University College
Henrik G. Bastiansen, Volda University College
Martin Klimke, New York University Abu Dhabi

Location
Faculty of Media and Journalism,
Volda University College, Norway

Date:
November 20-21, 2014

Keynotes:

Successful applicants will be provided with an allowance that should cover all necessary expenses during the conference. The organizers will also provide a limited travel grant.

The conference language will be English.

Extended Deadline for Applications and Abstracts:

March 15, 2014

The conference will focus on the discussion of 5.000–6.000-word, pre-circulated papers (due October 1, 2014).

Please upload your application materials here, which should include

• paper proposal (500-1,000 words, in English)
• a brief CV / biographical statement

Selections will be made by: April 15, 2014.

In the early years of the cold war, the medium music served as a vehicle of propaganda for the advocates of the atomic bomb. The 1946 song When the Atom Bomb fell by Karl & Harty glorifies the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “the answer to our fighting boys’ prayers”, the effects of the atom bombs were trivialised which was typical for the early Cold War popular culture.

A shift came when the possibility of a nuclear strike on the USA increased in the 1950s. Civil Defense films like Duck & Cover were used for educational purposes, explaining the right course of action in case of an attack. Gradually the public perceived the nuclear bomb as an outright threat. In Great Britain, the  Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was founded in 1957, introducing the famous Peace logo. Public protests like the Aldermaston Marches soon found their counterparts in Germany with the “Ostermärsche” of the 1960s. In both countries, music play an increasing role for the protests.

Duck and Cover 1951 – Civil Defense Film with Bert the Turtle

A revival of the protest culture came about in the late 1970s during another critical phase of the Cold War, fuelled by the Euromissiles Crisis and the NATO Double-Track Decision. Music played an increasingly important role for the protests, also integrating protagonists of the American Civil Rights movement. For example, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan joined Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE), or the Peace Sunday Concerts in 1982. A continental European counterpart was “Künstler für den Frieden”, founded in 1982.

Big concerts of this period featured singer-songwriters of the 1960s like Hannes Wader as well as mainstream stars like Gianna Nannini. To counter possible accusations of anti-Americanism, artists like Harry Belafonte made their appearance and voiced their support to show that a different, non-Reagan America also advocated peace. The protest culture and its events adapted to mainstream culture, appealing to a much wider audience than the sub-culture of the 1960s.

According to Philip Baur four general observations can be made. As mentioned before, protest themes within popular culture broadened in the 1980s. But also it got more professional, event managers were hired and the music was much more commercialized than before to make the protests more accessible for a wider audience. So one could argue that the protest happened in the 1980s also through consumption, not just political upheaval. The Protest also became more transnational with American Civil Rights actvists and artists also travelling to peace demostrations to Europe.

After the lecture the class was divided into three groups, working on different music videos and collecting thoughts about them. The chosen works were „Vamos a la playa“ (Righeira), „Forever Young“ (Alphaville) and „Land of Confusion“ (Genesis). Although all three of them are critical towards atomic weapons, they were popular within the 1980s and are still played today. Many people knew the songs but were not aware of the fact that the lyrics deal with nuclear threat. They are good examples for the influence of the political sphere on popular culture, and vice versa.

Genesis – Land of Confusion

At first, „Vamos a la playa“ seems to be a very common summer song: In the video the two members of the group are  dancing in a very colorful surrounding. In the background you can see a family with a small child playing games. An analysis of the lyrics shows that the song is not just another ordinary summer song: Actually it is about an atomic bomb exploding near the beach, radioactivity burning away the people’s hair, the water becomes fluorescent. So there is a big contrast between the video and the lyrics of the song. „Vamos a la playa“ deals with a political topic although it doesn’t seem political at the first sight. It uses common known references and is rather ironic.

In contrast „Forever Young“ and „Land of Confusion“ are more serious: The first song is about the sentiment of young people in an uncertain world. They hope that the atomic bomb won’t fall, at the same time viewing the nuclear holocaust as something unavoidable. The work seems to suggest that it is better to die young when death is unavoidable anyway. The second video heavily criticizes the politics of Ronald Reagan. It depicts a dream Reagan has about the difficulties of being a superhero in need of saving the world. When he wakes up Reagan wrongfully pushes the nuclear button setting the world on fire. Nonetheless the video as a whole suggests that a solution is possible when people become more involved. So ironically while being the only one of the three works depicting an atomic explosion it is the one with the most positive view on the issue.

