Radiation Nation

by Natasha Zaretsky

  Activists also fought for financial redress through class-action lawsuits. Former atomic workers demanded that the Veterans Administration recognize radiological injuries as a legitimate form of war-incurred disability, while downwinders relied on tort litigation. Within the legislative and legal arenas, the essential line of argument was the same. The AEC had failed to level with citizens about the risks of radiation exposure, and as a result, people had sickened and died. As one atomic veteran explained at a hearing in April 1980, “Although our claims are difficult to prove because we cannot feel, taste, hear or smell radiation, it is more deadly than bullets or shrapnel.”122 Victims, who frequently labeled themselves as “radiation fodder,” felt they should no longer be asked to prove that their illnesses had been caused by radiation exposure sustained years in the past (an impossible task). Instead, it was time for the government to acknowledge what it had long denied: that certain groups had shouldered the burdens of the atomic age without their consent.

  In their activism, radiation sufferers elaborated the geography mapped by the antinuclear movement. Many had witnessed the hypervisible displays of the atomic age: the flashing lights, the blasts, and the mushroom clouds from bomb detonations, what scholars have called “the nuclear sublime,” a term used to describe the sense of awe and terror such scenes can evoke.123 Appearing before Congress, one downwinder recalled the ritual trip she and her father took to the desert when she was a teenager: “I was fourteen when they started doing the testing, and I tell people that I went out on the desert with my Dad and I watched the blasts. I have seen mushroom clouds.”124 But activists also testified to what was not visible, namely, the pain unleashed by radiation exposure. A 1980 national conference for radiation sufferers was called “Invisible Violence,” and over and over again activists commented on radiation’s stealth quality. According to a Las Vegas Sun editorial on the plight of NTS workers, “Radiation kills silently. No blood gushes from open wounds. Often the body from the outside shows no signs of mutilation. Instead, radiation penetrates cells, often attacking the core of life itself—genes, the carriers of life. Sometimes it takes only days or weeks. In other individuals, the damage won’t show for years.”125 As psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton testified, the fear “doesn’t go away for years … the sense of having something left in your body, a fear of a poison that may take effect at any time.”126 Radiation sufferers were witnesses in a dual sense. They had watched atomic spectacles up close, but they also testified to what could not be seen—the internal suffering unleashed by radiation-induced cancers and blood disorders.127

  This atomic activism bespoke the wider politicization of illness over the course of the 1970s. Throughout that decade, feminist and black health activists indicted mainstream medicine and created their own institutions to meet the healthcare needs of their communities.128 They challenged the authority of the medical establishment and sought to provide vital services. Like these activists, radiation victims challenged the monopoly of experts and cited illness as evidence of injustice. Yet while women’s and black health activists viewed medical discrimination as symptomatic of a wider nexus of inequality, radiation sufferers were self-described patriots whose encounters with illness created a breach of trust in their relationship with the state. Radiation activism was populated by “people from America’s heartland,” observed a SANE newsletter, “the soldiers, the housewives, the workers. Not protestors, not skeptics—to begin with. But their bruising encounters with government irresponsibility … have worked a remarkable transformation. They have become activists, researchers, one-person investigating teams.”129 A disillusioned widow in the National Association of Radiation Survivors raised what for many activists had become the crucial question: “How could the government of the greatest nation in the world be so irresponsible, unconscionable, and unconcerned towards the fighting men of our country?”130 A psychiatrist affiliated with Physicians for Social Responsibility coined a new term, atomic veterans syndrome. “A healthy man,” he explained, “becomes an unhealthy man, an unquestioning patriot becomes angry at the government, and focuses his life on that anger.”131 By the early 1980s, anger and disillusionment fueled the movement: the government had betrayed its citizens by downplaying or concealing the dangers of radiation.132

