Atomic Africa by Kolvenbach, Marcel
Social Interest
Historical and Political Relevance
Nuclear power, the right to enrich uranium and develop the technology to exploit its energy, has always been a difficult point in international politics. In the Cold War the threat mainly came from the war talk and power displays of archenemies the United States and the Soviet Union which both had a gigantic nuclear arsenal. As the cold war ended the threat of a nuclear war declined. However the nuclear disaster in a power plant in Chernobyl a few years earlier proved that the benefits of nuclear power also pose a big potential threat in case of incidents. However, this incident did not stop more countries from starting a nuclear program with a wide range of experiments While in the last decade the interest of the West in Nuclear power seems to decline some new players on the nuclear market, with questionable regimes like Iran and North Korea , are causing much international debate about the right to develop nuclear power. The rapidly developing African continent is in serious need of energy and has always been rich in raw resources to produce energy and is now slowly developing the knowledge to exploit them. The African continent may well be on the verge of a nuclear revolution so the political discussion about the right to use nuclear energy is more relevant than ever. Because not only questionable regimes can pose a potential threat, also war and especially terrorism are extremely dangerous, since it takes a single rocket fired by a single person to blow up a nuclear power plant.
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