Within a radius of about 50 kilometers around Augsburg, 7 nuclear depots could be found from the 1960s to the 1980s, all of them were heavily guarded by three fences and guards with dogs. Some of them were used as ammunition or artillery shell storage units, and often short lived. Former U.S.-Army Major Rick Cervenka talked about his time as a soldier in Frankfurt and Augsburg. First of all, he explained that nukes weren´t called nukes but ‘special weapons’, even though everybody knew about their capabilities. Although the soldiers would not work with real nuclear weapons, they were training with replicas so that in the unlikely event of a commanded nuclear attack they would know how to use the real ones. The real nuclear missiles had a range of 700 and 1000 kilometers, rockets are less accurate though, whereas missiles can be fired a lot more precisely. Finally, like any other weapon, they would raise the question whether firing nuclear missiles from far away would have a smaller impact on the person responsible for firing it. Rick Cervenka said that in the end it didn´t matter, whoever would have pulled the trigger would have killed people and this always comes at a certain cost.

The trip ended with a group picture in the building, next to the still working army vehicles, quite amazing if you think about how long they´ve been standing around…

For more information, please visit:

http://www.philhist.uni-augsburg.de/lehrstuehle/geschichte/transatlantische/amerika-in-augsburg/

There has always been a strong connection between the real world of politics, and the fictive world of popular culture. Video games, like all media, are not only a mirror of our culture: they are a place where our culture, politics and society are negotiated and constructed; therefore the historical analysis of movies, graphic novels, novels, radio programs and video games is useful to understand the collective identity which characterizes every society and its values and norms, which themselves influence the political process. For instance, the American president Ronald Reagan mentioned in his diary and speeches the movie “The Day After” which had a strong impact on the public opinion. The President watched the film in 1983, several days before it aired on TV and he described it as “very effective and left me very depressed”. The movie changed his mind on the prevailing policy of a “nuclear war” and it became an important factor in convincing Reagan that the existence of nuclear weapons put United States in danger.

According to him defense policy placed “our entire faith in a weapon whose fundamental target was the civilian population”. He was afraid of the possible consequences, observing that, “Even if a nuclear war did not mean the extinction of mankind, it would certainly mean the end of civilization as we knew it. [A]s long as nuclear weapons were in existence, there would always be risks they would be used, and once the first nuclear weapon was unleashed, who knew where it would end?”.

Four years later the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed. The amount of people who buy video games has experienced a constant growth: sales of video games in the US reached 15 billions dollars in 2012, compared to 7 billion dollars in 2005 when the movie business was estimated 9 billion dollars. Undoubtedly, they are very important and reflect social values and norms; this industry catches people’s desires and frightens to be more attractive. The possible apocalypse caused by the nuclear mutual mass destruction was the base for many different video games that have been very popular:

• Balance of power  is a computer strategy game of geopolitics during the Cold war, created by Chris Crawford and published in 1985 whose aim is to avoid a nuclear war and to maximize the prestige of either United States or the Soviet Union. It was a game  where it was necessary to maintain the balance to assure stability, otherwise the world would have come to an end.

• Missile command is a game where six cities are constantly attacked by an endless hail of ballistic missiles. It inevitably leads to the end oh the human kind as, like many other arcade games there is no way to win: the game becomes more and more faster until it becomes impossible for the player to defend the cities

• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is an Ukrainian horror video game set in the area surrounding the Chernobyl accident site that is called “The Zone” in an imaginary reality where a second explosion occurred at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant after the first one, causing strange changes in the area around it.

• Fallout 3 is the most important example of how the nuclear war is represented in video games: it is the third chapter of the fallout series (with Fallout and Fallout 2). It is set in 2277, two hundreds years after a nuclear war. Human beings live in underground bunkers named Vault while the external world has been destroyed by a nuclear fallout.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/embed/iYZpR51XgW0

All these examples demonstrate that there has always been a deep fear inside the society concerning the end of the world: human beings are always attracted by apocalypse, how to face it and they are afraid not to survive: nuclear war has been very important in shaping people’s fears for many years and video games, like all the other products, have to reflect people tastes, preferences and emotions in order to be sold.

This is why new media are so important and their connection with the political sphere is always relevant to deepen the knowledge of a particular historical period.

Probably on one of the sunniest days of our IP-Programme so far, our group first assembled on the Marienplatz, enjoying the beautiful architecture in the centre of Munich. Afterwards we split in two groups, one that would visit the research reactor in Garching around lunch time and another which would head to Garching later in the afternoon.

