Radiation Nation
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RADIATION NATION
Radiation Nation
THREE MILE ISLAND AND THE POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE 1970s
Natasha Zaretsky
Columbia University Press
New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press
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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54248-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Zaretsky, Natasha, 1970– author.
Title: Radiation nation: Three Mile Island and the political transformation of the 1970s / Natasha Zaretsky.
Other titles: Three Mile Island and the political transformation of the 1970s
Description: New York: Columbia University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017038412 | ISBN 9780231179812 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231179805 (cloth: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: United States—Politics and government—1977–1981. | Nuclear power plants—Accidents—Pennsylvania—Harrisburg Region. | Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant (Pa.)—Accidents—Social aspects. | Radiation injuries—United States—Social aspects. | Political ecology—United States—History—20th century. | Nationalism—United States—History—20th century. | Conservatism—Environmental aspects—United States.
Classification: LCC E872 .Z37 2018 | DDC 363.17990974818—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038412
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.
Cover image: © AP Photo/Harrisburg Patriot-News, Martha Cooper
For Jonathan
The accident had ruined a lot of lives. Or, to be exact, it had busted apart the structures on which those lives had depended—depended, I guess, to a greater degree than we had originally believed. A town needs its children for a lot more than it thinks.
—Russell Banks, The Sweet Hereafter
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
PREFACE
Introduction
Chapter One
The Culture of Dissociation and the Rise of the Unborn
Chapter Two
The Accident and the Political Transformation of the 1970s
Chapter Three
Creating a Community of Fate at Three Mile Island
Chapter Four
The Second Cold War and the Extinction Threat
Conclusion
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS
FIGURE 1.1. Reddy Kilowatt Coloring Book
FIGURE 1.2. “Radioactivity. It’s Been in the Family for Generations.” Electric Light and Power Company Advertisement, 1972
FIGURE 1.3. “Your Child’s Teeth Contain Strontium 90.” SANE Advertisement, 1963
FIGURE 1.4. “1¼ Million Unborn Children Will Be Born Dead.” SANE Advertisement, 1960
FIGURE 1.5. “The Peaceful Atom Is a Bomb”
FIGURE 1.6. Map of Manmade Radiation Hazards, SANE World, May 1979
FIGURE 1.7. Ionizing Radiation in the Female Body
FIGURE 2.1. Map of Three Mile Island Region
FIGURE 2.2. Worker in Gas Mask Heading to Three Mile Island, 1979
FIGURE 2.3. A Red Cross Volunteer Receiving a Body Scan for Radiation, April 1979
FIGURE 2.4. Mother with Child, 1979
FIGURE 2.5. A Neighbor Helps Mother and Daughter Evacuate, March 30, 1979
FIGURE 2.6. Nurse Administers to Women and Children, Hershey Center, 1979
FIGURE 2.7. A Red Cross Volunteer Feeding Children, Hershey Center, 1979
FIGURE 2.8. Child Sleeping Under Civil Defense Blanket, 1979
FIGURE 3.1. Middletown Council Meeting, June 20, 1979
FIGURE 3.2. Illustration of Sex Reversal in Corn
FIGURE 3.3. Mutant Editorial Cartoon, January 1983
FIGURE 3.4. “Thank You, Met Ed” Sign
FIGURE 3.5. Have You Forgotten About Three Mile Island? 1981
FIGURE 3.6. Antinuclear and Pronuclear Protesters in Front of GPU Meeting, May 10, 1979
FIGURE 3.7. “Case Closed” Cartoon, 1983
FIGURE 4.1. Film Still from The Day After, 1983
FIGURE 4.2. Physicians Marching for Disarmament, New York City, June 1982
FIGURE 4.3. What Do You Feel About the Unthinkable? 1983
FIGURE 4.4. “The Earth Is Enveloped,” Council for a Livable World Education Fund
ABBREVIATIONS
AEC
Atomic Energy Commission
AMA
American Medical Association
ANGRY
Anti-Nuclear Group Representing York
CMCHS
Civilian-Military Contingency Hospital System
DER
Department of Environmental Resources
ECNP
Environmental Coalition on Nuclear Power
EIS
Environmental Impact Statement
FDA
Food and Drug Administration
FEMA
Federal Emergency Management Agency
GPU
General Public Utilities Corporation
MET-ED
Metropolitan Edison
NAS
National Academy of Sciences
NEI
Nuclear Energy Institute
NEJM
New England Journal of Medicine
NEPA
National Environmental Policy Act
NRC
Nuclear Regulatory Commission
NTS
Nevada Test Site
NW
Nuclear Winter
PANE
People Against Nuclear Energy
PCC
Pennsylvania Catholic Conference
PEMA
Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency
PIRC
TMI Public Interest Resource Center
PSR
Physicians for Social Responsibility
PTSD
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
SALT
Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty
SANE
Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy
SVA
Susquehanna Valley Alliance
TMI
Three Mile Island
UCS
Union of Concerned Scientists
USDA
US Department of Agriculture
WAND
Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament
YAF
Young Americans for Freedom
PREFACE
Ten years ago I stumbled upon the photograph that graces the cover of this book. Taken in the spring of 1979, it depicts a woman shadowing a toddler, leaning forward and clutching her hand to prevent a fall. This is a familiar moment, one that I have enacted myself many times. But in this case, the cooling towers of Three Mile Island rise up behind the mother and child, introducing a destabilizing element into an otherwise reassuring scene. As a historian of the 1970s who had written about the place of the family in debates about national crises such as the Vietnam War and the OPEC oil embargo, I wondered as I looked at the photograph whether women, gender, and the family might have also played an underappreciated role in the 1979 accident. How did mothers and children, husbands and wives, homemakers and feminists figure into the story of a nuclear crisis? And what might the accident reveal about US
political culture at a time of transition, when the intense polarization of our own time first took hold?
