Life in the Nuclear Archipelago: Cold War Technopolitics and U.S. Nuclear Submarines in Italy.

Abstract

Life in the Nuclear Archipelago is the first study of expert and public understandings of nuclear risk to analyze Italy’s geopolitical place in the global Cold War and after it. The study adopts a trans-regional perspective to examine the political, ecological, and public health controversies surrounding the installation of a U.S. Navy base for nuclear submarines in the Archipelago of La Maddalena (Sardinia) between 1972 and 2008. Using ethnographic and historical methods, the dissertation documents how local residents, journalists, and administrators navigated and challenged the rapidly evolving legal apparatuses designed to regulate the new threats and possibilities introduced through nuclear, and allied, technologies in the context of the global Cold War. By unpacking the sociotechnical processes through which La Maddalena became actively incorporated into the network of U.S. military bases overseas, Life in the Nuclear Archipelago explains how material and legal infrastructures, technologies, institutions, ecosystems, and epistemic traditions converged to co-construct a system of environmental monitoring that embodied a compromise between public safety and military security. By focusing on radiological risk this study examines the mutual effects and interactions of international and national nuclear regulatory regimes and scientific protocols, the contributions of technology in embodying and enacting political goals, and in shaping power relations between Italy and the United States, and (within Italy) between center and periphery. The dissertation is divided in three parts—two chapters each—that focus on specific arguments and themes. Part 1 addresses the military legacy of the archipelago to explain local attitudes towards the U.S. Navy and examines the technopolitical debates about the nuclear status of the archipelago due to the submarines’ presence. Part 2 focuses on the political economy of knowledge production and examines how both military secrecy and bureaucratic and epistemological limits of Italian regulatory agencies produced knowledge gaps about the environmental monitoring system of La Maddalena. Part 3 advances a semiotic approach to risk for analyzing how both experts and non-experts make invisible risks of nuclear contamination visible. Further, it looks at nuclear accidents as processes rather than events.