This review surveys historical and contemporary anthropological work on nuclear things and shifting human–nuclear relations. Confronting the paradox that nuclear phenomena are physically omnipresent yet inevitably mediated by politics, technoscience, and expertise, anthropologists have traced how states, experts, industries, and affected communities negotiate exposure, risk, safety, and responsibility within unequal power dynamics. Foundational ethnographies of laboratories, governance, and social movements are put in conversation with recent research on peripheries, colonial geographies, and enduring radioactive ecologies and legacies. The review challenges entrenched binaries—war/peace, elites/public, antinuclear/pronuclear, victims/nonvictims—and calls for a pragmatic approach that subsumes nuclear things as the subjects of anthropological humanization. In an age of renewed enthusiasm for nuclear technologies to meet climate goals and power artificial intelligence, it suggests temporarily suspending—rather than dismissing—nuclear victimhood narratives to better understand everyday coexistence with nuclear things and to develop more inclusive models of human–nuclear relations for the public.
Ryo Morimoto (Thu,) studied this question.