Radiation Nation

by Natasha Zaretsky

  The concept of a limited, winnable nuclear war received considerable support after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. In press interviews and statements before Congress, key players in the new administration predicted that the nation could survive and even emerge victorious in a nuclear war. When in January 1980 George Bush (who would soon be selected as Reagan’s running mate) was asked by journalist Robert Scheer how you win a nuclear exchange, he replied: “You have a survivability of command and control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict upon you. That’s the way you have a winner.”12 National Security Council member and détente-critic Richard Pipes speculated that in a nuclear war the “country better prepared could win and emerge a viable society.”13 William Chipman, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Association’s (FEMA’s) Civil Defense division, conceded in the Los Angeles Times that a nuclear war would be depressing and miserable, but that in all probability, people would “rise to the occasion and restore some kind of a country that would fairly be called the post-attack United States.”14 When asked on the floor of the Senate in June 1981 whether the country could survive a full-scale nuclear exchange, Eugene V. Rostow, who at the time was being considered for the directorship of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, reflected that “the human race is very resilient.”15 Taken together, these statements painted a picture not simply of a more confrontational Reaganesque military policy, but of an administration that was entertaining nuclear war as a rational possibility. This notion struck critics as deranged. As Bernard Feld, an MIT Physics professor and the editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, put it, reports of a nuclear strategy based on a limited counterforce exchange “raise the serious question of whether our leaders have taken leave of their senses.”16

  Adding to mounting public anxiety was a fear that Ronald Reagan’s alliance with evangelical Christianity had led him to view nuclear war as inevitable, even scripturally preordained within an eschatological worldview. The Old Testament’s Book of Revelations predicted an Armageddon—a final battle between good and evil emanating from the Middle East that would end with God taking charge of human history through the second coming of Christ. Some evangelical Christians saw the escalating arms race as one of several prophetic signs that the “end days” were fast approaching, and throughout the early 1980s, Reagan implied that he might share this view. During his presidential campaign, Reagan had confided to evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell and televangelist Jim Baker that he “sometimes saw Armageddon coming up very fast.”17 In a phone conversation with AIPAC executive director Tom Dine, Reagan reportedly said, “I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if we’re the last generation that’s going to see that come about. I don’t know if you’ve noted any of these prophecies lately, but believe me, they certainly describe the times we’re going through.”18 The concept of limited nuclear war had proceeded from the premises that a nuclear exchange could resemble conventional warfare and that life would go on after an attack. Talk of Armageddon moved in the opposite direction, implying that if a nuclear war came to pass, it would be the result of divine rather than human intervention and would constitute a millennial rupture in time. Despite the differences, however, the military’s embrace of a limited nuclear war doctrine and the evangelical discourse of Armageddon reinforced each other by making the prospect of nuclear war appear more rather than less likely.

  The concept of a limited nuclear war circled back to the early Cold War by resurrecting the issue of civil defense, whose viability hinged on the survivability of a significant portion of the population. The Reagan Administration also saw a vigorous civil defense as crucial to restoring the nation’s military strength and maintaining the overall balance of power. Several members of Reagan’s foreign policy team were convinced that the Soviets had gained the upper hand in civil defense planning, and in March 1982, the administration proposed a 4.3 billion dollar, seven-year civil defense program that had two components: crisis relocation (the physical relocation of 150 million Americans from higher-risk to lower-risk locations) and protection in the form of shelters that would save lives, preserve major industries, and allow for the continuity of government after an attack. The scenario for crisis relocation went like this: At a time of escalating crisis, US satellite intelligence would detect that the Soviets had initiated their own defense measures, indicating that preparations were underway for an attack. The president would then identify the areas and urban centers within the United States to be evacuated. Evacuees would be moved to the countryside, where they would be sheltered in host communities outside the range of immediate destruction. The implementation of the evacuation plan would take approximately one week, and assuming that it had sufficient warning, FEMA predicted that it could protect 80 percent of the US population (a figure that sounded impressive until one realized that this translated into 46.3 million fatalities). “It would be a terrible mess,” FEMA head Louis Giuffrida acknowledged to ABC News, “but it wouldn’t be unmanageable.”19

  A second component of the plan assumed that properly designed shelters could provide adequate protection from a nuclear blast and the radioactive fallout that would follow. In an interview in January 1982, the deputy undersecretary of defense for strategic and nuclear forces, T. K. Jones, explained that shelters could work, as long as there were enough shovels for distribution. “Everybody’s going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around.… Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It’s the dirt that does it.”20 Jones was called before Congress to explain the quotation (he never appeared), and the New York Times jokingly wondered whether he was a peace movement mole who had infiltrated the Reagan White House in order to discredit it.21 But while Jones’s reckless statement made him an easy target for ridicule, he was hardly an outlier in his contention that civil defense, if properly implemented, could work. On the contrary, the vision of an effective civil defense was fundamental to Reagan’s reassertion of the nation’s military strength vis-à-vis the Soviet Union after a decade of perceived American retreat and decline.

