FIGURE 3.7. Case Closed Cartoon. © Tribune Content Agency, LLC. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. Courtesy of University of Pittsburgh Special Collections.
In April 1983, the US Supreme Court overturned the lower-court decision. The court found that the NEPA guidelines did not encompass psychological health but applied only to “air, land, and water.” When Congress designed the law, Justice William Rehnquist explained, they were talking “about the physical environment—the world around us.” The court did not intend to minimize the community’s fears, he maintained, but it supported the NRC’s original contention that they fell outside the agency’s scope.170 An editorial cartoon mocked the decision, depicting members of the Supreme Court shielded by their own hazmat suits as they declared the case closed. PANE was defeated in court, but its legal effort had illuminated how psychological trauma permeated the political culture of the 1980s, as well as how the construction of a community of fate could go in any number of different directions. While PANE was attempting to hold the nuclear industry accountable specifically, the claim of psychological suffering could be mobilized in other struggles, especially those over race and class. The broader implications were not lost at the time. The Philadelphia Inquirer characterized the Supreme Court ruling as a “victory for the federal government, which feared that the appeals court’s rationale, if allowed to stand, would subject proposals for prisons, military bases, low income housing and other projects to extensive assessments of psychological impact.”171 “How long can it be,” asked an article in Harper’s in 1982, “before someone’s citing studies to show the alleged adverse psychological impact of busing for desegregation on white communities?”172
THE SHIFTING OF BLAME
In the end, the creation of a community of fate ultimately reinvigorated rather than deposed the region’s homegrown conservatism. How did this happen? After all, the accident at first appeared to affirm foundational liberal principles of early-twentieth-century Progressive and New Deal–era reform. A private utility company had jeopardized the health and safety of local citizens, suggesting the need for greater regulatory oversight of the nuclear industry. Yet on the whole, the community responded not by calling for more extensive government regulations, but by moving in the opposite direction—that is, by developing an intense mistrust of the state. Indeed, between 1979 and 1985, there was a gradual shift in blame at Three Mile Island away from Metropolitan Edison and to the regulatory commission itself. With this shift, an earlier critique of corporate power fell from view and was replaced by a critique of centralized power, and the community’s fight was recast as a struggle between local autonomy and federal authority.
This transposition was not a foregone conclusion. The accident had created a credibility crisis for three parties: the utility company, the NRC, and the state. However, it was Met-Ed that initially came in for the lion’s share of public criticism. The charge that it had delayed reporting the escalating situation, combined with its contradictory statements to the press, left some convinced that the utility had engaged in a cover-up. For the first time, many asked whether a profit-making corporation responsible to its shareholders could be trusted with something as potentially dangerous as nuclear technology. The NRC, on the other hand, had played a largely calming role throughout the crisis. To be sure, the accident had exposed both the commission’s limitations as a command center and its overconfidence about safety. But on the third day of the crisis, President Carter dispatched NRC director Harold Denton to supervise staff at the plant, communicate with state officials about conditions, and field questions from reporters. From the moment he arrived on the scene, Denton—an unassuming, forty-six-year-old nuclear engineer—appeared honest and straight-shooting, especially in contrast to utility spokesmen who came off as prevaricating. If there was anyone who approximated a heroic role during the crisis, it was Denton. The local community trusted him. One Middletown resident described Denton as “someone who looks like an ordinary guy. Not like those goddamn know-it-all snobs they got down there at Met-Ed.”173 After the accident, residents wore T-shirts that read, “Thank you, Harold Denton,” and local schoolchildren wrote him and expressed their gratitude for his having let “the air out of the bubble.”174
