Radiation Nation
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Concerns surrounding fetal and infant health persisted amid the generalized distrust. Ernest Sternglass and Gordon MacLeod were convinced that rates of infant hypothyroidism in three nearby counties had increased in the months after the accident, indicating exposure to radioactive iodine. State officials investigated and found no link, and they also rejected a separate claim that there had been a postaccident spike in infant mortality. The state’s health department released data showing that thirty-one infants had died within a ten-mile radius of the plant in the six months after the accident, a figure that appeared high compared to the twenty infant deaths in 1978 and the fourteen in 1977. But because the total number of live births had also risen, the rate of infant deaths had remained constant.109
Still, some residents remained convinced that babies were dying from the reactor. An Annville woman told an interviewer in 1980 that “the ladies [near the plant] are having babies, and they’re being stillborn and God, it makes you wonder. It scares you. They’re not telling the truth.”110 A woman from Hershey who had gotten pregnant soon after the accident chose to have an abortion: “I couldn’t handle having a baby that would either develop leukemia or be deformed or deficient in any way. I just didn’t believe that I could have a child that would suffer like that.”111 Another woman explained it at a public hearing, “My three children are all daughters, and I am very concerned about what is going to happen to them as potential child-bearers. After working in state hospitals, I don’t want to see them have brain damaged children.”112 One restart activist had her daughter carry a sign at rallies that read “What Have They Done to My Genes?”113 Meanwhile, what came to be called “flipper baby jokes” circulated throughout the community: “What’s red and has a hundred flippers? Answer: The maternity ward in Harrisburg.”114
As the restart fight heated up, concerns about male reproductive health also came to the fore. Nuclear physicist-turned-critic John Gofman contended that the nuclear industry was “irradiating the sex cells—in the gonads—of the nuclear workers.” “Many of these workers,” he predicted, “are going to have children, and thanks to the extra radiation, some of these children are going to have defective genes. And these defective genes will be passed into the whole population when these children have children of their own.”115 Between 1979 and 1985, this figure of the irradiated or mutated male nuclear worker became ubiquitous in visual culture. Sometimes, he glowed in the dark, a property that circled back to the turn-of-the-century fascination with radium. After the accident, residents jokingly told one another, “You’re glowing,” or “You look radiant today.”116 A Dallas News cartoon from 1979 depicted a plant worker as a translucent skeleton, levitating off the ground and emitting light. He hovers in his bedroom doorway and assures his terrified wife, “I’m home, dear.… that nuclear reactor malfunction kept us busy through th’ night. But I think we’ve got everything under control now.”117 At other times, the figure was presented as a mutant—half-human, half-animal. An editorial cartoon from December 1982 showed a conversation between two men standing in front of Three Mile Island in the year 2079. In the first three frames, the men are shown from the neck up, and they speak admiringly of the plant. “I can hardly believe it! Here it is 2079, and the ol’ nuclear power plant is still going strong after 100 years!” one says to the other. Scoffing at the protests and the “silly fears” and “blind mistrust” of the past, they conclude: “it just goes to show how wrong you can be.” But the final frame of the cartoon reveals that the men are species-crossing mutants—they have bat wings, dinosaur tails, and elephant feet.118
Whether evoking radium’s magical properties (radiance) or radiation’s scarier potential (mutation), the gothic humor of the cartoons derived from their rendering of a collision between the domestic and the horrific. There was a dissonance between the captions, which offered up bland reassurances of nuclear safety, and the graphics themselves, which revealed radiation’s sublime and terrifying capacity to remake human bodies. In these cartoons, the Cold War culture of dissociation unraveled. The claim that “everything is under control” was revealed not simply as fallacious, but as dangerously unmoored from reality. The subjects were not simply mutants; they were dolts who did not realize that they had undergone mutation. The message was clear: those in positions of authority could not be trusted. If the men who defended the industry did not recognize that their own bodies had been reconstituted by radiation, then how could they be expected to protect others from danger?
FIGURE 3.3. Mutant Editorial Cartoon. JIM BORGMAN © Cincinnati Enquirer. Reprinted with permission of ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections.
On April 7, 1979, Saturday Night Live posed this very question to a mass television audience. “The Pepsi Syndrome” sketch opens in the control room of a nuclear power plant called “Two Mile Island,” where an operator named Matt (played by Bill Murray) casually hands out sandwiches and drinks to his two coworkers beneath a conspicuous sign reading “No Soft Drinks in Control Room.” When Matt spills his soda all over the control panel, the room descends into chaos. The panel sparks flames, an alarm bell begins to ring, and panicked workers shout that there is water loss and an explosion in the reactor core. The scene then switches to a press conference, where the plant’s upbeat PR man assures a room full of reporters that the situation is under control. He offers a quick primer on nuclear power, pointing to a flow chart that connects a plant to an icon titled “energy” to a kitchen toaster. When a reporter asks him how much radiation they are being exposed to at that moment, the PR man gropes for an analogy. It’s like a chest X-ray that your doctor has to give you over and over again, he explains. Or, it’s like falling asleep under a sun lamp for a week or two, he continues. Or, it’s like drying your hair in a microwave oven. To signal that there is no danger, he announces that the president will visit the site the following day.
