Gender, Science and Politics: Queen Frederika and Nuclear Research in Post-war Greece

Abstract

In the 1950s a small group of scientists and politicians in Greece became determined to build a center for nuclear reactor research. With the exception of a handful of students trained in nuclear physics, no real expertise existed in the country. There were also no experienced administrators or managers ready to take the lead, and the existing national bureaucracy was labyrinthine. Thus a new scientific network had to be constituted largely from scratch in the Greek postwar sociopolitical order, a network that had to be extended to the international scientific community if it was to be efficient at all. Surprisingly, behind the construction of this scientific nuclear research project in Greece one can discern the female touch of a powerful and determined woman, Queen Frederika of Greece. I argue that she was the one who, by taking advantage of the United States' discourse on atomic energy for peace, was able to exploit the knots and nodes of her own political network, build new alliances and transform scattered resources into a grid that could underlay nuclear research in Greece and her own legitimacy in the country.