A second constellation of threats posed by radiation exposure revolved around reproductive and fetal health. Here, scientists and clinicians issued three warnings. First, they cautioned that the risks of radiation exposure were even more acute for the developing fetus than they were for the young. “A living organism is more sensitive to radiation damage in the early embryonic stage than at any other time in the entire life cycle,” explained one radiology expert.72 Geneticists and biologists in the late 1950s warned that fetal exposure to radioactive isotopes like Tritium and Cesium-137 could cause birth defects like microcephaly and mental disability, both of which had been diagnosed in Japanese babies who had been in utero at the time of the bombings in 1945. The second warning was that both male and female reproductive organs were especially sensitive to radiation. Thus exposure could lead to sterility and infertility. Finally, scientists warned that radiation could unleash multigenerational genetic mutations that might not appear at first, but could manifest at some indeterminate future point. After the Bravo test in 1954, A. H. Sturtevant, a geneticist at the California Institute of Technology, predicted that the explosion alone would eventually exact a “genetic toll” on eighteen hundred children. This figure was based in part on evolutionary biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan’s famous Drosophila experiments, in which radiation had been used in the laboratory to induce mutations in fruit flies.73 “Every new bomb exploded will result in an increase in this ultimate harvest of defective individuals,” Sturtevant warned in baldly eugenicist language. In 1956 and 1958, the genetics committee of the National Academy of Sciences and the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation issued similar warnings. While the NAS study was tentative about the carcinogenic effects of low-level radiation, the findings of its genetics committee were less ambiguous: “radiation causes mutations or harmful changes in the genes or germ cells of the reproductive organs.” These mutations could shorten life spans and eventually lead to an increase in what the Academy called “deformed or freakish children.” A follow-up UN report stressed that once a genetic mutation occurred, the process was irreversible: “Even if the mutation is in one gene, there is some harmful effect and that mutation will go through every generation until the line that bears it becomes extinct.”74 The report stressed that in contrast to somatic injuries, genetic injuries were intergenerational. “Man’s actions,” it argued, “can damage the genetic inheritance … once the genes have been altered, there is no changing them back.”75
These warnings placed genetic injury at the center of a widening public debate about atomic weapons testing. In November 1958, chemist and test critic Linus Pauling predicted that every year of continued testing could eventually lead to fifty-five thousand “defective births” and one hundred thousand stillbirths.76 By causing premature death, radiation-induced cancers imperiled the presumably protected realm of childhood, but a pediatric cancer—as horrific as it was—went to the grave with its victim. Genetic damage was different. It could upend the reproductive process altogether, either through bringing it to a halt through sterility or infertility, or through setting in motion runaway mutations that divorced reproduction from the logic of generational continuity on which it ostensibly relied. As the National Academy of Sciences explained, a genetic injury would only fade out with the extinction of the genetic line. “Mutant genes,” it warned, “can only disappear when the inheritance in which they are carried dies out.”77 Anticipating a dawning anthropogenic consciousness, Danish biologist Mogens Westergaard grimly concluded that humans had entered a new era in which their mistakes were now irreversible, drastically altering “the course of man’s biological evolution.”78
Like oncology, genetics occupied a central place in US postwar science. The federal government greatly increased funding for genetics research after 1945, in part because it wanted to better understand the hazards of low-level radiation exposure. But as historian Luis Campos has shown, the links between radiation and genetics went back much further.79 As we have seen, radium’s vitality—its role as a “mutant” among the elements—had convinced turn-of-the-century scientists that the element contained the secret of life. Thus the discovery of radium prefigured, and would eventually be displaced by, the subsequent claim that the origin and nature of life were encoded within the gene. In the 1950s, radiation propelled some of the most significant advances in genetics, including the first photographic image of the DNA molecule, which relied on X-ray diffraction and laid the groundwork for the discovery of the double helix two years later. In addition, evolutionary biologists and botanists enlisted radium, radiation, and X-rays as mutagens in the life-sciences laboratory—that is, as agents that could artificially induce mutations. Radium and radiation thus provided life scientists with the metaphorical, material, and experimental supplies required for the eventual development of a genic theory of mutation. The work of evolutionary biologists in particular yielded a corrective to the Darwinian theory that species change could only occur over a long time horizon. Mutations could occur abruptly, even within a single generation.