After shifting away from the rest of the group, we really wanted to make the best of our free time, so we first strolled around the English Garden before making our way into the centre of Schwabing. There really was no way around the many Pinakotheken and after little time of contemplating about where we should go, we visited the Museum Brandhorst, where we enjoyed lots of wonderful works of art, the most prominent were maybe some works by Andy Warhol.

Afterwards, we comfortably sat down in one of Munich’s cozy cafés. Surprisingly, the café we randomly selected turned out to be a “cat coffee” which is a simple café where you are surrounded by numerous cats and are free to pat them as a customer. Some of us had heard of this café business model, but none of us had seen it in action, but every one of us loved it.

In the afternoon we went to the research reactor in Garching, near Munich. This is the second one in fact. The first one started operating in 1957. It was purchased from the United States. Within nine months the reactor was fully operative.

In 2000, the first research reactor was shut down. The second one began working in March 2004. While we were there, the reactor was not in operation, nevertheless experiments took place. Normally it has a 30-day-cycle with an active run of three weeks and a maintenance break of one week. Since the reactor is kind of a prototype, there is a big inspection necessary after ten years. By the way, normal power-reactors have this kind of an inspection yearly.

The core runs with highly enriched uranium with about 93% of U235. The reasons why this type of fissile material is used is simple: Highly enriched uranium allows it to build the reactor much more compact and to increase the output of Neutrons with less thermal losses. In other words: The reactor produces much more Neutrons in a smaller and easier way to cool the facility than a core with low enriched uranium could.

That is the purpose of the reactor. It‘s there to produce Neutrons. The heat it produces is a by-product. Also the reactor is no research facility for enhanced reactor technologies, it is only there to create Neutrons which are necessary for state-of-the-art fundamental research and to manufacture high-tech materials.

The neutrons are released during the nuclear fission in the core itself and are afterwards led to the experiments by neutron-conductors. These conductors use the physical effect of so called „total-reflection“, comparable with what happens in fibreglass-optics used for data-connections.

Depending on in which distance to the actual fission in the core the neutrons are led out, they have different energies. The energy the neutrons have is measured in eV (ElectronVolts), beginning with so called „UltraCold“ Neutrons with about less than 0,002 eV (Speed about 700km/h) up to „Hot“ neutrons with up to 14 MeV (14000000 eV) (nearly the speed of light)are produced and led to the experiments.

Maybe interesting to mention is the medical use of neutrons for cancer therapy. This rather new approach to tread cancer uses Neutrons instead of radiation to destroy the cancer cells, which causes less damage to the surrounding tissue.

Leopoldo Nuti, Frédéric Bozo, Frédéric Gloriant and Marilena Gala (f.l.t.r.)

Today we had lectures by Frédéric Gloriant, Marilena Gala, Leopoldo Nuti and Frédéric Bozo about the nuclear issue in international relations. Each of the lecturers had a different focus in this context. After their presentations we asked them to give us a short interview to deepen our understanding of the nuclear issue in international relations.

At the end of the interview you will find a short introduction of the lecturers!

Do you think it is still possible to achieve a world without nuclear technology or is it already too late?

Leopoldo Nuti: I don’t think nuclear technology can be de-invented. I think when you talk about a world without nuclear weapons, even assuming that eliminating all nuclear arsenals were possible, it would be a huge task. How can you erase the knowledge which is necessary to make nuclear weapons? It is basically impossible to make sure that even without the hardware – the weapons themselves –, states could no longer be capable of making them. Frankly, I do not think this is a realistic goal even though you have perfectly legitimate speakers who say so, e.g. from Barack Obama to the so called “four horsemen” Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, Sam Nunn and Frank Perry They said that a nuclear-free world was possible. So who am I to say they are wrong? I see that as a fairly difficult task to be accomplished and I think it is much more likely to find a way to create some form of joint control on nuclear weapons if we want to try and restrain their possible use. So, I do not think you can put the nuclear genie back in the bottle and eventually destroy the bottle.

Frédérik Bozo: If you look at the situation in Iran, it brings considerable terrain to understand what can be done: That you cannot de-invent the atomic bomb. The key issue is to control the dual use.

Frédérik Gloriant: I wanted to add something about “global zero”: When there are such proposals you always have to keep in mind that there are ulterior motives. In this case, the US has an enormous conventional arsenal, so even if there were no nuclear weapon in the world any more, they would still be the largest military power by far. You have to keep in mind the balance of power when interpreting one country’s discourse about nuclear weapons. Talking about Iran, I think perhaps the most ambitious objective in terms of arms control would be to keep Iran as a nuclear threshold country. You cannot erase the fact that they have nuclear knowledge; you can reach a point of equilibrium where Iran would be kept as a threshold country.

