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This project takes up North and South Korean discourses on atomic science and technology between 1945 and 1965. It focuses on how science in these two postcolonial states became a site for the ideological contestations of decolonization and cold war struggle. Atomic technology has always assumed a central place in Cold War narratives, but how it interlaced with the processes and logic of decolonization has been largely neglected. There was a decisive character that writers in Korea ascribed to atomic technology that resulted in its habitual inclusion in renderings of the future and in accounts of the recent past. This project examines the constant presence of this fetishized technology in discussions of liberation, division, and revolution as Korean intellectuals struggled to determine the implications of such terms for a new chapter of world history. By focusing on Korea in the years between 1945 and 1958, this fixation on the atom is examined in a mid-century setting uniquely positioned in a colonial, socialist, and liberal present.
Chapter I: Reviving a National Research
Chapter II: Revolutionary Science
Chapter III: Energized History
Chapter IV: Radiating from the Past
Chapter V: Will there be War?
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