ABSTRACT
During the Perestroika period, conflicts over nuclear legacies became openly apparent and, in various ways, contributed to the disintegration of the USSR. Nuclear politics have remained a key issue in the post-Soviet space and beyond – for exposed communities, near sites of the atomic program, in debates over energy transitions and uranium mining as well as in the politics of history and memory cultures in Russia and Central Asia. This introduction addresses various scales of the Cold War nuclear, by foregrounding the supply chains of the Soviet atomic program and locating Soviet and post-Soviet case studies more broadly in global developments. Framing the contributions within conceptual approaches of traces and tracing, heritage and legacies, we outline the contested historiographies and complex politics of things nuclear. By bringing together researchers across disciplines to examine the entanglements of the nuclear past and present, we invite readers to rethink the historiography of nuclear legacies, which all too often finds itself entrenched in Cold War paradigms.
