Throughout most of its history, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been portrayed as a technical agency in which geopolitics are either extraneous or inappropriate. This chapter argues that this separation of technology and politics was discursive and never enacted in practice. Looking at the role of South Africa in the early history of the agency, this chapter shows that the IAEA's technopolitical regime was the continually contested outcome of negotiations between visions of a hierarchical, bipolar global order structured by cold war tensions and visions of a decentralized global order inspired by decolonization. This chapter also explores how dynamics between the apartheid state, decolonizing nations, and the United States inflected the meanings and implications of the "nuclear" in IAEA technopolitics. "Nuclearity"-that is, the degree to which a nation, a program, a policy, a technology, or even a material counted as "nuclear"-was a spectrum, not an on-off condition. Both nuclearity and its implications emerged in substantive ways from the dynamics between cold war and postcolonial visions of the world.
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