Marilena Gala: I totally agree with all of them. Let me answer very synthetically by asking you another question: Do you believe in a global government? It is basically the same question.

How has the public perception changed during the time about the nuclear issue in general?

Marilena Gala: It has changed dramatically. There is no regular trend. Of course at the beginning, nuclear weapon development meant high technological devices, it meant sort of endless progress for humanity. Then we had the first huge nuclear accident, which was in 1954. This was the moment, when consciousness about the danger of the nuclear fallout started to spread all over the world. And now you see the first steps and these are made by the major powers. Our steps may also respond to this pressure on the part of the public opinion. So let’s stop atmospheric testing. It was not the only reason as well of course. They had many other important political reasons in terms of the balance of powers and many other things. But that was the first response. Then you see the different kind of public opinion reactions, which were also the result of the manipulation of the governments as well. I’ve seen the documents of the Unites States even related to the fifties, where you can really read that the US-Government was suggesting to some associations of physicists to underplay the nuclear fallout danger. Now, I mean it is a difficult issue to analyze as one has these extreme reactions which are really difficult to analyze because of the role-playing of the single governments sometimes.

Frédéric Gloriant: It is tricky as there is a huge diversity of positions among countries within the same area, e.g. Europe. In Western Europe you have very diverse public positions and therefore very diverse debates. For example, in Britain, the disarmament movement began already in the fifties whereas the formation of this kind of movements in France was quite slow and remains very weak, even today. It is very different depending on the country about which you ask the question. There are some similarities but also huge differences among the European countries.

Frédéric Bozo: I agree with what Frédéric Gloriant was saying. France has been immune to any kind of debates regarding the nuclear issue for a very long time. After Fukushima a debate has been emerging. It is not like Germany but there’s some kind a convergence. A former French Minister of Defense is now advocating France’s abounding of its nuclear arsenal, which would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

Leopoldo Nuti: I would stress what Frédéric Gloriant was saying before: The diversity in the prospective between the countries is staggering. If you look outside of Europe, for instance India, the nuclear dimension is a matter of great nationalistic pride. There are photographs of these parades: People looking very happy and proud going down the streets while holding all sorts of colorful portraits of missiles in their hands. Another example would be Iran. Being able to mastering a fuel-cycle is making them stand tall. It is not just a matter of being capable to prepare for war and produce weapons. It is also a matter of achieving what is still regarded as a significant scientific and technological success. So, in terms of public opinion you ask the right question, but you also have to ask, which public opinion we are talking about, because there is no such thing as a global public opinion. There seem to be moments when we are moving to that direction, for example after Fukushima. And after several years, I am not sure of how many reactors were actually shut down after Fukushima.

Do you think EURATOM is a failure or a success? And why?

Leopoldo Nuti: I think it’s the most remarkable failure in the history of the European integration and if I can afford to be blunt: It proves that the Federalist’ enthusiastic interpretation of European integration is wrong. Basically the Federalist’s assumption is that the states will shut off their national trappings and eventually converge into a supranational identity even if there will be difficult times before achieving that goal. They see the struggle against the nation state as a struggle against a multi-headed beast like a hydra: Every time you cut one head the head comes out somewhere else. Eventually it is the task of the illuminated elite to push states towards this direction and win the fight. If you look at the history of the economic integration, you have ups and downs, you have cycles of success and failure, but the federalist assumption is pretty much an accurate description. Who could have guessed that we would have a common currency and the European Central Bank forty years ago? So things seem to fit in this pattern. Now look at EURATOM. It’s a history of one failure after the other. The fact is, that EURATOM never managed to achieve what was meant to be achieved. Now it is reduced basically to be the main guarantor of security in terms of controlling and verifying the safe-guards of the European civilian plants; it’s basically all that it does – very little more. Whenever there was a talk of a Joint European Enrichment Plan, that project failed. It depends what you mean by success, but certainly when the negotiations started on EURATOM and the common market, EURATOM was regarded as the more important of the two. The common market was a side-show. What really mattered was that we Europeans would be able to master the energy market to help modernize Europe.

Frédérik Bozo: I would argue that the main reason why EURATOM failed was that some of the six countries wanted it for military reasons.

