From 1945 to the present, scientists, technicians, and diplomats in Argentina and Brazil have been among the developing world’s vanguard in harnessing the promise and power of nuclear energy technologies. The Atomic Age created a wholly new set of criteria of modernity to which a nation’s leaders and citizens might aspire. It also offered an unparalleled opportunity to refashion the relationship between science and the state, and that between the developing scientific periphery and the technologically advanced nations of the North Atlantic.
Brazil and Argentina have stood, since the 1980s, among a different club of elite nuclear nations, joined by only four countries that have uranium enrichment facilities that nonetheless chose not to build nuclear weapons. While much of the unbridled pursuit of advanced nuclear technology in these South American neighbor countries can be explained as an attempt to realize long-sought economic development, other aspects of this history of technology and diplomacy fit much more neatly into a defiant assertion of sovereignty against a North Atlantic center increasingly opposed to transfers of nuclear materials and technologies. How did Argentina and Brazil learn the rules of the new nuclear game, and how did they rewrite them to their own ends? What did responsible global citizenship and sovereignty mean within and outside Latin America as the Atomic Age progressed? This paper examines these two questions of nuclear technology and diplomacy against the larger background of economic and scientific development.