This book is the product of my engagement with these questions. It is a cultural history that uses the accident as a lens for examining the shifting political landscape of the late 1970s. Three Mile Island was and remains the site of the worst atomic power plant accident in US history. The near-meltdown confirmed the fears of longtime nuclear skeptics and catalyzed an antinuclear left. From the United States to Australia, from West Germany to the Philippines, the ominous cooling towers became a symbol of atomic danger, as activists demanded “no more Harrisburgs.” However, the immediate actors in the drama were the largely conservative, white, Christian residents who lived in the shadow of the reactor, especially women who feared for the health of their babies and unborn children. At Three Mile Island, the struggle over nuclear energy converged with contemporaneous struggles over feminism and abortion rights. The crisis thus brought into relief dimensions of the conservative movement that might otherwise have remained hidden from view.
Thanks to the cumulative labors of historians, the view of the 1970s as a sleepy interregnum between the New Left upheavals of the 1960s and the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s can be laid to rest. In the 1970s we see the origins of our own time: accelerating deindustrialization and the rise of global finance capitalism, falling wages and the proliferation of service work, the shattering of gender hierarchies and the end of the family wage economy, the resurgence of feminism and the transformation of the public sphere, the displacement of egalitarianism by meritocracy and the birth of a neoliberal regime that has (not by coincidence) unleashed economic inequality while feeding off the charismatic currents of feminism, antiracism, and gay liberation. We also see the roots of the polarization that shapes our contemporary political landscape, as those who embraced the social and cultural revolutions of the era squared off against those who opposed them. It is arguably for this reason that historians often use martial language—divisions, battlegrounds, wars, blowbacks, standoffs—to portray the decade’s contentious and volatile politics.
But this language, however useful as a heuristic device, presumes that what fueled the rise of the right above all was reaction and opposition to the left. The hundreds of letters, depositions, and testimonies written by Three Mile Island residents after the accident tell a different story. As they sought to make sense of a nuclear emergency, the men and women who lived near the plant drew on the protest cultures of the 1960s for inspiration. From the New Left and the antiwar movement, they absorbed a picture of the US government’s duplicity, its secrecy, and its need to maintain its power without public accountability or deliberation. From ecology, they borrowed insights about toxicity and contamination. And from the women’s and black liberation movements, they drew on a sense of bodily infringement and vulnerability that emerged out of a longstanding neglect of health and community well-being. If by the late 1970s US politics had come to resemble a warzone, it was one in which concepts, symbols, and insights circulated more widely and moved more freely across the battlefield than most scholars have thus far acknowledged.
This circulation created something new in US politics, what in this book I call biotic nationalism. This concept builds on an argument I made in No Direction Home, namely, that the 1970s witnessed the rise of an aggrieved nationalism on the right fueled by a sense of injury and violation. This aggrieved nationalism was not without historical precedent, of course. But in the wake of the successive political, military, and economic ruptures of the early 1970s, it functioned like a funhouse mirror, transmuting America’s unparalleled geopolitical power into a distorted vision of vulnerability and weakness. In Radiation Nation, I expand on this earlier argument by using the term biotic to foreground both the role of the body within post-Vietnam nationalism and the influence of ecological thought throughout narratives of national decline and revival in the 1970s. At its core, biotic nationalism is about betrayal: it proceeds from the charge that the nation has callously turned its back on the bodies of its own citizens, leaving the United States itself weakened and sickened. This creates a distinctly embittered strain of US nationalism that can explode to the surface at moments of crisis. “While America keeps a splendid and welcoming house,” writes Anatol Lieven, “it also keeps a family of demons in its cellar.”1 One of those demons is nationalism.