  Reagan’s vision did not go uncontested. In the early 1980s, a broad, transnational movement emerged that condemned both the reescalation of the nuclear arms race and the talk of “winnable war” that accompanied it. In 1980, arms control advocate Randall Forsberg wrote A Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race, which appealed to both the United States and the Soviet Union to halt the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons.22 The idea was to “freeze” the nuclear arms race in place and only then turn to the thornier work of disarmament. Building on the earlier movement to stop the spread of nuclear reactors, the simple call for a mutual and verifiable freeze—precisely because it cut through military and technocratic jargon—proved remarkably effective as a tool of political mobilization throughout the United States.

  Like the fight over the restart at Three Mile Island, the freeze movement transcended the divide between left and right, not in the name of bipartisanship, but rather through a shared sense of emergency. By the summer of 1982, freeze resolutions had been endorsed by state legislatures, city councils, and at town meetings throughout the country. Working in thirty-seven states, twenty thousand volunteers collected over two million signatures in support of a freeze, and in the November midterm elections, twelve million Americans voted for a bilateral freeze on referenda at the ballot box. In June of that year, 750,000 people gathered again in Central Park to demand an end to the arms race, the largest protest rally in US history up until that time. Fanning out across the country (including into regions like the South that tilted promilitary), freeze activists helped to create what historian Lawrence Wittner has described as “the largest, best-financed, and most popular disarmament campaign in American history.” In partnership w
ith their transatlantic allies—who recognized that the European theater would be ground zero for any nuclear war between the superpowers—these activists constituted what, according to Wittner, was the most dynamic, international citizens movement of the modern era.23

  A constitutive aim of this movement was to dismantle the concept of a limited nuclear war. In order to do this, the freeze movement had to appropriate a technique from the Cold War national security state—futurology—and repurpose it for its own ends. The post–World War II national security state had devoted vast resources toward predicting and planning for a nuclear war. Convinced that the advent of nuclear weapons rendered earlier military history irrelevant, Cold War policymakers relied on intelligence estimates, war plans, role-playing exercises, and technology forecasts in order to both predict and shape specific outcomes.24 With the reescalation of the Cold War in the early 1980s, freeze activists came to believe that the only way to generate massive support for a freeze was to compel the public to imagine repeatedly a full-blown nuclear attack. This required activists to take the security state’s own forecasting techniques and remake them into weapons against the arms race. “We are forced in this one case to become historians of the future,” wrote Jonathan Schell in 1982, “to chronicle and commit to memory an event that we have never experienced and must never experience.”25 Since no one would be left to bear witness to a nuclear-induced extinction, Schell contended, “We must bear witness to it before the fact.”26 Nuclear war was a scenario that, in the words of astronomer Carl Sagan, could only “be treated theoretically.” Recognizing that the problem transcended science, he explained that such a war was “not amenable to experimentation.”27

  As freeze writings, speeches, and films routinely invited their audiences to envision what would happen if the places where they lived, loved, and worked came under nuclear attack, every locale became its own version of central Pennsylvania, with nuclear bombs replacing power plants as the primary existential threat. Freeze activists detailed the decimation of buildings and infrastructure, stressing how iconic American cities would be rendered unrecognizable at the moment of detonation. But the buildings were only the surface of the disaster. To counter the official discourse of survivability and to incite citizens to take action against the arms race, the movement called attention to the multiple assaults—biological, physiological, radiological, epidemiological—that would bear down on the human body in the event of a nuclear attack. Thus at the center of the freeze movement was the same vulnerable, irradiated body that had exploded to the surface at Three Mile Island.

  Yet there were differences. TMI residents had expressed dread about the dormant and accretive effects of radiation over months, years, and even decades. With the threat of a nuclear war, however, the slow violence of low-dose radiation exposure was displaced by images of immediate and acute radiation poisoning: gastrointestinal distress, bleeding, hair loss, open skin sores, and severe fatigue. If an attack occurred, tons of irradiated soil and debris would drift away from the blast area, and between one and two hundred rads of radiation would produce nausea and vomiting in up to half of those exposed. A dose of four hundred and fifty rads of radiation would kill off 50 percent of the population, assuming the best-case (and highly unlikely) scenario of adequate medical care.28 In other words, as radiation fears were rerouted away from power plants and toward weaponry, and as the threat of low-dose exposure was eclipsed by that of rapid, high-dose exposure, the symptomatology of radiation was transformed from something slow-moving and stealthy into something acute and visible on the body.

