A lot of people assume it’s an antinuclear book. When you put “wretched” in the title, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s interpreted that way. I’ve even gotten some hate email from advocates of nuclear power who have assumed (without reading it) that this book is intended as a take-down. But the “wretched” in the title refers to a central tension of the book, namely the significance of promoting nuclear technologies in the so-called developing world during the era of decolonization. We usually think of nuclear technology as a Cold War story (and it is!) but we sometimes neglect to see it through the lens of colonialism, control of the earth’s natural resources, and narratives about modernization.The title is inspired by Frantz Fanon’s 1961 book Les Damnés de la Terre, published later in English as the Wretched of the Earth. Fanon pointed out that the promise of rapid development often led to new kinds of dependence. Because I’d encountered some documents at the Food and Agriculture Organization voicing the same kinds of concerns about nuclear technology, I wanted to use that framing for the book as a whole.I’ve tried to position The Wretched Atom as a global history of one of the most misunderstood political weapons of the twentieth century. It was adopted by President Truman and every US president afterward to exert leverage over other nations’ weapons programs, to corner world markets of uranium and thorium, and to secure petroleum supplies. Other countries embraced it too, for their own reasons. Atomic promises were embedded in Japan’s postwar recovery, Ghana’s pan-Africanism, Israel’s quest for survival, Pakistan’s brinksmanship with India, and Iran’s pursuit of nuclear independence. I see the book as an invitation to confront the role of civilian nuclear technology as an instrument of power, and to perceive the historical legacy of racism and colonialism even in today’s nuclear order.As a researcher, what I really enjoy is working in archives, and ferreting out new material that hasn’t previously been the focus in existing work. For this book I tried to get away from simply using US documents (although there are plenty of those!) and instead to shift the focus to a more global perspective, using the archives of international organizations. So there’s a great deal of source material here that hasn’t appeared in print, including controversies at the International Atomic Energy Agency (Vienna), Food and Agriculture Organization (Rome), and World Health Organization (Geneva). In fact the idea for the book came while doing archival research in Rome, where I found a mountain of documents related to a disgruntled employee who accused his bosses of corruption. How could I ignore those documents?