The sense of betrayal contained within biotic nationalism originated in the Cold War security state. Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, the US government willingly (and often knowingly) sacrificed the health, well-being, and life chances of its own citizens in the name of national security. From southeastern Nevada to Hanford, Washington, to Rocky Flats, Colorado, men, women, and children living within patriotic, military communities became sick and died from exposure to radioactive isotopes. The nation’s subaltern and dispossessed—descendants of the enslaved, members of the black and brown commons, queers, immigrants, the poor, the homeless, the incarcerated, political radicals and revolutionaries—already knew that theirs were bodies that did not matter to those in power. Nor was this a revelation to the native peoples of the Southwest who bore the burden of uranium mining, milling, and waste. But by the 1970s patriotic white Americans who lived among testing sites and munitions factories were also becoming convinced that their lives had been rendered disposable by the state. Borrowing from the antiwar movement’s insights about the Vietnam War, the ecology movement’s recognition of the interconnection between biological and environmental health, and the black and women’s health movements’ insistence that bodily integrity was a stake of social struggle, these patriotic Americans crafted an oppositional politics of their own, one that played a critical and largely overlooked role in the consolidation of late-twentieth-century conservatism.
This politics challenged the logic of the Cold War and in particular a culture of dissociation that sought to isolate a fraught global landscape of nuclear danger from the domesticated and commoditized mores of civilian life. The first chapter traces the creation and breakup of this culture between 1945 and 1979. The second and third chapters turn their attention to Three Mile Island, looking first at the accident and then at the community’s ultimately unsuccessful effort to shut down the reactor. These chapters serve as a case study of the interplay between the protest culture, feminism, and conservatism. The final chapter traces the evolution of nuclear fears during the Second Cold War of the 1980s, as the atomic age gave way to the ecological age, an epoch in which all politics is increasingly filtered through the lens of human-made disasters. But even as the atomic age mutated into the ecological one, there remained continuities, not only between the prominence of fear and a collective sense of looming disaster, but also in a vision of the United States as a wounded and vulnerable body.
During the years that I was researching and writing this book, I could not have anticipated the election of Donald Trump, who can be seen among many things as an avatar of biotic nationalism. Trump’s victory, propelled by his promise to “Make America Great Again,” speaks to the power of the embittered and redemptive strain of US nationalism that I explore here. By promising to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, Trump conjured the spatial dimensions of an exclusionary ethnonationalism, but by using the adverb again he also made a temporal claim; the nation itself—like a human body—is a living organism that can decline or rejuvenate over time. This likening of the nation to a living body has deep religious, philosophical, and historical roots, but after the Vietnam War, it was reborn again and helped to animate an angry, volatile American nationalist current that has always existed alongside civic nationalist aspirations. In the 1970s, this current contested the universalist ideals of the New Left and the early women’s movement, and it provides a crucial clue for understanding the triumph of the right.
While Radiation Nation focuses on the same period as my prior book, it has taken me down new scholarly avenues. In order to tell the story of Three Mile Island, I have
learned much about energy, ecology, technology, and public health. However, like No Direction Home, this is a work of cultural history that uncovers gender and the family in surprising places. Ultimately, both books represent my own attempt—however partial and incomplete—to make sense of the paradox that has preoccupied me throughout much of my life, namely, how the New Left revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s transformed US culture and society but failed to halt the nation’s rightward political march. The Susquehanna River Valley of central Pennsylvania may seem an unlikely place to puzzle through this paradox, but in the pages that follow I try to make the case that some of the answers might be found there.
Introduction
At 4:00 AM on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, the most serious accident in the history of US nuclear energy occurred at Unit Two of the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear facility.1 A valve was mistakenly left open, permitting large amounts of water—normally used to cool the plant’s core—to escape. As the containment building lost coolant, temperatures and radiation levels rose. The plant began leaking radiation into the surrounding air and water, and a hydrogen bubble formed at the top of the core’s container, making it difficult for workers to bring down its temperature and stoking fears of an explosion. Two nights later, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite warned the nation that it faced “the considerable uncertainties and dangers of the worst nuclear power plant accident of the atomic age. And the horror tonight is that it could get much worse.” In fact, the accident did not get worse. No explosion occurred, and plant operators were eventually able to bring down temperatures inside the core. Still, the Three Mile Island accident exposed unresolved safety questions that contributed to an informal three-decade moratorium on the licensing of new plants, making it a watershed in the history of nuclear power.2