The Politics of Security: Protests against nuclear weapons, the IAEA, and the early Cold War

My paper explores the debates about nuclear energy in the British and West German protests against nuclear weapons from the mid-1950s into the early 1960s. Curiously, there was no engagement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, although there was some discussion about the peaceful uses of atomic agency. My paper is concerned with using this absence of discussions about a regulatory regime for nuclear energy and the relevant agency to highlight more general features about the discussions about 'the atomic age' in the early Cold War. I argue that this absence can be explained with the specific politics of security that was at work here: this was a politics of security that had the mass violence of the Second World War as its reference point, while at the same time propagating a program of modernization linked to the 'peaceful' uses of nuclear energy. As the IAEA was concerned with managing the controllable risks of nuclear energy more generally and as protesters focused on the uncontrollable dangers of the nuclear arms race, the IAEA did not matter for the protest movements. This highlights a key feature of the structure of the Cold War international system during this crucial period for the construction of peace in Europe: there emerged, for West European NATO member countries, a system of security swaps: West European governments abrogated their military sovereignty to NATO (which effectively meant to a US-controlled system) and organized military violence was internationalized. Within this system, the US guaranteed economic affluence which stood for social security and material abundance. Apocalypse and peaceful atoms could therefore go hand in hand. (author)