But the restart fight revised the terms of the struggle. It focused not on Met-Ed but on the NRC, the federal regulatory body that would decide whether to reopen or decommission Unit One. That decision resided exclusively with the NRC, a sign of the highly centralized nature of civilian atomic power in the United States.175 As the months passed, Denton’s quasi-heroic role faded from view, the NRC replaced Met-Ed as the community’s prime adversary, and government control displaced corporate malfeasance as the most formidable threat facing the community. This is not to imply that hostility toward Met-Ed disappeared. Throughout the early 1980s, the utility was accused of a string of abuses, including falsifying data, concealing documents, destroying monitoring records, intimidating whistleblowers, violating testing requirements, tolerating managerial incompetence, and mishandling cleanup operations.176 But during the same period, the General Public Utilities Corporation embarked on a low-key but well-coordinated publicity campaign to rebuild its reputation, increasing its public relations budget tenfold in the region.177 In the five years after the accident, Met-Ed, the original target of public suspicion, quietly reintegrated itself back into the local community, while the NRC became the embodiment of hostile, distant authority, callous toward residents’ physical suffering and psychological distress. Marjorie Aamodt vented her rage at the NRC. “It is nothing short of criminal,” she wrote, “for this small group of men safely ensconced in well-appointed offices in Washington D.C. to deliberately inflict further stress on the families … by restarting Three Mile Island after what has already been done to them. This will turn out to be the environmental Watergate of our time.”178
This charge of governmental indifference was accompanied by a second accusation, that the decision-making process had been a sham. Despite the hundreds of hours they had spent writing testimony and attending NRC hearings, many restart activists suspected that in the end their efforts did not matter. As one local woman put it, “I resent five men in Washington holding the fate of my life in [their] hands.”179 “Have you ever had the feeling that you were crying for help and no one was listening—Well, I do now!” wrote one woman to the NRC in August 1981. She saw the commission hearings as a complete waste of time: “We feel that the decision to restart TMI Unit 1 is a FOREGONE CONCLUSION and nothing we have said or will say will make any difference.” The NRC was not simply guilty of callousness, in her view. It had perpetrated a fraud against the people of the region by creating an ersatz show of democracy that had deluded residents into believing that they “had any voice in [their] own lives and futures where nuclear power is concerned.”180 On May 29, 1985, the NRC voted four to one in favor of the Unit One restart. More than three hundred local opponents had traveled to Washington for the final hearing. As the four commissioners called out their affirmative votes, shouts of “murderer” were heard from the floor. Meanwhile, back at Three Mile Island, eighty-two protestors were arrested at the plant gates.181
The community of fate at Three Mile Island revealed something crucial about the political transformation of the late 1970s that gets lost in narratives of culture war, polarity, and division. In the shadow of the reactor, self-identified patriots culled insights from the protest cultures of the 1960s and rerouted them into a new post-Vietnam conservative imaginary. These insights included a generalized suspicion of authority, a heightened politicization of the body, a drive to debunk false claims of expertise, an ecological awareness that air, water, and land could be contaminated, the power of collective psychology and the concept of trauma, and the value of local autonomy over federal authority. Weaving these insights into the conservative imaginary was no easy task. It took considerable time, commitment, creativity, and labor, much of which was performed by the region’s wome
n, who drew on their traditional roles as wives, mothers, and Christians. All the while, residents identified themselves as reluctant activists who had been conscripted into the political arena by their wounds, in contrast to the rootless cosmopolitan activists seemingly driven instead by abstract, hazy principles. In the end, the construction of a community of fate failed not only as a legal strategy, but as a political one as well. Its reliance on a status of injury precluded other affective stances—like empathy and solidarity—that might have laid the groundwork for other possibilities. Left behind instead was a transpartisan culture of suspicion that revolved around a post-1968 politicization of the imperiled body, but one ethically unmoored from the very protest movements that had first brought it into being. Between 1980 and 1985, this imperiled body would appear yet again as the revival of Cold War militarism reintroduced the threat of nuclear war.
