Radiation Nation

by Natasha Zaretsky

  Patriotic body politics drew inspiration from the era’s social movements. From pacifism it borrowed the insight that militarization permeated every aspect of life; from ecology it took the warning that human health could be threatened by environmental assaults; from the black and women’s health movements it drew on the awareness that sickness could have political meaning; and from feminism it took the recognition that the body could be a site of contestation. But above all, it took from the antiwar movement the revelation that the government could deceive its own people, even in matters of life and death. Indeed, it was the Vietnam War that provided the crucial historical backdrop for patriotic body politics. The call to military service was the moment when men were asked to give up their lives—to sacrifice their bodies—on behalf of their nation.18 The failures of the war, combined with divisiveness on the home front, raised the question of whether that sacrifice had been for nothing. This question haunted not just the families of dead and returning servicemen, but also the relatives of prisoners of war and MIAs, disabled veterans, and US soldiers exposed to Agent Orange. Narratives recounting the suffering of these men tethered physical illness to lost patriotism and disillusionment. Within these narratives, somatic suffering emerged as a symptom of national injury inflicted not by a foreign enemy, but by the US government.19 As the country hovered between left and right in the late 1970s, an ambiguous body politics incorporated the legacy of the social movements of the 1960s and facilitated the nation’s rightward shift.

  Occurring six years after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, which formally ended the war in Vietnam, the accident at Three Mile Island relocated threats of bodily injury and premature death away from the warfront to the domestic realm, and from the masculine, martial body to the reproductive female body, the young child’s body, and the fetal body. This relocation positioned women—specifically in their capacities as mothers, nurturers, and custodians of health—at the center of the struggle over the fate of the reactor. At Three Mile Island, it was primarily mothers of young children who rejected the official claim that the accident had done no harm and who demanded the decommissioning of the plant. In the shadow of the nuclear reactor, patriotic body politics became women’s reproductive politics. The accident thus crystallized the centrality of women to the conservative ecological imaginary. To be sure, this was not wholly new. The call for a ban on weapons testing in the 1950s, for example, had been spearheaded largely by white, middle-class women who mobilized hegemonic conceptions of motherhood and domesticity in order to critique Cold War militarism and deflect red-baiting. This movement had allowed women to carve out a public space for themselves before the resurgence of feminism while enabling them to surpass the limits of Cold War politics.20 Women’s activism at Three Mile Island resonated with this earlier mobilization, but it occurred against a radically different political backdrop: the feminist revolution of the 1970s.

  The women’s politics that emerged at Three Mile Island stood in complex relation to this revolution. On the one hand, the women who lived near the plant drew on the feminist insight that women’s reproductive health was a political issue, and that state and medical experts could not be trusted. On the other hand, they appealed to an earlier maternalist tradition that valorized motherhood and familial obligation in ways that many (though not all) women’s liberation activists were rejecting. While late-twentieth-century feminism was multidimensional, a primary goal was to free women from the claim that women’s biological capacities should delineate their place in society; thus women’s reproductive rights encompassed the right not to have children at all.21 The politics of reproduction at Three Mile Island was very different, centering not on how to protect women from the reproduction imperative, but on how to protect reproduction from external threats. If the culture wars were waged over the fate of women’s reproductive rights, these wars played out against a broader, more diffuse backdrop animated by ecological questions over the fate of reproduction writ large. At Three Mile Island, then, conservative women articulated a new politics that drew simultaneously on post-Vietnam critiques of expert authority, a feminist politicization of the body, and a biologically based rendering of community peril. At the center of this politics was the figure of the unborn, which first took shape within the atomic-cum-ecological imaginary and only later assumed prominence within the culture wars over feminism, gay liberation, and reproductive rights.

  Radiation Nation thus makes two interrelated moves. It places reproduction at the center of the ecological imaginary, and it places the ecological imaginary at the center of post-1968 conservative politics. By doing so, it revises our understanding of the conservative counterrevolution in four ways. First, this book complicates an account of the conservative resurgence that interprets it exclusively as a backlash against the perceived excesses of the 1960s and 1970s—against the antiwar movement, which it condemned for its elitism and antipatriotism; against the liberal welfare state, which it saw as a benefactor of racialized largesse; and against the feminist and gay revolutions, which it construed as a threat to traditional familial and gender roles.22 These accounts all proceed from the premise that the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s gave rise to a divide between those who endorsed and those who rejected multiculturalism, feminism, and gay liberation. Thus we have the metaphor of the culture wars. Accordingly, historians characterize the 1970s either as a period of conservative reaction (for example, in the creation of right-leaning think tanks and political action groups) or as a time when the legacies of the left-inflected social movements of the 1960s endured, even as national politics moved rightward (for example, within local community organizing and institution building).23 But such characterizations are partial and incomplete. What happened at Three Mile Island makes clear that the strength of post-1968 conservatism hinged less on an overt rejection of the antiwar, ecology, and feminist movements and more on its capacity to appropriate and retool their insights that a deceptive, callous government could turn its back on its most loyal citizens and that women’s bodies could be sites of political struggle. Yet as these insights were integrated into post-1968 conservatism, their meanings shifted, often in ways that stripped them of their earlier ethical content. If the culture wars are associated with polarization, the ecological age is animated instead by a culture of suspicion that blurs the line between left and right and places the imperiled body at the center of eroding trust.