This fear of mutation, and the prospect of a “weirded” reproduction contained within it, propelled the figure of the unborn to the center of the radiation scare and facilitated the transformation of the fetus into an object of intensified visual and legal scrutiny. This was something new. Before 1945, human fetuses had been displayed only at museums, exhibitions, and world’s fairs. But between 1946 and 1953, photographs of the developing fetus were featured in Newsweek, Time, and Life, allowing millions of Americans to “see” it for the first time. In 1946, the same year that Newsweek printed a photograph of a three-month-old fetus, the District Court of the District of Columbia heard the case of Bette Gay Bonbrest, a girl born in 1939 who had sustained serious injuries during her delivery by forceps. Her father sued the obstetrician for negligence, and the court established “the right of a child to recover from harm incurred when it was a viable fetus in utero.” Establishing that “a child en ventre sa mere is regarded as a human being from the moment of conception,” the case overturned six decades of legal precedent and was quickly emulated by other courts. By 1960, eighteen states had awarded damages for prenatal injury.80 The growing legibility of the fetus became entwined with the rise of atomic power.81 A volume published in 1959 titled Atoms and the Law devoted over twenty pages to radiation and prenatal injury and the Hibakusha, the Japanese term for the community of bombing victims, included babies who had been in utero at the time of the explosions.82 The postwar cultural, scientific, and legal construction of the fetus, in other words, emerged in a proto-ecological field psychologically saturated with radiation.83
The unborn was thus an atomically charged figure before it became caught up in the coming abortion war. And it was the growing movement against atomic weapons testing, in which mothers played an outsized role, which helped to suffuse this figure with new political meaning. The coalition calling for a test ban that took shape in the late 1950s and 1960s was diverse. It included pacifist organizations like the American Friends Service Committee, religious organizations like the World Council of Churches and the Lutheran World Federation, and prominent public scientists-cum-activists like Linus Pauling and Albert Schweitzer. But the shock troops of organizations like SANE (1957) and especially Women Strike for Peace (1961) were white, middle-class women who appealed to hegemonic conceptions of motherhood and respectability in order to legitimize their role in a male-dominated public sphere.84 In the wake of McCarthyism, when dissent was seen as almost treasonous, the appeal to motherhood—sometimes referred to as maternalism—provided test ban activists with political cover while also helping to give the movement a religious inflection. The Catholic Church was especially vocal in its opposition. In his 1955 Easter Sunday address, Pope Pius XII condemned nuclear testing on the grounds that it threatened “that mysterious something which is deep down in every living thing” and warned of the “horrors of monstrous offspring.”85
As activists honed their
arguments, they increasingly appealed to “the rights of the unborn.” Insisting that testing constituted an ethical Rubicon for the nation, they contended that it produced two distinct but parallel crises of political representation. First, because fallout did not follow any predictable path, it posed a threat to citizens beyond the territorial bounds of the United States. In 1958, Albert Schweitzer presented the dilemma clearly: “Bomb testing harms peoples far from the sovereign territories of the nuclear powers—endangering the lives and health of distant peoples.”86 From this, Schweitzer concluded that nuclear testing fell under the jurisdiction of international rather than national law, a claim that captured how traditional political boundaries were becoming attenuated within the Anthropocene. “No nation has the moral right to take risks for other people without their consent,” explained a SANE pamphlet, “No nation has the moral right to contaminate the air and water and the food that belong to other people. The air does not belong to the US alone, or the Soviet Union alone, or Great Britain alone.”87 Because testing posed a physical danger to peoples who had never consented to it, activists claimed, it constituted a form of what they called annihilation, extermination, or contamination without representation. One SANE advertisement placed the question of consent at the center of the testing crisis: “we have every right to take such risks to ourselves as we wish in the pursuit of our own security. But we do not have the right—nor does any nation—to take risks, large or small, for other people without their consent.” “If we persist in an act that is actually or potentially hazardous to other peoples,” the advertisement continued, “we have the obligation to give them the complete right to participate in the processes of government and public debate inside our own nation.”88
The testing crisis was not only spatial. It followed a temporal course as well, and it is here that the unborn entered. Unlike somatic traumas, radiation’s genetic harms stretched into the future, ensnaring successive generations in its web. This meant that fallout posed a threat not only to living humans, but also to those who had not yet been conceived. As one Newsweek reader put it, “once upon a time, war affected only those in the line of fire, now it reaches into the third and fourth generations.”89 The claim that fallout constituted a form of contamination without representation thus established an affinity between non-US citizens and the unborn. Neither had political voice, and both were being placed at biological risk without their consent. In May 1958, Albert Schweitzer published an essay titled “The Rights of the Unborn and the Peril Today” in which he singled out the dormancy of radiation as its “most sinister aspect” precisely because of its repercussions for those not yet here: “Years may pass before the evil consequences appear,” he wrote. “Indeed, incipient injuries may manifest themselves, not in the first or second generations, but in the following cycles. Observers in generation after generation, for centuries to come, will witness the birth of ever-increasing numbers of children with mental and physical defects.”90 Citing French biologist Jean Rostand, who had condemned weapons testing as a “crime against the future,” Schweitzer insisted that the living had obligations to the not yet born: “Only those who have never been present at the birth of a deformed baby, never witnessed the whimpering cries of its mother, could dare to maintain that the present risk of nuclear tests must be taken.”91 Similarly, Indian delegate Krishna Menon told the UN General Assembly during a debate about nuclear testing that the United Nations had an obligation not “only to represent ourselves but to represent … the generation that is unborn.”92 In April 1958, Time magazine featured a photograph of prominent SANE supporters with the caption “Defenders of the unborn … or dupes of the enemies of liberty?”93 The magazine went with the later theory, but the caption indexed just how prominent the figure of the unborn had become.
