Conceptual History of "Nuclear Security" in the Czech Ideological Environment: Nuclear Scientists and Ecological Activists (1950-2000)

Abstrakt

Although the proliferation of nuclear power plants was coined with the slogan "Atoms for peace", it was also since the very beginning closely associated with the question of security. The paper focuses on the synchronic and diachronic interpretation of conceptual morphologies connected to nuclear security.

It understands nuclear security as an essentially contested concept and compares its decontestations in the Czech context by nuclear scientists on the one hand and ecological scientists and activists on the other. On this basis it demonstrates the ideological importance of nuclear energy as a perimeter concept (Freeden 1996).

Besides transdisciplinarity in terms of the object, this study also combines Freeden's approach of interpretative realism with speculative realism. By that it builds on insights from science studies, which aims to overcome not only the dualism between society and nature, subjects and objects, but also between social and natural sciences (Latour 1984, Moore 2015, Morton 2013).