We next see President Carter (played by Dan Akroyd) and first lady Rosalind Carter (played by Laraine Newman) in the control room twenty-four hours later. Against his wife’s worried objections, Carter insists on entering the reactor core in order to assess the damage. He confidently points to his feet swathed in plastic, boasting: “I know how to handle myself around a nuclear facility. Besides, I’m protected. I’ve got my little yellow boots on.” After Carter enters the core, the first lady expresses her relief that they did not bring their daughter Amy along for this particular trip. She had school, she explains, “and besides, what if one day Amy wants to have children?” The president soon emerges from the core, where he has been visibly irradiated; his body emits a pulsing, bluish light. “Don’t touch me,” he commands Rosalind. “I am a nuclear engineer, and I am pretty worried right now.” And not without reason. The president has been exposed to such a high dose of radiation that he soon morphs into a ninety-foot giant, “the Amazing Colossal President.” In the skit’s final scene, Carter’s oversized head is seen outside the window of a tall building, King Kong–style, as reporters gather inside. “This experience has not changed my commitment to nuclear power,” he insists. Yet while his physical transformation has not eroded his support for the technology, he feels he can no longer be with Rosalind. He announces that he is going to leave her and marry Violet, an African American woman maintenance worker at the plant (played in drag by Garrett Morris) who, like him, grew in size after entering the core. The skit closes with reporters frantically running for cover at the spectacle of the president, now a naked, irradiated behemoth.
Like the editorial cartoons, the skit relied on a series of disconnects: between the glaring sign on the control room wall and Bill Murray’s casual disregard for its warning; between the PR man’s cheerful tone and the situation’s direness; between the severity of the contamination threat and the paltriness of the safety measures to contain it; and between the president’s radiation-induced metamorphosis and his unwavering support for nuclear power. Airing only days after the
accident, “The Pepsi Syndrome” advanced a knowing commentary that would have resonated with SNL’s audience, made up largely of white, urban viewers who had entered political maturity in the era of Vietnam and Watergate. Plant workers flouted safety rules, PR men lied to the public, and nuclear industry boosters stuck to their guns, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence of danger. In an age of declining trust, the sketch was hardly unique in satirizing compromised political authority, technological hubris, and corporate smugness. But its humor was also infused with a pervasive anxiety about mutations that threaten to derail reproduction through setting in motion irreversible changes at the cellular level. This danger was rendered fantastically when the Amazing Colossal President took up with a metastasized African American woman janitor, thereby linking mutation to racial and class transgression. But the danger was also alluded to when Rosalind Carter explained that she has kept her daughter Amy away from the plant because she might want to have children one day. This line was met by conspicuous silence from the SNL audience.
The construction of a community of fate at Three Mile Island brought into relief the contested place of scientific authority, gender and reproduction, and the ecological imaginary within the political realignment of the late 1970s and early 1980s. By rejecting the official story about the accident, residents were challenging the state’s monopoly over scientific expertise and seeking to accrue their own body of knowledge about radiological illness. They read books on the topic, brought scientists into the area to lecture, accumulated documents and evidence, and traveled door to door to confer with neighbors about the accident’s health effects. Women in particular engaged with the key scientific and medical questions at the heart of the nuclear power debate, something they were unlikely to have done before the accident.119 Mary Osborn began by reading about radiation in her daughter’s school textbook and eventually compiled mountains of documents stacked throughout her home. She described herself as a “dippy housewife” who was nonetheless convinced that “these cancer and animal deaths should be looked into.”120 Anne Trunk, a local woman appointed to the Kemeny Commission, recalled that before the accident, she had known nothing about nuclear power, not even “the difference between a millirem and a reactor vessel.” But she had since learned a great deal. “If a housewife can understand it, anybody can,” she told a reporter. “That way, we won’t be afraid anymore.”121
These local efforts indexed a larger attempt to democratize science in the 1970s. As Phil Brown has argued, popular epidemiology does not reflect an antipathy toward science, but rather an alternative conception of what science is and who should control it.122 The decline in public confidence in science in the late 1960s and 1970s did not represent a loss of confidence in science writ large, so much as it represented a critique of the trajectory of scientific knowledge since World War II, when science became embedded in what Stuart W. Leslie has called the “military-industrial-academic complex.”123 One TMIA newsletter argued that the medical community was locked in its “sterile laboratories” without access to real “human beings.” “They accept totally inadequate data from GPU and the NRC, extrapolate meaningless projections on health effects, and find it unforgivably rude of people to get sick in spite of their computations.”124 Local residents suspected an unholy collusion between medical authorities, the utility company, and the NRC, and they responded by crafting an alternative narrative of what had happened in 1979. This was a formidable conceptual task that required mastering a new vocabulary and acquiring an elemental understanding of a technology that had once seemed too complex to grasp. But many residents felt they could no longer remain in the dark. As the Union of Concerned Scientists explained, the debate over nuclear power “is not a question just for experts—each citizen must make an informed choice.”125 “What is going on here is the test of American democracy,” asserted ecologist Barry Commoner, who traveled to the region in 1980. “You people are doing your best to make democracy live under difficult conditions.”126
The cataloguing of radiological damage to plant, animal, and human life provided a window into the cultural unconscious of the Cold War by referencing several key events in US and global history. Accounts of burns, blistering skin, and “waves of heat” circled back to the suffering of the Japanese victims of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while fears of cancer conjured the experiences of leukemia-stricken residents of the US Southwest who had grown up near atomic testing sites in the 1950s. The specter of a valley evacuated of birds and other animals evoked Rachel Carson’s exposé of industrial pesticides and the war-inflicted defoliation of the jungles of Southeast Asia. And reports of mutations among plants and animals took inspiration from both science fiction films like Them! (a film from 1956 in which atomic testing transforms carpenter ants into giant mutants) and popular comic book series such The Incredible Hulk, in which radiation had the sublime power to rearrange genetic and biological material.
