Proliferating Markets: the Transnational Trade in Uranium from Africa

Gabrielle Hecht is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.  Her first book, The Radiance of France:  Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (MIT 1998), won awards from the American Historical Association and the Society for the History of Technology.  The French translation appeared with La Découverte in 2004, and MIT will publish a new English-language edition in 2009.  Her current project, entitled Uranium from Africa and the Power of Nuclear Things, draws on archival and field work conducted in Africa, Europe, and North America.  Focusing especially on Gabon, Madagascar, South Africa, Namibia, and Niger, this project examines uranium mining in these places and the flow of uranium from these places. It argues that the view from Africa transforms our understanding of the "nuclear" as a political, technological, and occupational category, as well as our perspective on the transnational power of nuclear things. 

Alexander Montgomery, a visiting assistant professor in 2008-09, was a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC in 2005-2006 and is an assistant professor of political science at Reed College. He has published articles on dismantling proliferation networks and on the effects of social networks of international organizations on interstate conflict. His research interests include political organizations, social networks, weapons of mass disruption and destruction, social studies of technology, and interstate social relations. His current book project is on post-Cold War U.S. counterproliferation policy, evaluating the efficacy of policies towards North Korea, Iran, and proliferation networks.

He has been a joint International Security Program/Managing the Atom Project Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He has also worked as a research associate in high energy physics on the BaBar experiment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and as a graduate research assistant at the Center for International Security Affairs at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has a BA in physics from the University of Chicago, an MA in energy and resources from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in sociology and a PhD in political science from Stanford University.