[ATHENA] "The secret histories of laser fusion", Alex Wellerstein, séminaire HSHI, 17 décembre

["Arielle Haakenstad" (labex-ehne1 AT listes.paris-sorbonne.fr via athena Mailing List) <athena AT services.cnrs.fr>]

Chers collègues,

 

Alex Wellerstein

assistant professor at Stevens Institute of Technology

interviendra sur

The secret histories of laser fusion

le jeudi 17 décembre à 17h00

au séminaire Histoire des sciences, histoire de l'innovation
(Université Paris Sorbonne, UPMC, LabEx EHNE)

dans la salle de conférence de l’Institut des sciences de la communication (ISCC)
20 rue Berbier-du-Mets, Paris 13°, M° Gobelins.

 

Présentation de son intervention :

The secret histories of laser fusion

The invention of the laser and its proliferation in scientific settings created a unique problem for the United States government starting in the 1960s. The Cold War regime of nuclear secrecy had required an absolute legal distinction between “peaceful” civilian technology and “dangerous” military technology: the former needing wide dissemination and development by the private sector, the latter being tightly regulated under penalty of imprisonment and possibly even death. But the emergent technology of laser fusion, whereby small pellets of hydrogen fuel were imploded to thermonuclear densities with high-energy laser beams, challenged and blurred these Cold War categories. For its proponents, which included both international scientists and private entrepreneurs, laser fusion held out the hope of clean, limitless power generation during a time of increasing energy instability. But at its heart was a form of physics that was, for government censors, far too near to the methods used in the design of advanced thermonuclear weapons. This talk will use newly declassified files to tell the international history of laser fusion in the 1960s and 1970s as a case study for looking at the unusual classification problems of late Cold War nuclear technology, ignited by a proliferation of new scientific tools (such as the laser), new forms of scientific actors (such as ex-weapons scientists working for the private sector), and new attitudes towards classification and secrecy (such as a willingness to resist control by private industry).

 

Alex Wellerstein is a historian of science in the Program for Science and Technology Studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA. He received his PhD in History of Science from Harvard University in 2010, and has a BA in History from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to taking his position at Stevens, he was a postdoc at the Harvard Kennedy School's Managing the Atom program, and at the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics. His research work focuses on the history of nuclear technology. He is completing a book on the history of nuclear secrecy in the United States, from the Manhattan Project through the "War on Terror," to be published by the University of Chicago Press. He is also the author of Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog, and the creator of the NUKEMAP, a popular on-line nuclear weapons effects simulator. His research has been published in scholarly periodicals such as Isis, but also in popular sources such as on NPR's Radiolab and Morning Edition, and he has written articles for the websites of The Guardian and The New Yorker.

 

 

Prochaines séances après l’interruption hivernale:

4 février                 Jean-François Dunyach, (CRM/Université Paris-Sorbonne)
William Playfair (1759-1823), le chiffre et la forme. Petite histoire de la naissance et de la diffusion des représentations statistiques en Europe (c. 1780 - c.1820)

11 février              Marc Gigase, (UNIL Université de Lausanne)
Transports et système touristique dans l'Arc lémanique (Suisse): synergies, innovations et revers au cœur d'une "success story" (1852-1914)

18 février              Florian Schmaltz, (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
Aeronautical Research in France during Nazi Occupation (1940-44)

10 mars                 Olivier Darrigol, (SPHERE/CNRS/Université Denis Diderot)
Nécessité et contingence des théories physiques.

17 mars                 Roberto Cantoni, (IFRIS/LATTS)
De l'Iran à l'Algérie : l'industrie pétrolière française face aux nouveaux équilibres de la Guerre froide

24 mars                 Simone Fari        (Universidad de Granada)
History of telegraphy: actors, institutions, landscapes

31 mars                 Anthony Heywood, (University of Aberdeen)
Climate, Technology, War and Revolution: Winter Weather, Inter-Urban Transport and Tsarist Russia's War Effort, 1914-1917

7 avril                   Gabriel Galvez-Behar, (IRHiS/Université Lille 3/IUF)

L'innovation, but de guerre : de l'usage stratégique de la propriété industrielle en situation de conflit au XXe siècle.

14 avril                 Jon Agar, (University College London)
The politics of Star Wars: Thatcher and the UK and European contexts of the Strategic Defense Initiative.

3 mai (attention exceptionnellement séance le mardi)                Thomas Thwaites, designer
Making a toaster, becoming a goat, policing with bees… Doing design projects about science and technology

12 mai                   Catherine Radtka, (CNES/ISCC)
Mettre en pratique un engouement pour l'espace : les constructions de fusées en amateur dans la France des années 1950-60.

 

Bien cordialement

--

Arielle Haakenstad
Laboratoire d'excellence EHNE Écrire une histoire nouvelle de l'Europe
Coordinatrice axe 1 " L’Europe comme produit de la civilisation matérielle : l'Europe des flux "
labex-ehne1 AT listes.paris-sorbonne.fr
Université Paris-Sorbonne
Institut des sciences de la communication (ISCC)
20 rue Berbier du Mets
75013 Paris
+33 (0)1 58 52 17 85
http://europeflux.hypotheses.org/
www.labex-ehne.fr