An evergreen methodological admonition among historians of technology is to study failure as much as success. Yet we rarely live up to that goal. Technological successes are, generally, easier to study and more fun to read about.

John Krige may have the solution. If we want to study failure, then historians of technology need only look to diplomatic relations among states. In diplomacy, no one gets everything they want; often no one gets anything they want. When you add the complications of technology to diplomacy – especially finicky and dangerous technologies such as rockets and atomic energy – the chances of failure and disappointment increase astronomically.

The intersection of foreign relations and technology provides other methodological advantages too. Historians of technology often speak of groups ‘negotiating’ artefacts such as bicycles and electrical grids – but in diplomacy the negotiations are literal, and minutely documented in letters, cables, reports and memoirs. The archival traces of diplomatic negotiation shouldn't be taken at face value – as Krige shows, diplomats often don't tell or know the truth – but those traces still offer more detail than is available for metaphorical ‘negotiations’.

The negotiations Krige examines in Sharing Knowledge, Shaping Europe centre on the circulation and diffusion (‘proliferation’, in actors’ terms) of nuclear and space technologies across the North Atlantic from the 1950s to the 1970s. The book reads as – and the introduction implies it partly is – a sequel to Krige's more science-oriented American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (2006). Many of the themes of that book reappear here: potential German rearmament, Gaullist belief that France must lead rather than join, the jerky pace of European integration.

In Sharing Knowledge, Shaping Europe, however, the case studies are more focused on technologies with clear dual-use potential. Chapters 1 and 2 look at Euratom in the context of Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace programme. Chapter 3 presents a late 1960s episode in US–West German space cooperation that was linked to disputes over defence payments. Chapter 4 delves into the darkly humorous tale of Britain's on-again–off-again relationship with the European Launcher Development Organisation (a predecessor of the European Space Agency). Chapter 5 revolves (no pun intended) around American monitoring of British innovation in centrifuges used for enriching uranium. The conclusion wraps up, but also includes further empirical material on Henry Kissinger's bullying yet cooperative attitude toward France's nuclear weapons programme in the early 1970s.

Perhaps because the book focuses on dual-use technologies, the actors come across as more cynical and aggressive than in American Hegemony. Successive US administrations, in particular, are depicted as trying to divert European allies into giant technoscientific adventures designed to devour scarce resources that could have been used to develop bombs and missiles instead. Indeed, sometimes Krige's narrative reveals cynical explanations that the actors themselves were unaware of. For instance, he shows that US diplomats believed that their suasions of logic, friendship and soft power convinced Harold Wilson to keep Britain in ELDO – when in fact Wilson simply discovered that the UK would have to pay an enormous penalty for leaving the organization (a penalty the UK itself had imposed on ELDO members under Macmillan). Later, the tables were turned when the UK thought it had wriggled out of harsh US restrictions on centrifuge development. In fact, the US simply discovered that British researchers were working with an outmoded design and lifted the restrictions in order to encourage the UK to continue down a defunct technological path.

Because of the dual-use character of nuclear and space technologies, Krige's actors are also more internally divided than in American Hegemony. Each nation's security establishment saw nuclear power, rockets and satellites in military terms, while their industrialists viewed the same technologies in commercial terms. Pursuit of military aims (for instance, by helping allies build up their nuclear programmes) was sometimes hampered by pursuit of commercial aims (for example, by the US Congress's insistence on a Buy American policy). Each nation's diplomats tried to balance commercial and security objectives, but also interpreted those objectives differently than did their military and industrial colleagues. For instance, in 1958 the US Department of State and Atomic Energy Commission came to blows over whether Euratom's member states should be allowed to inspect each other (rather than being subject to third-party inspectors) to prevent fissile material being diverted to weapons programmes. State thought promoting Euratom (and hence European integration) would aid non-proliferation; the AEC thought that making an exception for Euratom would undermine the IAEA and cripple non-proliferation.

All these inter- and intranational divisions led, almost inevitably, to failure and disappointment. As a reader, I found Krige's stories of frustration occasionally, well, frustrating – especially in the first two chapters on Euratom, where a great deal occurs but ultimately not much happens. Still, as a historian I recognize that all that frustration and disappointment tells us something important about both diplomacy and technology. Those first two chapters may, though, appeal more to historians of US foreign policy and European integration than to general historians of technology. Certainly, Krige very clearly charts for his readers how the Euratom chapters navigate among various arguments in diplomatic history much more than in history of technology. Conversely, I suspect historians of technology will find Chapters 3–5 to be more in line with our disciplinary tastes. The latter case studies are more self-contained, their narratives are more linear, and the design of artefacts (solid fuel or liquid fuel for rockets, centrifuges with or without end caps) plays a larger role.

In other words, Krige is – like his actors – trying to satisfy very different constituencies whose norms are somewhat in tension. Fortunately, he succeeds better than his actors. Readers will be challenged, but all will finish with an understanding of the centrality of technology in post-war diplomacy – and of the influence of relations among states on the evolution of technology.