Professional Affiliation

Associate Professor, Georgetown University

Expert Bio

Toshihiro Higuchi is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University. He studies the international history of the nuclear age with a focus on its scientific, technological, and environmental aspects. He is a recipient of the 2021 Michael H. Hunt Book Prize in International History for his book, Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2020), awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Currently, Higuchi is working on his next book project on the oceanic history of post-1945 American empire through the lens of nuclear marine propulsion.

Expertise

• Cold War
• Energy
• Environment
• Global Health
• Global Governance
• History
• Science and Technology
• Security and Defense
• US Politics

Wilson Center Project

Nuclear Marine Propulsion and the Oceanic History of American Empire

Project Summary

This project addresses one of the most successful yet overlooked uses of atomic energy in U.S. foreign relations: nuclear marine propulsion. Emerging from World War II as a global hegemon, the United States eagerly embraced the nuclear engine, which in theory could operate for a virtually unlimited duration, as a technological solution to many foreign policy challenges during the Cold War. By foregrounding the oceans in the analysis of the U.S. nuclear propulsion program, the project aims to demonstrate how the oceans uniquely complicate the question of what makes things "nuclear" and also to decenter land mass in the history of the U.S. empire. By putting the nuclear propulsion’s promise of unrestricted mobility and its messy reality at the center of analysis, the project will demonstrate the dynamic, contentious, and contingent formation of the nuclear-powered U.S. maritime empire.

Major Publications

• Higuchi, Toshihiro. Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020.
• Higuchi, Toshihiro. "Mutsu Adrift: A Nuclear Ship, Scallop Growers, and the Inescapable Ecologies of Mutsu Bay.” In Oceanic Japan: The Archipelago in Pacific and Global History, ed. Stefan Huebner, et al. Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2024.
• Higuchi, Toshihiro, & Jacques E. C. Hymans. “Materialized Internationalism: How the IAEA Made the Vinca Dosimetry Experiment, and How the Experiment Made the IAEA.” Centaurus 63, no. 2 (2021): 244-61.