Frédérik Gloriant: Coming back to the federalist idea, I would say that when you read the writings of Jean Monnet about European integration, you can see that he does not think in strategic terms, he thinks in a very functionalist way on how Europe will be built and how nations will fuse into one unit to reach a better economic efficiency. However, he doesn’t think of this fusion of nations in a strategic way; he doesn’t give any answer to the crucial political question: how the problem of sovereignty will be resolved. The power relationship with the US for example is not a topic as such in Jean Monnet. So there is something idealistic in his writings and the concept of sovereignty is not thought about. In this respect, there is a weakness in Jean Monnet’s thoughts.

Leopoldo Nuti: And Jean Monnet is really keen on EURATOM, more than on the common market. He thinks that this is really what Europe needs to make a big jump forward.

According to some scholars, the case of Syria might guide the world towards a new bipolar era. In fact Russia is abandoning its isolationism and getting more involved in international affairs. Do you think that this could cause a new Cold War including a new nuclear arms race?

Marilena Gala: First of all I am not so sure that Russia has followed an isolationist policy. I don’t really agree in that sense. The Cold War is so deeply connected to a world where two different systems in terms of ideology, economy and social organization of the nations that were competing with each other. It is impossible to recreate that sort of competition. It was a competition about how the future world should look like. Right now, there’s nothing going on like that. Russia is not that sort of a global power as the Soviet Union from the seventies onwards. It is true, that Russia is a big power, even being involved in other areas in the world, but this doesn’t mean that the Cold War is back again. It is not going to be recreated and adjusted to the new world. I don’t see anything like that developing at the moment.

Frédérik Bozo: I approve of what Marilena Gala just said, even though I want to add two things: What happens to Russia and Syria illustrates a long-term debate of how we missed to build a world order after the Cold War Era: First by failing to bring Russia into a sort of Western enlarged community. It is clear that Russia became frustrated by this in the first decade of the century. The thought that the West was not being fair towards Russia in the nineties and the first decade of the century was raised by Putin probably after the Iraq war. So they decided to play not an isolationist card, but more a more nationalist card. The second point is, when it comes to Syria the Western powers have basically taken Russia for granted in the Middle East and other regional crises. They are also discarding and dismissing Russia’s – sometimes valid – arguments on what was to be done or not to be done. They were not realizing that sometimes Russia had a point. Even though sometimes Putin is not always a pleasant partner, he was saying interesting points on Syria that we should have listened to. So, I think that has nothing to do with the Cold War, even though there have remained some attitudes of the Cold War Era on both sides. I don’t see his as leading to a possible confrontation, even though people like to scare themselves. It is just for the show.

Leopoldo Nuti: I agree with all of them. I think what the whole period of the Cold War made unique is the combination of the distribution of power between two major centers and some few smaller actors. At the height of the Cold War the distribution of power was basically strictly bipolar and each one of these two centers of gravity represented a strong ideological view on the idea of the future of the evolution of mankind. So the uniqueness of the Cold War was a very heavy ideological dimension which was combined with the distribution of power. You no longer have that. You don’t have anyone claiming to be the future of mankind and you don’t have a bipolar system. You have a unipolar distribution of power in terms of military power, because you have one power which is military more powerful than anyone else and you have an economic multipolar world system in which there are at least several centers of gravity (for instance in Asia, in South America and across the Atlantic). If you want to find a historic example of a confrontation with Russia, think of England facing the Czarist Empire in the 19th century and trying to prevent the Czarist Russia to getting control of the Dardanelles.

 Please describe your presentation in one phrase!

Frédérik Bozo: On the INF the French were right, the American were wrong.

Marilena Gala: The Power of the European Persuasion

Leopoldo Nuti: 50 shades of Grey. History is not black and white. Don’t look for the easy way out. Look for the complications and the intricacies.

Frédérik Gloriant: My presentation tried to uncover the roots of Franco-British misunderstanding about both Europe and nuclear weapons. This is an important issue as it is still present today and represents a very serious obstacle to European unity.

CURRICULA VITAE

Leopoldo Nuti

Leopoldo Nuti: He is Professor of History of International Relations and director of the Doctoral School in Political Science at the University of Roma Tre. Since March 2006 he is Director of CIMA. A graduate of the Universities of Florence (laurea), George Washington U. (M.A. in International affairs) and Rome (Ph.D. in History of International relations), Prof. Nuti has been a Fulbright student, NATO Research Fellow, Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, Research Fellow at the CSIA, Harvard University, Research Fellow for the Nuclear History Program, Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Visiting Professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris and a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre for International Scholars. Mr. Nuti has published extensively in Italian, English and French on US-Italian relations and Italian foreign and security policy.

