Dr. Paul Josephson is examining the cultural and political history of peaceful nuclear programs in the former Soviet Union. In order to undertake such a study, Dr. Josephson is focusing on the Soviet physics community and the physics institutes which served as the locus of the interactions between the Soviet government and the Communist Party on the one hand and the public or Soviet citizenry on the other. He is seeking to explain how physicists developed broad political and cultural support for an expansive research program that involved application of nuclear physics throughout the economy for peaceful purposes. As in the United States, the Soviet nuclear program had several different components aimed at military, research and power-generating ends. Both the Soviets and the US programs, for example, developed nuclear reactors for research and strictly military purposes . as well as to generate electricity for public use. Both undertook nuclear explosions for both military and "peaceful" aims. Both also examined the use of various radioisotopes for a number of medical, industrial and military purposes. This broad-ranging program in the Soviet Union reflected soviet-wide enthusiasm in science and technology as a panacea for many social, economic and developmental problems. This effort was not an attempt to deceive the Soviet public or international audiences about middling achievements nor an attempt to mislead them about extensive environmental and health hazards that came to be associate with nuclear power. Rather, atomic-powered communism is revealing of the deeper political and administrative structures and research processes that were paradigmatic for science and technology in the Soviet Union. A relatively closed political system and an overly centralized scientific enterprise often permitted one individual, school or institute to dominate an entire area of research. There were few external controls on the scale, extent or speed of diffusion of technologies. This was compo unded by inadequate concerns about the health and safety of the population and the environment owing to overriding pressure to meet plan targets. In this case, while certainly not the intention, the result was hastily approved programs that acquired great momentum and premature standardization of nuclear technologies in which bland and functional designs predominated. In this study, Dr. Josephson will describe the genesis and history of the Soviet breeder and thermal reactor programs, the fusion program, various attempts to construct flying and mobile reactors, the peaceful nuclear explosions program, applications of radioisotopes in mining, medicine, and agriculture, particle accelerators and the spread of the nuclear empire based on the "Moscow model" to other union republics. He will reexamine the political significance of Chernobyl in a period of glasnost and perestroika, the economic and environmental fallout that accompanied the accident and the breakup of the Soviet Union and of the Soviet physics enterprise.
