Introduction

In the spring of 1959, representatives of twenty-six nations from both sides of the Iron Curtain gathered in Prague to negotiate. The Cold War was at its height: ten years before, NATO had been born, and in response, just four years prior, the Warsaw Pact. But this gathering in Prague featured neither diplomats, nor any mention of armaments or border disputes. Those who gathered in the Narodni Klub were mostly scientists, doctors and health officials. They sought, instead, to settle a striking divergence that had become ever more apparent over these same years in national approaches to industrial hazards. Specifically, they sat down to debate differences in so-called ‘Maximum Allowable Concentration Levels’ (MACs), the numerical limits many of these nations had established for toxins in their workplaces. Behind their disagreements, ostensibly over just what levels to prescribe, lay issues of appropriate knowledge and technique; also – as will come as no surprise to readers of this book a differences of culture and power. In broad outline, the contrasts were vintage Cold War: those from the US and the USSR sharply disagreed, and the Europeans were caught in-between. In ways that STS scholars or historians have as yet hardly explored, the disagreements also foreshadowed the future course of toxics regulation not just in workplaces but across many other spheres of the industrialized world.