  With the mobilization of radiation sufferers in the 1970s, the mistrust of government—first voiced by a relatively small group of testing critics in the 1950s and then by a mass movement of antiwar activists in the 1960s—migrated to patriotic, military communities. Yet as this mistrust migrated, it also mutated. Radiation activism borrowed from the antiwar movement the revelation that the state could transform bodies into fodder, but it broke with the earlier movement when it came to which bodies were worth grieving. Those who had opposed the war mourned not only the soldiers coming home in body bags, but also the Vietnamese men, women, and children who were killed. The latter were the “collateral damage” that the US government disowned through pseudo-objective, deceptive, and distancing reportage. Antiwar activists thus rejected a nationalist logic that saw American lives alone as worth mourning. Radiation activists moved in the opposite direction. The government’s crime, they suggested, was not that it had devalued human bodies in a universal sense, but that it had turned American bodies into fodder. Where the antiwar movement had brought questions of moral culpability to the fore, radiation activists were animated by a sense of victimization, at once rooted in the body and reverberating beyond it.

  Thus even as radiation sufferers drew on the earlier antiwar movement for inspiration, they distanced themselves from it. They often described themselves as “reluctant activists” whose encounters with illness had left them with no alternative but to embrace an antagonistic stance vis-à-vis the state. They found this new position uncomfortable; it was anathema to their true political proclivities, which ran in the opposite direction. This appeal to reluctant activism simultaneously acknowledged and disavowed the protest culture that had supplied its language and sense of outrage. The motivations of antiwar activists had been specious and self-seeking, radiation sufferers now began to argue, while their own motivations were pure, precisely because their activism had been arrived at only with great ambivalence. The radiation sufferers’ repeated claim that they had turned to activism as a last resort drew an implicit line between good and bad activism. The latter embraced radical politics without apology, hesitation, or qualification.

  Ultimately, what made the radiation sufferer such a powerful mediating figure was the bodily trauma he or she had sustained. At a moment of political interregnum, this sense of trauma established a homology between somatic and national injury. The injury had not come from an external enemy, but rather from within, which was why it constituted a form of betrayal. The New Left had sought a more self-critical direction for US foreign, military, and economic policies after Vietnam, but the emerging right sought something else: the restoration of a lost patriotism and the reconstitution of national power. This call for restoration took diverse forms throughout the 1970s, including the push for a return to market fundamentalism, the steady drumbeat of law and order, the championing of traditional family values, and the demand for the renewal of the nation’s military strength on the world stage. But amid a political realignment, the radiation sufferer provided something indispensable: a sickened, betrayed body that could serve as the proxy for a wounded American nation. This body would surface again at Three Mile Island, the site of the worst nuclear accident in the nation’s history.

  Chapter Two

  THE ACCIDENT AND THE POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE 1970s

  Accidents can function like X-rays, revealing tears and fissures in the social fabric, subterranean streams and pathways, and structural weaknesses and breaking points. They can also reveal hidden forms of resistance and resilience, including powerful—if also ephemeral—forms of communal solidarity.1 The Three Mile Island accident functioned in this way. On the surface, it appeared nothing more than a dramatic
episode in the history of nuclear power. But it occurred against the backdrop of the political, social, and economic transformations that were underway in the 1970s and that were restructuring late capitalism.2 The decade witnessed the end of New Deal liberal egalitarianism, the decline of the Keynesian-Fordist welfare state, and the beginning of a neoliberal era of financial domination, antistatism, and widening inequality. The crisis at the reactor brought into relief five features of this transformation.

  First, it afforded a glimpse into one patriotic, largely working-class community at a moment when its way of life was under pressure. The decline of the auto and steel industries, the shift to corporate agriculture, the proliferation of service and information-based work, the rise of the two-earner family, the influx of women into wage labor, and the growing dominance of the Sunbelt: all of these upheavals were upending the lives of workers and farmers throughout the Northeast. These transformations eroded the institutions that had undergirded Fordism—the male-breadwinner family, a sanctified domestic sphere, local support networks, and the church. Simultaneously, feminism and sexual liberation sought to dismantle the gender and sexual hierarchies on which those institutions had relied. The Three Mile Island region was more economically stable than other areas of Pennsylvania, but it was very much part of this world-in-transition. Before the crisis at the plant, most residents were Republican Party loyalists, had supported the Vietnam War, and prided themselves on their love of family and country. The accident not only challenged their worldview, but it occurred as the region’s older Fordist institutions were giving way to a new order dominated by a professional managerial class. These new elites assigned a crucial role to public relations, the terrain on which much of the drama at Three Mile Island would play out.

