Technology and Culture

Between 1972 and 2008, the U.S. Navy operated a military base in the archipelago of La Maddalena, off the northeastern coast of Sardinia (Italy). Following the Soviet Union's growing influence in the Mediterranean in the late 1960s, the United States increased its surveillance of maritime choke points and used nuclear submarines to control Soviet underwater activities. La Maddalena, which was already accustomed to military presence and was in a strategic position, provided an ideal place, while the Italian government, a faithful ally of the United States inside NATO, swiftly agreed to sign an agreement. Davide Orsini's The Atomic Archipelago reconstructs the history of the U.S. Navy's presence in La Maddalena and its aftermath by looking at the debates and conflicts surrounding the issue of radiological risk in and around the base.

Through a detailed and sophisticated analysis of a variety of different sources, and drawing on an original combination of scholarly studies, The Atomic Archipelago sheds new light on the history of science and technology during the Cold War. First, it contributes to studies of U.S.-Italian nuclear relations (Elisabetta Bini and Igor Londero, eds., Nuclear Italy, 2017) and, more broadly, to the growing historiography of U.S. military bases (Catherine Lutz, ed., The Bases of Empire, 2009; Rebecca Herman, Competing with the Colossus, 2022) by looking at how local communities and institutions interacted with and challenged American power, while at the same time participating in the coproduction of techno-scientific knowledge. The Italian case raises a series of interesting questions, as the country never developed [End Page 384] a military nuclear arsenal but gained nuclear status by allowing U.S. nuclear weapons and equipment to transit and station on its territory. Moreover, the Italian state never introduced a clear legislation concerning the regulation (and radiosurveillance) of military nuclear infrastructure and equipment, leaving military authorities free to act outside the surveillance of public agencies or Parliament. It pursued what Orsini calls a "dual nuclear regulatory regime" (p. 117), based on the separation between military and civilian uses of nuclear technology and on the creation of "an unregulated space over which military authorities could exercise an exclusive control" (p. 121).

This "dual nuclear regulatory regime" heavily affected the forms of radio-surveillance that experts working for public agencies could carry out and, in turn, shaped the politics of science in Cold War Italy. Orsini offers a thorough and fascinating study of the history of radioecology internationally and in Italy and highlights the complexity of Italian legislation concerning radio-ecological surveys and the problems faced by scientists and public agencies. Even though by the early 1970s radioecology had established itself as an interdisciplinary field, experts constantly faced organizational issues and a lack of funding and technology. Together with the forms of secrecy on the part of sectors of the Italian government and the U.S. Navy, radioecologists were unable to set up an efficient monitoring system in La Maddalena.

A particularly interesting aspect of the book is the analysis of scientists' increased politicization during the 1970s, as experts challenged the neutrality of technical knowledge and sought to rethink the social and environmental responsibility of techno-science. They argued for the need to recognize the nuclear status of La Maddalena and treated the archipelago like any other nuclear installation, thus making radiological risk visible. While this was true of other contexts as well, in Italy scientists tended to be more politically organized around labor unions and far-left parties as well as more radicalized, an issue that Orsini might have developed more thoroughly by placing it in a comparative perspective to better understand the politics of science during the Cold War.

One of the most original parts of the book is the study of the ways in which residents in La Maddalena experienced and reacted to the U.S. military base. While they did not initially oppose it, as...