  Second, by contending that the imperiled body played a constitutive role in the rise of the right, this book attends not to policy-making, but rather to the structures of feeling and affect that animated post-1968 conservative politics. To be clear: one argument that I am not making is that the attention to suffering bodies that found expression in patriotic body politics translated into tangible policies and practices that protected bodily health and safety. On the contrary, in recent years, the political right has often advanced highly disembodied arguments that champion abstract principles such as the “free market” and “personal liberty” over the protection of biological health. Examples include the staunch advocacy of gun ownership rights, opposition to a perceived “nanny state” that seeks to use public policy as an instrument for promoting wellness, and the shredding of federal regulations that place public health and environmental protection above corporate profit. What mattered historically about patriotic body politics, in other words, was not that its preoccupation with suffering bodies somehow became concretized or codified within conservative policy-making. Rather, it mattered because, at a crucial moment of transition in the nation’s political life, it provided a potent field of imagery and emotion that shaped the affective regime of post-Vietnam conservatism. This regime was structured above all by a profound sense of betrayal.24

  Third, the conservative ecological politics that came to the fore after the accident was not based on an electoral or demographic realignment, of the sort classically described in works like Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors, Kevin Kruse’s White Flight, and Elizabe
th Tandy Shermer’s Sunbelt Capitalism.25 This story is not one of voters shifting their party allegiances or one of a redrawing of the political map in central Pennsylvania. On the contrary, the region had been a Republican Party stronghold in the state before 1979 and remained one afterward. This is instead a story of a transition within conservatism, as local actors at Three Mile Island incorporated elements of the protest culture into their ideological and strategic arsenal, a move that at once deepened the region’s long-standing suspicion of big government and populist skepticism toward expertise and extended them into intimate spheres of bodily illness, sickness, and death. If the body politics that emerged at Three Mile Island reflected the reach of social movements like feminism, it also captured the extent to which, by the late 1970s, the core insights of these movements—contrary to being blockaded by post-Vietnam conservatism—had been folded into the conservative imaginary. Rather than being displaced, the region’s conservatism underwent a change or—to borrow from radiation’s own lexicon—a mutation, one that made it stronger rather than weaker.

  Finally and in its broadest implications, this book complicates the view of the United States as a quintessentially liberal nation founded on the principle of individual rights that has become more inclusive over time.26 According to this civic nationalist account, the story of the nation is one of gradual inclusion of historically excluded groups into the liberal fold and the continuing extension of political and civil rights: first to immigrants, then to African Americans, and then, in the 1970s, to women and gay people. But this version of history neglects an alternative vision that runs alongside the liberal one and often undercuts its promise: an ethnonationalism that mobilizes images of community endangerment, demarcates sharp lines between insiders and outsiders, and creates a climate of paranoia, fear, and distrust. This US ethnonationalism began in the colonial era, spanned the history of western settlement, gave shape to ideologies of racial and ethnic hierarchy, underwrote nativism and xenophobia, reached a fever pitch during the Cold War, and resurfaced amid the political, economic, and military ruptures of the 1970s.27

  My thesis is that in the late 1970s, this second nationalism became shot through with ecologically derived images of the vulnerable bodies of mothers, babies, and fetuses, creating a biotic nationalism. Radiation Nation draws on the story of Three Mile Island to illuminate this process. I use the term biotic, which refers to living and organic systems, in order to stress the new, enhanced role of the body within an aggrieved nationalism that took hold on the political right in the wake of military defeat in Vietnam. As we shall see, biotic nationalism did two crucial things at once: it compelled many Americans to imagine the nation as a weakened body, feeding into a narrative of national decline, and it cited the suffering body as evidence of betrayal, propelling the rightward turn. The near-meltdown at Three Mile Island thus revealed both the endurance of ethnonationalism and its ecological adaptation within late-twentieth-century American politics.

  Chapter One

  THE CULTURE OF DISSOCIATION AND THE RISE OF THE UNBORN

  The political realignment of the 1970s had its roots in the early Cold War. The dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945 unleashed what peace advocate Norman Cousins described as “a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown [which] has burst out of the subconscious and into the conscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehensions.”1 In the United States, this fear intensified with the acceleration of nuclear testing that accompanied the Cold War arms race. That race transformed the nation’s infrastructure, as the government built plutonium factories, uranium mines, enrichment facilities, and testing sites across nearly all fifty states. Physicist Niels Bohr predicted to scientist Edward Teller that building the atomic bomb would require remaking the United States into one huge factory.2 Between 1946 and 1963, this factory kept busy: the government conducted nearly six hundred atomic tests (many above ground), produced more than seventy thousand nuclear warheads (more than all the other nuclear states combined), and set in motion a series of slow-motion disasters in the form of cancer epidemics at testing sites and munitions factories.3 Meanwhile, the possibility of the deployment of atomic weapons never went away. Between 1952 and 1969, the US military considered such deployments in Korea, French-Indochina, Cuba, and Vietnam.

