The afterlife of a nuclear dosimeter: Locality, risk and the Cold War in the museum

There is a tension in science museums between the general and the specific. While the concepts that a museum explores may be considered universal and the technologies on display distributed internationally, the stories of individual artefacts are unavoidably singular. Whether or not their biographies are explicit in museum interpretation, they each have distinct meanings associated with the places they have passed through: the geographies of their biographies. In this paper, two pieces of unassuming apparatus—a personal dosimeter and its charging unit—are used to illustrate how even mundane objects can be afforded rich narratives linked to a particular place. The use-life of this safety equipment for detecting radiation, now held in National Museums Scotland, links the collection to the geographical specificity of the experimental development of nuclear power in Northern Britain. The afterlife of the dosimeter and charger on display in the museum's collection is a material element of the construction of nuclear cultural heritage. Previously displayed to illustrate general principles of radiation, in their more recent museum setting, these small risk-management tools manifest the hopes and fears of Cold War Scotland. They link the civilian and military development of nuclear technology in the context of a conflict between global superpowers to everyday life in a facility on the windswept coast of a small country.