Chapter Four
THE SECOND COLD WAR AND THE EXTINCTION THREAT
On November 20, 1983, almost five years after the Three Mile Island accident, one hundred million Americans switched their television channels to ABC and watched as an imagined Kansas City—described as the epicenter of the nation’s heartland—was blown to smithereens in a Soviet nuclear attack. Combining genre elements from family melodrama, “social issue” television, and disaster films, The Day After’s plot centered on husband, father, and physician Russ Oakes (played by Jason Robards), who witnesses the detonation from the highway. Realizing that his home is gone and his wife and children are dead, he returns to his workplace, a campus hospital in nearby Lawrence, where he attempts to administer to the burned, the injured, and the dying. Viewers are introduced to other stock characters: a farmer and his family who initially survive the blast in their cellar-cum-shelter; a woman who is nine-months pregnant with her first child; and a young premed student at the University of Kansas.
Before the attack, the farmer and his wife are planning to marry off their eldest daughter, the pregnant woman is awaiting her baby’s arrival, and, when viewers first see Dr. Oakes, he is staring at an ultrasound image, lit from behind, that reveals a fetal heart defect in an unborn child. Characters go about their tasks, at first paying only scant attention to an escalating military crisis along the German border, where NATO and Soviet forces have amassed. They recall earlier Cold War scares like the Cuban Missile Crisis and express confidence that cooler heads will again prevail. They hear snippets of radio and television reports. East German soldiers have rebelled, West Berlin has been blockaded, and the United States has detonated three tactical warheads over Soviet troops. At first these events feel far away, but in a nuclear world, “far away” no longer exists. “What’s the chance that something will happen way out here in the middle of nowhere?” a young man asks nervously as he sits in a barbershop in Lawrence. “There’s no nowhere anymore,” another customer responds. “You’re sitting next to the Whiteman Air Force Base right now. That’s about 150 Minutemen silos spread down the state of Missouri. That’s an awful lot of bulls-eyes.”1
Representing nuclear war and its aftermath created certain challenges for the creators of The Day After. First, they were depicting an event that, not unlike radiation, shattered all logics of representation. The detonation itself—featured in the film—would instantaneously blind if not incinerate any observer. As writer and disarmament activist Jonathan Schell wrote, a film that showed the full consequences of a nuclear holocaust would fail to attract either sponsors or spectators. It would “have to display nothingness on the screen, and last forever.”2 Director Nicholas Meyer agreed, noting that “if you told this story accurately, there would be no story.”3 A second challenge was that the film’s subject, a full-scale nuclear war, had never occurred. Thus the film was inherently speculative, compelling its creators to rely on government-sponsored studies like the Office of Technology Assessment report The Effects of Nuclear War (1979), antinuclear tracts like Helen Caldicott’s Nuclear Madness (1978), and writings by organizations like Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) that imagined the probable biological and medical effects of a nuclear attack.4 Throughout the early 1980s, these thought experiments made nuclear war appear both possible and imminent. Indeed, a Gallup poll conducted in 1982 found that almost half of all respondents (47 percent) believed that such a war would likely occur within five years.5
FIGURE 4.1. Film Still from The Day After, ABC Circle Films, 1983.