  The atomic presence was at once ubiquitous and hidden from view, a slight of hand achieved through the creation of a culture of dissociation, a Cold War cultural logic according to which US civilians could supposedly be shielded from danger while its military wielded a nuclear arsenal comprising bombs, missiles, submarines, and doomsday devices. This culture aimed to defuse or tamp down what political and policy elites saw as the greatest danger posed by the atomic age. This was not atomic weaponry itself, but rather the unleashing of irrational, extreme emotions that could take a variety of forms: populist mass movements such as Nazism, Communism, and McCarthyism on the one hand, or the widespread panic and hysteria that civil defense planners imagined might ensue in the event of a nuclear attack on the other.4

  Drawing on this culture, postwar promoters of atomic power insisted that the dangers of nuclear bombs did not extend to power plants. At the same time, atomic power’s role as a source of cheap household electricity aligned it with the normative ideal of the white, middle-class domestic sphere of the 1950s. The “peaceful atom”—to borrow from President Eisenhower’s famous “Atoms for Peace” speech—would power the myriad household appliances flooding the US consumer market: refrigerators, air conditioners, televisions, washers, dryers, and vacuum cleaners. If the bomb symbolized the instability of the atomic age, then power plants would be associated with the opposite: a tranquil domestic space that provided white, middle-class consumer-citizens with safety, health, cleanliness, and abundance. Within the atomic imaginary, an ostensibly apolitical, consumption-oriented, feminized domestic realm provided cover for a technocratically managed war machine.

  This culture of dissociation was always fragile. Haunting it was the specter of radiation. When Marie Curie first discovered radium in 1898, chemists and biologists heralded it as an elixir with vitalizing properties. But the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 remade radiation (released when radium decays) into a symbol of death, and in the United States, the subsequent acceleration of nuclear testing incited fear that radiation could seep into the atmosphere and harm human health. Throughout the 1950s, radiation scares became a routine, if also unnerving, feature of everyday life. The testing of atomic weapons sickened and killed livestock, spread radioactive ash and rain, and deposited Strontium-90 in wheat and milk. In 1959, President Eisenhower created a federal radiation council, and biologists singled out young children, infants, and “the unborn” (a term that referred to both developing fetuses and those not yet conceived) as vulnerable to radiological dangers.

  The culture of dissociation fell apart in the late 1960s. The protest movements of the era challenged a Manichean Cold War logic that relied on isolating the foreign and domestic realms—that is, maintaining militarization abroad and peaceful consensus at home. Meanwhile, as the licensing of power plants sped up, radiation fears once centered on weapons testing were redirected toward nuclear power plants. In the 1970s, two social movements reflected the shift: an antinuclear movement that insisted that nuclear weapons and plants were part of one interconnected system, and a community of radiation sufferers from every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle. Three Mile Island alone did not undo the culture of dissociation. But the accident shattered the dissociative logic by challenging the distinction between plants and bombs, undermining the official claim that American citizens would be protected from radiological harm, and propelling the symbol of the irradiated body to the center of a crisis in authority. Before turning our attention to the accident itself, we need to look first at the history of the culture of dissociation between 1945 and 1979—how it was assembled, how it came apart, and how it was haunted by the figure of the unborn.

  STRIPPING THE MILITARY CASING: CREAT
ING THE CULTURE OF DISSOCIATION

  Both the drive to integrate atomic energy into a peaceful, consumerist economy and the difficulties inherent in that process became evident soon after World War II. In August 1946, Congress transferred atomic weapons and energy research from military to civilian control when it created the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). From now on, this federal agency would oversee the diffuse web of government laboratories, university-housed programs, and production plants established as part of the Manhattan Project. At the time of the AEC’s creation, this web included thirty-seven installations located in nineteen states and Canada, and it employed thirty-eight thousand contract workers, almost four thousand government workers, and two thousand military personnel.5 The aim of the AEC would be to continue the wartime work of research into atomic weaponry, while turning attention to the civilian applications of atomic power. While the new agency ostensibly brought atomic energy under civilian jurisdiction, the military retained a firm practical and psychological hold over the new technology. The 1946 legislation created a powerful military liaison committee, and both civilian elites and military officers in the commission remained fixated on the issue of national security. Because military and civilian atomic power would now be housed under the same administrative umbrella, the latter could never fully shed the aura of secrecy associated with the earlier Manhattan Project.