Adamson, Matthew (Author)
This study considers the history of the Commissariat l'Energie Atomique (CEA) from its founding in 1945 to the first French atomic bomb tests in 1960. Expansion dominates this history, expansion that resulted in diversification of scientific researches, multiple reactor prototypes, and invention and production of nuclear weapons. Previous studies involving the CEA have often dealt with these products while leaving the causes of expansion obscure. As it happens, the origins of the CEA's dramatic growth are as diverse as the expansion's consequences, and the elaboration of those origins is quite problematic. This account falls within the history of technology. I consider the framework of Thomas Hughes' "technological system " as a means of identifying various technological, institutional, and biographical elements. However, such a framework can become too static for description of historical change. My solution is to examine the changing parameters of technological stability embedded in the CEA's expansion. Stability is a state during which technological building and growth can occur. On this view, stability was active, a question of dynamic feedback between technique and organization, between internal institution and national economy and polity, between system builder and hierarchy of machine and personnel. These polarities can be used analytically, but it is the occurrence or disappearance of technological stability that formed the historical reality underlying CEA expansion and for that matter the existence and growth of any atomic project. Stages in the history of the CEA can be roughly described as initiation, accumulation of personnel, materials, and political strength, orientation of the French project towards certain outputs, and system building itself. Institutional expansion marked the passage of the CEA from one stage to the next. And the cause of that expansion can be understood as the interplay of a variety of human, technological, institutional, and socioeconomic factors that produced a dynamic technological stability.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 66 (2005): 735. UMI pub. no. 3163023.
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