Chapter III: Energized History

The politics of the future are cast in a different light in chapter three. Here North and South Korean discussion of atomic power are placed alongside a broader fixation on energy as a currency of history. In popular science texts from this time, energy quickly emerged as a unifying feature in discussions of social, economic, and political change. This chapter attends to how writers in both the North and the South turned to the concept of energy to develop stagist historical narratives of development that reduced the politics of production to the aggregation of energy. Atomic power was an ideal addition to these accounts. Appearing as transcendent to previous forms of carbon or muscle-based fuels, atomic energy perfectly fit into a revolutionary telos of development. These visions appeared uniformly across the peninsula and while replete with the dichotomous caricatures of science under socialism or capitalism, developed a notion of historical progress free from politics or human agency.