Superheavies after the Superpowers

In the first twenty years after the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the USSR, nine superheavy elements have been added to the actinide row of the periodic system, compared to thirteen during the four decades of bipolar stalemate. The overwhelming majority of the new elements during the earlier era were discovered by the Americans; since the 1990s, when the geopolitical and economic strength of the United States was uncontested, zero superheavy elements have been discovered by the once dominant Berkeley. Even more surprisingly, fully five of these later superheavies were synthesized in the Russian Federation, a seemingly paradoxical counterexample to the contemporary narrative of post-Soviet science in shambles. The history of the “transfermium wars” has often been framed as a partially geopolitical story; what came next is typically narrated devoid of such considerations. This presentation situates both the findings at Dubna (and to a lesser extent at the GSI in Darmstadt) and the failures at Berkeley firmly in the context of the transformations of collaborative patterns that emerged with the New World Order of the 1990s.