  Second, the accident illuminated how a growing mistrust of the government was filtering into patriotic communities by the 1970s. Hostility toward the government had been a long-standing, recurring feature of US political culture, of course. But throughout much of the New Deal era, many Americans viewed private corporate power with suspicion and looked favorably to the government for countervailing remedies. This was reversed during the 1970s. In the era of Vietnam, Watergate, and energy shortages, the government itself became an object of public distrust and derision, because it was seen as either deceptive, ineffectual, or both. Coming toward the end of a decade in which it seemed that nearly everything had gone wrong, the accident contributed to this reversal. After all, the industry had promoted nuclear power as an essentially risk-free technology, and now, overnight, central Pennsylvanians found themselves confronting the worst accident in the history of the reactor program. As we shall see, while residents would initially blame the accident on the utility, they would later redirect their anger at the state, a shift that captured the broader turn against government in the neoliberal age.

  Third, the accident located the body at the center of a crisis of authority. At a moment of eroding public trust, both locals and outsiders questioned the official story about what had happened at the plant. That story would prove remarkably consistent. It maintained that however frightening the partial meltdown, it had never endangered public health. Many residents, however, were convinced that both the utility and the state were downplaying the accident’s severity and that they had suffered latent biological injury. Because it threatened to trigger a radiological health emergency among civilians, in other words, the accident assigned a critical role to the imperiled human body—indeed, the irradiated human body—within the political realignment. This body helped give shape to a biotic nationalism that interpreted the key crises of the decade—defeat in Vietnam, the energy crisis, productivity lag, and stagflation—as symptomatic of national decline. Within this nationalism, the nation itself was imagined in biological terms as an enervated body. Simultaneously, a steady attention to the suffering bodies of patriots rerouted a politicization of the body from the 1960s into a conservative politics of betrayal.

  Fourth, Three Mile Island made clear that it was the woman’s body—and more specifically, the maternal body—that animated biotic nationalism. It revealed how gender was displacing class within US society and politics in the 1970s. The irradiated body that exploded to the surface after the accident was not just any body. Rather, officials singled out three bodies as uniquely endangered: that of the pregnant woman, the young child, and the fetus.3 As a consequence, the region’s conservative, patriotic, white women emerged as central protagonists, articulating not merely a critique of authority, but an ecological, reproduction-centered critique. In public testimonies and private letters, mothers who lived near the island voiced their suspicion that the accident had induced infertility, miscarriage, and stillbirth, raised the risks of birth defects among their babies, and transformed their sons and daughters into carriers of “damaged genes” that might one day be transmitted to their own offspring.4 For nuclear engineers, the TMI accident constituted a technological crisis. For the state, it constituted a crisis in governance. For the utility that operated the plant, it constituted a public relations crisis. But for the women who lived near the plant, the accident constituted a crisis in reproductive futurity. At Three Mile Island, then, the figure of the unborn would reappear, where it tied the earlier atomic age to the emergent ecological one, highlighted the centrality of reproduction to the realignment, and revealed how fears of biological injury were becoming knitted into the cultural fabric of one patriotic community.

