British Nuclear Mobilisation Since 1945

Jonathan Hogg is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century History at the University of Liverpool, UK. He is the author of British Nuclear Culture: Official and Unofficial Narratives in the Long Twentieth Century (Bloomsbury, 2016), and editor of the e-textbook Using Primary Sources (Liverpool University Press, 2017). Kate Brown is Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA. Her numerous books include Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford, 2013), Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (University of Chicago Press, 2015), and most recently Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Allen Lane, 2019).

Introduction: social and cultural histories of British nuclear mobilisation since 1945

Jonathan Hogg and Kate Brown

1. Mass observing the atom bomb: the emotional politics of August 1945

Claire Langhamer

2. ‘...what in the hell’s this?’ Rehearsing nuclear war in Britain’s Civil Defence Corps

Jessica Douthwaite

3. ‘Nuclear Prospects’: the siting and construction of Sizewell A power station 1957-1966

Christine Wall

4. Weaponising peace: the Greater London Council, cultural policy, and ‘GLC Peace Year 1983’

Hazel Atashroo

5. Resist and survive: Welsh protests and the British nuclear state in the 1980s

Christophe Laucht and Martin Johnes

6. Britain, West Africa and ‘The new nuclear imperialism’: decolonisation and development during French tests

Christopher Robert Hill