In spite of the constraints of the Anglo-American nuclear monopoly in the early Cold War, Norway and the Netherlands managed to build and operate a joint nuclear reactor by July 1951. They were the first countries to do so after the Great Powers. Their success was largely due to the combination of the strategic materials of heavy water (Norway) and uranium (the Netherlands). Nonetheless, they had to overcome significant political and technical obstacles. These existed partly because of strict secrecy policies. Diplomats and scientists in the Netherlands, Norway, Britain, France and the United States interacted to provide or sometimes prevent technical and political support. We highlight the interplay of three elements: strategic nuclear materials, the scientists’ particular transnational networks and state power politics. The transnational network of scientists and diplomats was instrumental for the Dutch-Norwegian collaboration to obtain the required support from third countries. In the end, Norway obtained important reactor design information plus reactor graphite from France. The Dutch quietly exchanged their unpurified uranium ore for ready to use British uranium fuel rods. All this eventually received the reluctant blessing of the United States. In the process, various nuclear secrets were tacitly or explicitly shared. By tracing the development of these secrets, we will show how they were co-owned by scientists and the government. This illuminates the broader co-construction of science and diplomacy.

The major historical picture for the postwar nuclear landscape is the thesis of American ‘co-produced hegemony’ (Krige, 2008). According to this picture, the US government used its access to nuclear knowledge in order to both help postwar Europe rebuild its scientific infrastructure as well as securing US hegemony. More recently, however, the active role of European nations in the development of nuclear research infrastructure has been stressed by historians of science. The Belgian response to postwar nuclear research has until now received only scant attention from historians. This paper describes the early development of nuclear energy research in Belgium via Belgium’s nuclear research center SCK•CEN, founded in 1952. To what extent can the domains of politics, industry and science be seen as independent in the construction of Belgium’s nuclear research infrastructure? In which way was the training of nuclear scientists and engineers, as well as the construction of nuclear technology, shaped through national and international politics? And how did this in turn affect the organization of nuclear science in Belgium/at the SCK•CEN?

This paper focuses on the technical assistance programs of the International Atomic Energy Agency as both the beginning and the embodiment of modern science diplomacy. According to its statute, the Agency, a political and diplomatic international organization within the United Nations system, was authorized to provide technical assistance to those Member States that required it. This paper brings front and center the case of Greece and unravels the complex negotiations between the Greek Atomic Energy Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency. To do so, we follow the first Mobile Laboratory on its maiden trip from Austria to Greece and scrutinize the negotiations that took place among central actors in our case. The mobile lab was one of the two laboratories that the US government donated to the IAEA for the technical training of new physicists on the use of radioisotopes in medicine, agriculture and industry. From 1959 to 1965, the two units visited sixteen countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America and approximately 1500 technicians and students attended training courses. We argue that the laboratory’s trip to Greece was much more than a scientific effort to develop the country’s nuclear program. It had the additional diplomatic mission to enlist Greece as an ally of the western bloc. Without doubt, the case of Greece demonstrates that the IAEA's technical assistance, as it was carried out through the Mobile Labs Program, was not just a moment of international scientific cooperation but it was essentially an aspect of scientific diplomacy.

Different authors have highlighted that invisibility, doubt or ignorance are not natural states of the population, simple absences of information or knowledge, but the outcome of active and effortful cultural and political processes. This paper argues that science diplomacy has played a crucial role in the processes involved in making invisible nuclear risk. To do so, it focuses on a nuclear accident that took place in Spain, 1966. Four nuclear bombs fell onto a town on the South coast, Palomares, due to a crash between two US Air Force planes. Two of the bombs leaked their radioactive content contaminating wide areas of the territory. I will argue that a key part of the diplomatic strategy adopted to solve this crisis focused on making invisible radiation risk in the public domain. Minimizing public attention to the accident was listed, in scientific and military reports of the accident, as a strong argument during diplomatic negotiations. It justified decisions regarding radioactive protection of the inhabitants and security measures of the clean-up actions. The public campaign to render nuclear risk invisible influenced the popular perception of nuclear risk, but not only this: it also had epistemic effects. The criterion of minimizing public attention shaped also the negotiations on levels and methods of decontamination. At the diplomatic table, scientists from US and Spain had to agree on the decontamination methods and on the levels at which various types of decontamination actions would be taken.

Since 1945, nuclear science and technology have oscillated between nationalism and internationalism. While the first decade after WW II was mostly characterized by military applications and national security, the launch of the American Atoms-for Peace-program in late 1953 promoted international cooperation. As a consequence, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the United Nations was formed in 1957 to support peaceful applications of nuclear science. More or less simultaneously, Euratom was formed by the members of the European Economic Community (EEC) as a first attempt to promote cooperation also in science and technology. Already by the late 1950s, nuclear science and technology was thus connected to internationalization processes paralleling efforts in different countries to advance atomic weaponry. Since then, facilities for nuclear research include a mix of national labs such as the one in Oak Ridge, and international ones, for example Institute Laue-Langevin inaugurated in Grenoble in 1970, which includes a significant measure of science diplomacy between France, Germany and the UK. In the mid-1990s, OECD endorsed the construction of three nuclear spallation sources in America, Europe and Asia. This resulted in SNS in USA 2006 and JSNS in Japan 2008 while the most powerful of the three, the European Spallation Source (ESS), in contrast relying on a number of partner countries complicating decision, funding and design processes, is still under construction in Lund in southern Sweden. This example shows how interactions between science and diplomacy may be necessary to create larger facilities while simultaneously prolonging their creation.