  Finally, the accident offers a vital clue as to how conservatives were able to establish hegemony after 1980; the new conservatism was shaped in part by an ecological consciousness that could not in itself be described as left or right. This consciousness had its origins in dissent, but over the 1970s, it pivoted rightward. The political history of the 1970s was thus one of creative appropriation as much as polarization. From the antiwar movement and the New Left, conservatives borrowed a distrust of state authority. From feminism, they took the idea that women’s bodies were sites of political contestation. From evangelical Christianity and Catholicism, they appropriated a “grammar of life” that they operationalized not merely to curtail abortion rights, but to condemn the nuclear industry for making bodies into fodder—or, as local residents put it, turning them into “guinea pigs.” By the late 1970s, insights about bodily illness and disposability that had originated on the political left were being folded into the conservative counterrevolution.

  THE ACCIDENT

  What occurred at TMI Unit Two in the early morning hours of Wednesday, March 28, 1979, was what nuclear engineers call a “loss of coolant accident.” A relief valve that was supposed to close remained open, permitting large amounts of water—normally used to cool the plant’s core—to escape. For several hours, operators did not realize that the valve was open, and as the containment building lost coolant, temperatures and radiation levels began to rise. If the reactor core was exposed for too long, it could overheat and eventually melt, releasing radioactive material into the environment. The most dangerous potential consequence of the accident was a meltdown, popularly known as “the China Syndrome,” a term that referred to the possibility that reactor core materials could dissolve and bore through the earth. Short of that, the accident posed several immediate threats to public health. First, because of damage to the reactor’s core, there was a radiation leak in the plant’s auxiliary building. Second, beginning on Wednesday morning, plant operators began releasing steam into the air that, because of a leak in the primary cooling system, contained detectable amounts of radiation. Third, on Thursday, plant operators discharged water containing small concentrations of xenon, a short-lived radioactive gas, into the Susquehanna River. Finally, by Friday, a large hydrogen bubble had developed in the top of the core’s container, making it difficult for workers to bring down the core’s temperature and stoking fears of an explosion.5

  This was an accident that was never supposed to have happened. As we have seen, as orders for nuclear plants peaked in the mid-19
60s, the AEC had waged an ambitious public relations campaign to convince Americans that nuclear technology was not only safe, but essentially accident-proof.6 In the winter of 1966, when the utility company Metropolitan Edison (a subsidiary of the General Public Utilities Corporation) announced its plan to build two reactors on Three Mile Island, it embarked on its own public relations campaign. The utility published brochures that reassured residents that the plant posed no danger, contending that the amount of radiation released from the plant during normal operations would be negligible and that radiation was a benign product of nature. The company opened a public observation center on the island, where visitors could acquire an elementary understanding of nuclear power, and local officials and opinion-makers were routinely invited to tour the plant.7 In 1975, a year after the opening of TMI Unit One, these publicity efforts were bolstered by the release of the Rasmussen Report, an NRC-sponsored study that concluded that a citizen was more likely to be killed by a meteor than by a reactor accident.8 The report reflected a culture of overconfidence that pervaded the industry throughout the 1960s and 1970s. As the NRC’s director of nuclear reactor regulation, Harold Denton, later recalled, “within the NRC, no one really thought you could have a core meltdown. It was more a Titanic sort of mentality. This plant was so well designed that you couldn’t possibly have serious core damage.”9

  This institutional overconfidence trickled down to the local community. Robert Reid, the mayor of nearby Middletown, remembered that “Everyone was assured by the federal government and by Met-Ed that this plant was safe, and there would never be an accident.”10 One survey found that 75 percent of the local population had been either neutral or positive about TMI before 1979. This is not to suggest that there had been no resistance. By the early 1970s, two statewide environmental groups, Citizens for a Safe Environment and the Environmental Coalition on Nuclear Power, had declared their opposition to the planned plant.11 In 1977, three years after the opening of Unit One and a year before Unit Two began operations, members of the local community formed TMI-Alert (TMIA) to voice safety concerns.12 But despite some protest, the community had welcomed the plant. As Carol Pfeiffer, a fifty-three-year-old grandmother who could see the towers from her bedroom window explained, “I don’t think hardly anybody in town realized the danger before the accident. We were just plain stupid about it. We didn’t understand. We were so pleased about the prosperity it brought to the town.”13