  In addition, in the event of a nuclear attack, radiation exposure would be only one of several traumatic assaults on the human body. People in a targeted city, if not incinerated or crushed to death right away, would be vulnerable to multiple injuries caused by flying glass and debris. They would sustain internal injuries to the chest and abdomen, broken limbs, skull and spinal cord fractures, ruptured lungs and eardrums, lacerations, hemorrhaging, and bleeding. Many would suffer retinal damage and blindness, creating scenes of “disarray as billions of blinded beasts, insects, and birds began to stumble through the world.”29 But by far the most serious assault on the human body in the event of a nuclear attack would come from burns. A booklet published by San Francisco’s Department of Public Health predicted that over half of the people living between 1.5 and 5 miles from that city would be killed from third-degree flash burns.30

  What would make such injuries so dire was the unparalleled medical manpower required to treat them. In New York City alone, the number of burn victims from an attack would exceed by a thousand the capacity of all burn care centers throughout the entire country. Howard Hiatt, the dean of Harvard University’s School of Public Health, predicted that whatever remained of the medical system after a nuclear war would “choke completely on burn victims.”31 This staggering list of injuries did not even take account of the utterly transformed postattack landscape. The pharmaceutical industry would be wiped out, and any remaining vaccines and antibiotics would need to be carefully rationed. There would be no sanitary water supply, no sewage system, and no waste disposal. Any remaining stocks of food would be rapidly depleted, and there would be no refrigeration. There would be hundreds of thousands of decomposing corpses, and there would be no means of disposal. These conditions would lead to hunger, famine, and cold among survivors, as well as to the likely return of epidemic diseases (typhus, cholera, meningitis, hepatitis, tuberculosis, polio) that had been largely eradicated throughout the developed world by advances in modern medicine. In its enormous capacity to alter space, a nuclear war would also amount to a form of time travel for any survivors—what the New England Journal of Medicine in 1962 had called an “atavistic return.” “It is one matter for man to have evolved from living deep in a Paleolithic cave to the city apartment or the garden home in the suburb,” the article observed, “but an entirely different matter to consider whether he can successfully return to the cave. The question of whether an abrupt return along this evolutionary path is psychologically possible will hopefully remain a metaphysical issue.”32

  Freeze activists often relied on documentary photographs and film footage of Japanese bombing victims as real-world approximations of the victims of a full-blown nuclear war. Footage of burned and irradiated sufferers at Hiroshima was spliced into Physicians for Social Responsibility’s film The Last Epidemic, a documentary that imagined the effects of a nuclear detonation on San Francisco. The film’s narrative describing the hypothetical nuclear destruction of that city was accompanied by footage showing actual victims from 1945. Fictionalized films like The Day After and Testament (another film released in 1983 that centered on the postattack lives of a mother and her three children in a small northern California town) also invoked Hiroshima as a point of reference. Panoramic shots of postattack Kansas City in The Day After took their inspiration from photographs of Hiroshima, and in Testament, the lone nonwhite characters in the film are a Japanese father and his son, pointedly named Hiroshi, who is mentally disabled. Thus throughout the freeze movement, the victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki emerged as proxies for nuclear war–induced bodily injury. Film footage of Japanese burn victims was meant to do more than flag the inaugural event of the atomic age. By providing a window into one possible future, they prefigured an ecological age in which emergencies constituted the rule rather than the exception. “The Hiroshima people’s experience … is of much more than historical interest,” wrote Jonathan Schell. “It is a picture of what our whole world is always poised to become—a backdrop of scarcely imaginable horror lying just behind the surface of our normal life, and capable of breaking through into that normal life at any second.”33

  This vision of the environment as a scene of somatic vulnerability and bodily trauma required a new politics of health. Noting the many doctors and psychiatrists who had come out in support of a bilateral freeze, Schell observed that the movement was animated by people “ordinarily concerned not wit
h politics but with disturbances in the body, the psyche, and the soul.”34 Once confined to the task of relieving individual suffering, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton explained, the physician’s mandate now extended to “threats to the human species.”35 Physicians for Social Responsibility gave organizational legitimacy to this new mandate. Originally founded in 1960 by a group of Boston-based doctors who successfully advocated for the limited test ban treaty, PSR was revived in 1978 and grew rapidly over the next five years. The group had gained a national constituency in the wake of the TMI accident, and at the time of its revival, PSR was committed to the issues of both nuclear power plant safety and atomic weaponry. But in 1980, the organization chose to focus on nuclear arsenals alone, a decision that signaled how the escalation of the arms race was consigning the nuclear power issue to the periphery. Over the next decade, PSR convened conferences and symposia on the medical consequences of nuclear weapons, produced and distributed documentary films like The Last Epidemic, engaged in dialogue with its Soviet counterparts, and encouraged its members to publish on species threats in the New England Journal of Medicine and similar venues. It organized “bombing runs,” in which physicians toured the country and told audiences what would happen if a one-megaton bomb were dropped on the city or town where they were speaking. Placing the nuclear threat at the center of an emergent anthropogenic consciousness, the organization imagined the planet itself as a sickened human body whose future hung in the balance. PSR leader Helen Caldicott described opposition to the arms race as “the ultimate form of preventive medicine. If you have a disease, and there is no cure for it, you work on prevention.”36