The movement also deployed this figure in its visual iconography in order to convey a sense of urgency. The earliest SANE advertisements had been densely worded position statements that contained no photographs or illustrations. But in July 1959, SANE member Lewis Mumford wrote to founder Norman Cousins, warning that these well-intentioned advertisements would come up short: “The facts you list are properly horrifying, but they won’t be read … and they won’t lead to action … I’d rather see four quarter page advertisements that would hit the reader like a blow between the eyes.”94 To that end, Mumford suggested simple, hard-hitting sentences accompanied by photographs of children, since, as he put it, “the people who will have the most cause for complaint against our nuclear policy are our descendants.”95 By the early 1960s, the architects of SANE’s publicity campaigns were taking his advice. The famous “Dr. Spock Is Worried” campaign, launched in April 1962, featured a photograph of the prominent pediatrician standing over a toddler girl. The following July, another SANE ad featured a single milk bottle stamped with a skull and cross-bones, provoking outrage from the milk industry.
No less alarming was a SANE advertisement from August 1962 that showed the silhouette of a woman in the final weeks of pregnancy, her hands clasped over her pregnant belly, her hair done up in a tidy bun. The caption that accompanies the photo reads: “1 ¼ Million unborn children will be born dead or have some gross defect because of Nuclear Bomb testing.” The power of the advertisement resides precisely in what it does not show. There are no grotesque images of dead or deformed fetuses, and there is no window into this woman’s womb. Instead, the caption asks readers to imagine what might be happening inside this woman’s impregnated body. It alerts them to the frightening possibility that this seemingly healthy pregnancy has been compromised, perhaps fatally, by weapons testing. The refined, manicured outward appearance of the pregnant woman stands in implicit contrast to something unpredictable and terrifying that could potentially be unfolding within. The ultimate crime of testing, the advertisement suggests, is that it transports the reproductive process from the domain of the natural, the universal, and the predictable into that of the liminal, the volatile, and the uncanny.96
The radiation scare undermined the Cold War logic of dissociation that relied on stark distinctions between the foreign and the domestic, safety and danger, and war and peace. The possibility that radiation from atomic testing could infiltrate the most intimate interstices of life (baby teeth, children’s bones, milk, the womb) meant that atomic danger transgressed all boundaries: the political boundary between the soldier and the civilian; the territorial boundary between nation-states; the biological boundary between the body and its environment; and the temporal boundary between the living and the not yet born. The scare was a by-product of the atomic age, but it prefigured the centrality of the imperiled body to the coming ecological age: the emergence of a body permeable to stealth assaults; the fear of cancer as a nimble disease of late industrial modernity; an elusive set of questions surrounding the human body’s capacity to carry toxic loads; the advent of risks that relayed back and forth between the somatic and the planetary; and an ambiguity surrounding whether it was the dosage or the timing of exposure that rendered the body vulnerable to toxic injury. The question of timing located the figure of the unborn at the center of the radiation scare in a way that fueled the construction of the fetus as a legal person susceptible to environmental harm.
FIGURE 1.4. “1 ¼ Million Unborn Children Will Be Born Dead,” SANE Advertisement, 1960. Copyright Held by SANE, Inc. Courtesy of Swarthmore College Peace Collection.
But even as the scare haunted the Cold War, the line between plants and bombs remained intact throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Because anxieties centered on fallout from weapons testing, civilian nuclear power remained removed from it. That the first nuclear power plant went online in 1958 at the height of the scare suggests that promoters of civilian atomic energy were at least partially successful in their efforts to distance reactors from bombs. But their success was also the result of historical timing. With the signing of the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, the radiation scare receded from view; the licensing of new plants was taking off
just as public fears of radiation were subsiding. The suppression of this fear would prove short-lived, however. By the late 1960s, the debate over radiation resurfaced, and this time, nuclear reactors would be at the center of the controversy.
THE CULTURE OF DISSOCIATION COMES APART
The culture of dissociation had always been fragile, but by the late 1960s, it was unraveling amid political, social, and cultural upheaval. The movement against the Vietnam War shattered the Cold War consensus, as antiwar activists insisted that militarization could not be cordoned off but instead violated the entire society. Over the course of the 1970s, the antiwar impulse and the antiauthoritarianism of the prior decade were extended to the nuclear power industry. Three intersecting forces proved especially crucial: dissident scientists who broke ranks and publicly voiced concerns about plant safety; a burgeoning antinuclear movement that fought to decommission existing reactors and halt the building of new ones; and a politicized community of radiation victims and their families who sought recognition and redress for their suffering. Together, these actors placed the irradiated body at the center of the political realignment of the 1970s.
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