Claims of injury also evoked darker, suppressed moments in the history of reproduction. The flipper baby jokes referenced the birth defects associated with thalidomide, a sedative prescribed to pregnant women from 1957 to 1961. If the thalidomide disaster, in which the medical establishment failed to protect pregnant women and their children, seemed far removed from the nuclear question, it nonetheless resonated within a community whose members felt that the experts had derailed their reproductive health. And while the charge that radiological exposure had unleashed an epidemic of sterility might have appeared far-fetched, there had been state-sponsored sterilization campaigns throughout the nation’s history, directed first at the “feeble-minded” and later at African American women and other women of color, who were accused of sapping the welfare state’s resources by having too many babies. Residents did not make direct reference to these campaigns, and in all likelihood they were not even aware of them. But the suspicion that the nuclear industry had derailed reproduction tapped into a racialized and class-based history of state intervention into women’s bodies.
Finally, the community’s response revealed something crucial about conservatism by the late 1970s: how images culled from ecology were becoming woven into a vision of the nation as a soil-based biotic system that possessed a reproductive life that could go awry. This biotic, reproduction-centered nationalism captured how an emergent ecological consciousness could go in any number of different political directions. Throughout the 1970s, many environmental achievements—from the passage of key pieces of legislation like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act to the creation of the first Earth Day—were integrated into a liberal civic nationalism that called for greater regulation and rational planning with the aim of safeguarding natural resources and redressing the crisis of industrial pollution. But at Three Mile Island, a new ecological consciousness conjured a more ominous national vision of an eviscerated landscape in which the “natural order” of things had been turned upside down. Within this landscape, the cycle of plant life becomes torqued and twisted, monsters and mutants have colonized the animal kingdom, and political authority is at once outsized and absurd. While many features of this landscape germinated during the atomic age, they came into full view at Three Mile Island as the culture of dissociation came apart. What gave ecology its power within the post-1968 conservative imaginary was its steady preoccupation with the threat of reproduction-under-assault. This preoccupation did two things at once. It fortified the condemnation of a domestic culture upended by feminism, abortion rights, and gay liberation (all perceived by conservatives as threats to the traditional reproductive order), and it underwrote the conviction that the nation, not unlike a living body, had sustained wounds that threatened the reproduction of its power on the world stage.
TRAUMA AND FEAR AT THREE MILE ISLAND
Alongside the claim of biological damage, restart opponents operationalized a vocabulary of collective psychological trauma. There was in fact broad consensus that the accident’s most palpable effects on the community were stress, dep
ression, and anxiety. George Tokuhata, a researcher with the state’s health department, felt that the accident’s psychological reverberations were more measurable than its physical ones.127 This marked yet another way that the accident upended conventional logic. Typically, symptoms associated with physical illness are readily apparent, while psychological symptoms are elusive. But at Three Mile Island, it was the opposite. The biological effects of radiation exposure remained out of reach, while the psychological effects could be observed and diagnosed. In fact, the accident’s physical and psychological effects could be difficult to distinguish.128 As a press release from TMIA maintained, “the stress and trauma suffered by the residents is [sic] as important to us as any physiological symptom.… the two are often inseparable.”129 For many residents, these symptoms surfaced during the accident and had abated quickly. However, research suggested that they persisted with one particular group: women, and especially mothers of young children, who lived in close proximity to the plant. This group was at the greatest risk for anxiety and depression up to one year after the accident.130 The Kemeny Commission attributed this mental stress to the confusion during the early days of the crisis, when the public had been subjected to contradictory information about both the severity of the radiation threat and the likelihood of an evacuation order.131 The ambiguity surrounding long-term health consequences continued to fuel the stress, especially for mothers living near the plant. “The nuclear facility at TMI,” as a TMIA press release explained it, “just may be the most efficient generator of stress ever engineered and thrust upon a host population.”132