Frédéric Bozo

Frédéric Bozo: He is a Professor at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle, where he teaches contemporary history and international relations. He is also a Senior Research Associate at the Institut français des relations internationales (IFRI) where his focus is on Atlantic and European security issues. His prior teaching positions include the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (1989–1992), the University of Paris X-Nanterre (1992–1994) and the University of Marne-la-Vallée (1994–1998). He is also a member of the Centre de recherche sur l’histoire du monde Atlantique (CRHMA/ Research Center on the History of the Atlantic World, university of Nantes) and of the Groupe français pour l’histoire de l’arme nucléaire (GREFHAN, the French branch of the Nuclear History Programme). Bozo received his PhD in contemporary history from the University of Paris X-Nanterre (1993) and his Habilitation from the University of Paris III (1997). An alumnus of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, he holds an Agrégation in history; he has also studied at Harvard University and speaks English fluently.

Frédéric Gloriant

Frédéric Gloriant: A PhD student in History of International Relations at the University of Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle). He focuses on Franco-British relations during the de Gaulle-Macmillan era (1958-1963) and on the process of how the two countries developed divergent visions of the Euro-Atlantic security architecture during this key period. Previously, he studied humanities (Classics and Philosophy) at the École Normale Supérieure and Sorbonne, and received his training in political science, history and international relations both at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris (Master of “Sciences-Po”) and at the University of Newcastle, from which he received his MA in Politics in 2007.

Marilena Gala

Marilena Gala: She is Professor at Roma Tre University in Rome. Between 2003 and 2008, she has been a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre, in 2003 and 2010. Currently, she is a Lecturer of History of International Relations at the Department of Political Sciences of the University of Rome III. Ms. Gala teaches there a graduate course on nuclear power in the international system. She is a specialist in Cold War transatlantic relations and arms control and is currently working on a book project on transatlantic relations from the European security standpoint between the climax of détente and the end of the Cold War.

by: Chiara Villani, Dora Czeferner, Nike Pulda and Oreste Bocco

Day 2 of the IP included three talks which focused on the early postwar history. During the 50s and 60s the necessity to control nuclear power became a centre of discussion among politicians around the globe. Moreover, in his speech “Atoms for Peace” in 1953, President Eisenhower emphasized the idea of a distinction between the military and civilian use of atomic energy. The risks seemed to be ignorable by the mean of controlled sharing. Therefore, some controlling organizations had to be founded. Eisenhower’s speech indeed directly inspired the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Dr. Elisabeth Röhrlich (University of Vienna) explained in her talk that the idea of creating such an organization was really welcomed around the world, and four years after Eisenhower’s speech, the IAEA was founded. But during these four years a lot of negotiations took place. The first partners in the negotiations were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and Canada. But four countries was not enough to create an international organization. So France, which at that time was developing a nuclear program, was included into the negotiations as well as South Africa, Belgium, Portugal (both because of their colonies) and Australia, all of them producers of Uranium. Brazil, India and Czechoslovakia then also entered the club of the negotiators.  All these countries finally agreed on a statute for the agency on July 29th 1957.

In 1957, the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) was established in order to create a nuclear-energy industry on a rather European than national level. Magdalena Reitbauer (University of Vienna) showed that it also aimed at coordinating the member states’ research programs for the peaceful use of nuclear energy, encouraging the construction of nuclear-power installations, establishing a common market for trade nuclear equipment and materials. The founding countries of EURATOM were the Benelux countries, France, West Germany and Italy. The treaty could also be defined as a union of sovereign states based on an international treaty with its own autonomously acting institutions. A lot of emphasis was laid on the treaty concerning the scale of research necessary for nuclear advance. Soon after the establishment of the treaty, its founding members signed an agreement with the US. Eisenhower strongly believed that this could serve as the cornerstone for the United States of Europe.

In the next decade (the 1960s) another country entered the club of nuclear powers: the People’s Republic of China. Dr. Leopoldo Nuti (University Roma Tre) argued that its success signed the failure of the idea of controlled sharing of atomic energy. Thus, the superpowers decided to freeze the situation for the moment to avoid the spread of nuclear weapons. During the negotiations, both superpowers had to face several challenges, e.g. the Vietnam War or the German question. Their conclusion was: ignoring the positions of their Allies and come to an agreement, called the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT, 1968).

That period could be better understood through the songs by the famous American satirist Tom Lehrer…..’people began to feel like a Christian-scientists with appendicitis’…

Working Group C – Benoît, Francesco, Gábor, Ivana