Nucleonics: Imagining the Nuclear Future in Chicago

This thesis reinterprets the postwar legacy of the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory ("Met Lab") by shifting the historiographic focus from the well-trodden "atom peace" narrative toward an alternative rooted in the concept of "nucleonics." The "atom peace" account, shaped by archival holdings and scholarly emphasis on the atomic scientists' movement, casts the Met Lab primarily as a political incubator for international nuclear arms control advocacy. Using Michel-Rolph Trouillot's framework on the production of historical narratives, this study examines how the University Archives' structure, accession practices, and curatorial priorities—alongside interventions by early historians such as Alice Kimball Smith—have reinforced this interpretation, privileging sources like the Franck Report while overshadowing other archival documentation. To offer a comparative perspective, this thesis re-centers analysis on the 1944 "Prospectus on Nucleonics" (also known as the Jeffries Report), a lesser-studied Met Lab document that articulated a broad technoscientific vision for the postwar nuclear field. Drafted by a mixed committee of academic physicists, industrial engineers, and administrators, the Jeffries Report coined "nucleonics" to encompass both fundamental nuclear science and applied technologies, from reactor engineering to nuclear medicine. It advanced a dualistic framework distinguishing pure, open academic research from applied, often secretive, industrial and military development, while anticipating tensions over intellectual property, monopolization, and government oversight. This vision forecast a tripartite postwar research structure—divided among universities, dedicated government laboratories, and private industry—that sought to balance collaboration with safeguards against overreach by any one sector. This thesis traces the influence and resonance of these ideas through the transformation of the Met Lab into Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), the first national laboratory and a direct institutional successor to the wartime program. Drawing on University of Chicago administrative records, it shows how early ANL leaders such as Walter Zinn navigated the same structural tensions envisioned in the Jeffries Report, particularly in negotiations over naval reactor contracts and in managing the interplay between classified defense projects and the university's preference for fundamental research. Episodes from the late 1940s to early 1950s—including disputes over military priorities, contract conditions, and the Korean War mobilization—demonstrate both the durability and the limits of the nucleonics ideal in practice. By juxtaposing the dominant "atom peace" narrative with a "nucleonics" framework, this study not only recovers an underexamined strand of Met Lab history but also reveals how archival organization and research interest can shape historiographic outcomes. The renaming of Henry Moore's sculpture from Atom Piece to Nuclear Energy emerges as an emblem of this broader shift—from commemorating unfulfilled peace advocacy to memorializing the expansive, contested scientific field the Met Lab helped define. In reframing the Met Lab's significance through nucleonics, this thesis underscores the need for critical engagement with both the content of archival sources and the conditions of their preservation.