At a time of heightened Cold War tension, the film courted controversy. Although its creators denied that The Day After contained an overt critique of US and Soviet military policies (the plot was ambiguous on the question of blame), critics on the right branded the film an alarmist piece of Soviet-inspired propaganda, one that, in William Rusher’s words, had inspired “an ignorant public hysteria.”6 The show aired shortly before the NATO deployment of Cruise and Pershing II missiles in Western Europe, and critics like Rusher interpreted the film as an implicit condemnation of the planned action. “Why is ABC Doing Yuri Andropov’s job?” asked the cover of the New York Post.7 Another accusation was that the film threatened to derail rational policy-making by sowing panic. When asked for his response to it, Henry Kissinger wondered, “are we supposed to make policy by scaring ourselves to death?”8 But the film also came under fire from critics who lamented its reliance on melodramatic conventions and in particular its tendency to filter an urgent geopolitical problem—perhaps the most urgent problem in planetary history—through the lens of domestic, familial, and romantic liaisons and dalliances. The first half of The Day After moves from one domestic scene to the next as clichéd rituals of heterosexual love, courtship, romance, and sex play out against the backdrop of escalating crisis. As film critic Kim Newman derisively put it, the problem with The Day After was that it treated nuclear holocaust as one “giant coitus interruptus.”9
CIVIL DEFENSE, THE BODY-UNDER-ASSAULT, AND THE PHYSICIAN-ACTIVIST
The revived fear of nuclear war in the early 1980s marked another moment of transition as the atomic age was reconfigured into the ecological one. The previous decade had witnessed the rise of an environmental consciousness within the United States. The first Earth Day was organized in 1970 in response to the oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast one year earlier. In 1971, Greenpeace was founded on the belief that ecological threats could not be remediated through policy-making and political legislation alone; civil disobedience would be necessary. Satellite images of the earth from space fostered a new planetary awareness of the globe as a small, solitary, and fragile entity. Meanwhile, as we have seen, the antinuclear movement hitched this expanding environmental consciousness to a critique of the Cold War complex. It gained momentum over the course of the 1970s, as direct actions and occupations contributed to plant closures at Shoreham, Yankee Row, Millstone I, Rancho Seco, and Maine Yankee. The Three Mile Island accident had immediate consequences for the industry, as activists throughout the United States and Europe seized on the island’s cooling towers as a global symbol of the nuclear threat. In May 1979, 125,000 people attended an antinuclear demonstration in Washington, DC. The following September, almost two hundred thousand people gathered in New York City’s Central Park to protest nuclear power. Faced with growing popular opposition and declining investor confidence, the NRC stopped licensing new plants. As a consequence, by the early 1980s, the fear of nuclear power receded and was supplanted by the fear of nuclear annihilation with the reescalation of the arms race. The accident at Three Mile Island had transformed central Pennsylvania into a site of radiological emergency. In its aftermath, every community in the country reimagined itself in a state of acute crisis, this time brought on by nuclear attack. Fears of radiation and atomic energy were thus rerouted away from nuclear power and channeled back into their original source: nuclear weaponry and war.
The wider backdrop of this rerouting was the Second Cold War of the 1980s. Between 1979 and 1984, détente collapsed, the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) died in the Senate after the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and a new, even more lethal generation of nuclear weapons was brought to life. In 1979 NATO installed intermediate-range missiles in Britain, West Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy. This was widely condemned as a unilateral act of provocation and sparked massive protests across the European continent. The US Pershing II missiles stationed in West Germany were capable of hitting Soviet targets within six to nine minutes. Between 1980 and 1984, the defense budget in the United States grew by 80 percent, and by 1980, the global nuclear stockpile comprised over sixty thousand weapons, the equivalent of over one million times the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.10 The research, development, and deployment of new kinds of weapons—the Pershing II missile, the MX cruise missile system, the Trident Submarine, the B-1B Bomber—reflected a strategic shift away from deterrence toward counterforce and first-strike capabilities.
Throughout the globe, this reescalation sparked fears of nuclear catastrophe. But within US policy circles, it went hand in hand with a claim that nuclear war could be limited, survivable, and even winnable. This claim was first elaborated in Presidential Directive 59, the “Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy,” a confidential directive signed by Jimmy Carter in July 1980 (the contents were subsequently leaked) that aimed to give the president more latitude in nuclear war planning. Unlike a policy of deterrence, which assumed that the lethality of nuclear weapons effectively deterred either side from using them, Directive 59 articulated a doctrine of first-strike willingness and a reliance on counterforce weapons, which were designed to disable an adversary’s military capabilities. It imagined several options beyond a massive strike, including using high-tech intelligence to strike nuclear weapons targets on the battlefield and then assessing damages (what was called a “look-shoot-look” capability). The directive assumed that a nuclear war could be both controlled and contained.11
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